Williamsburg Regional Library

The eagle unbowed, Poland and the Poles in the Second World War, Halik Kochanski

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

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index present

non fiction

The eagle unbowed

bibliography

792886974

Halik Kochanski

Poland and the Poles in the Second World War

The Second World War gripped Poland as it did no other country in Europe. Invaded by both Germany and the Soviet Union, it remained under occupation by foreign armies from the first day of the war to the last. The conflict was brutal, as Polish armies battled the enemy on four different fronts. It was on Polish soil that the architects of the Final Solution assembled their most elaborate network of extermination camps, culminating in the deliberate destruction of millions of lives, including three million Polish Jews. In The Eagle Unbowed, Halik Kochanski tells, for the first time, the story of Poland<U+2019>s war in its entirety, a story that captures both the diversity and the depth of the lives of those who endured its horrors. Most histories of the European war focus on the Allies<U+2019> determination to liberate the continent from the fascist onslaught. Yet the “good war” looks quite different when viewed from Lodz or Krakow than from London or Washington, D.C. Poland emerged from the war trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and it would be nearly a half-century until Poland gained the freedom that its partners had secured with the defeat of Hitler. Rescuing the stories of those who died and those who vanished, those who fought and those who escaped, Kochanski deftly reconstructs the world of wartime Poland in all its complexity<U+2014>from collaboration to resistance, from expulsion to exile, from Warsaw to Treblinka. The Eagle Unbowed provides in a single volume the first truly comprehensive account of one of the most harrowing periods in modern history

Definitions of Poland and the Polish -- Guide to Polish Pronunciation -- The Rebirth of Poland -- Polish Foreign Policy, 1920-1939 -- The September 1939 Campaign -- The German and Soviet Occupation of Poland to June 1941 -- Exile in the Soviet Union -- Escape from the Soviet Union -- Poland's Contribution to the Allied War Effort, 1940-1943 -- Polish Non-combatants Outside Poland, 1939-1945 -- The Dark Years : Occupied Poland, 1941-1943 -- The Holocaust, 1941-1943 -- Sikorski's Diplomacy, 1941-1943 -- Threats to the Standing of the Polish Government-in-Exile and the Polish Underground Authorities -- The Polish Dilemma : The Retreat of the Germans and the Advance of the Red Army -- Poland : The Inconvenient Ally -- Fighting under British Command, 1943-1945 -- The End of the War -- The Aftermath of the War -- The Final Chapter -- Appendix 1: Order of Battle of the Polish Army, 1939-1945 -- Appendix 2: Principal Polish Personalities

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