Download Free Memories Of Poland Lessons From Growing Up Under Communism Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Memories Of Poland Lessons From Growing Up Under Communism and write the review.

Paylie Roberts spent the first eight years of her life living under communist rule in Poland. From age eight on she grew up in the US and became so Americanized that she refused to acknowledge her native Polish heritage, including her birth name. Only after researching the history of why her family was exiled from Poland by the communist government did she realize the tremendously important and unique lessons that the Polish Solidarity movement offers about overcoming tyranny, oppression, and corruption, and how these lessons are imminently relevant and applicable to America today. Paylie combines her personal story with historical facts and sheds light on the many unnerving similarities between growing up in communist Poland in the early 1980s and life in the US now, in a way that is engaging, insightful and inspiring. She recounts her memories of living under the Soviet Union's rule over Poland, as her family struggled along with most other Poles just to survive. This book also includes memories that are only told by Poles as they were never recorded in "official" history due to media censorship during those years. Paylie wrote this book not only to honor the brave Polish people (including her parents) for defeating tyranny using largely non-violent means, but also with the hope of spreading knowledge that could help prevent her worst fears from manifesting regarding what the future in "free" America may hold.
Stolen Childhood is the story of what happened to some 380,000 Polish children who, with their families, were rounded up by Stalin's orders in 1939 and deported into Asiatic Russia. Lucjan Krolikowski, a young seminarian also deported there, shared and witnessed the suffering of his fellow Poles. Freed by an "amnesty," he joined the Polish Army, and when it moved to the Middle East, Lucjan resumed his theology studies, pronounced his vows, and became a chaplain to a Polish military hospital in Egypt. Reassigned to refugee camps in East Africa, Fr. Lucjan and the wandering Polish children met again in 1947 — a meeting that began a long and loving relationship. In 1949 when the Warsaw Communists claimed guardianship of the Polish orphans in Africa and demanded their repatriation, Fr. Lucjan was forced into a world of international intrigue. Called by the Communists "a kidnapper on an international scale," to his orphans, he was the good shepherd who led them to Canada, where he helped his charges overcome the theft of their childhood and become secure adults in a new world. Stolen Childhood is the book of memories he wrote for them, and a cautionary history for people of good will.
This book examines the ways that nationalist leaders and extremist groups have used football to advance their often-violent ideological narratives and to recruit and radicalise young people. Drawing on applied ethnographic research with the Ultra fan groups of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the book explores the behavioural dynamics of the BiH Ultras both on, and outside of, the football terraces. The book shines important new light on the Ultras' ideology, organisation and youth recruiting strategies, and their connections with other extremist groups. In a country and region divided on ethnic and religious lines, in which far-right and ethno-nationalist groups are a visible presence in politics and society, this book helps us to better understand why, when, and how BiH youth choose to join these groups, and why, when, and how these groups participate in violent acts, hate speech, crime, and racist actions. The book has important implications for efforts to counter violent extremism across the Western Balkans and beyond. This is valuable reading for any researcher, advanced student, policy maker, or practitioner working in sport studies, political science, criminology, development studies, security studies, or post-conflict studies.
Reined into the service of the Cold War confrontation, antifascist ideology overshadowed the narrative about the Holocaust in the communist states of Eastern Europe. This led to the Western notion that in the Soviet Bloc there was a systematic suppression of the memory of the mass murder of European Jews. Going beyond disputing the mistaken opposition between “communist falsification” of history and the “repressed authentic” interpretation of the Jewish catastrophe, this work presents and analyzes the ways as the Holocaust was conceptualized in the Soviet-ruled parts of Europe. The authors provide various interpretations of the relationship between antifascism and Holocaust memory in the communist countries, arguing that the predominance of an antifascist agenda and the acknowledgment of the Jewish catastrophe were far from mutually exclusive. The interactions included acts of negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing. Detailed case studies describe how both individuals and institutions were able to use anti-fascism as a framework to test and widen the boundaries for discussion of the Nazi genocide. The studies build on the new historiography of communism, focusing on everyday life and individual agency, revealing the formation of a great variety of concrete, local memory practices.
Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland's return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland's cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland's modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.
Although Witold Gombrowicz's unique, idiosyncratic writings include a three-volume Diary, this voluminous document offers few facts about his early life in Poland before his books were banned there and he went into voluntary exile. Polish Memories--a series of autobiographical sketches Gombrowicz composed for Radio Free Europe during his years in Argentina in the late 1950s--fills the gap in our knowledge. Written in a straightforward way without his famous linguistic inventions, the book presents an engaging account of Gombrowicz's childhood, youth, literary beginnings, and fellow writers in interwar Poland and reveals how these experiences and individuals shaped his seemingly outlandish concepts about the self, culture, art, and society. In addition, the book helps readers understand the numerous autobiographical allusions in his fiction and brings a new level of understanding and appreciation to his life and work.
"Before, there were trees and countryside. Man didn't intervene. Stalin decided to "rectify" that space, and now, instead of trees, there are concrete buildings, everywhere. Stalin had a factory built. Thanks to that, lots of people got jobs, like my dad." Born in 1979, Marzi is a 7-year-old Polish girl who looks wide-eyed at the world around her: her parents, her family, her school friends and the crabby women at the grocery store who don't even smile for a fruit delivery. Marzi lives on a council estate in an industrial town, and is a cheerful, carefree, mischievous and perceptive little girl, bound to run into many adventures!
National Jewish Book Award Finalist: “A fresh and delightful portrait of Jewish renewal in Poland . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice Since the end of Communism, Jews from around the world have visited Poland to tour Holocaust-related sites. A few venture further, seeking to learn about their own Polish roots and connect with contemporary Poles. For their part, a growing number of Poles are fascinated by all things Jewish. In this book, Erica T. Lehrer explores the intersection of Polish and Jewish memory projects in the historically Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz in Krakow. Her own journey becomes part of the story as she demonstrates that Jews and Poles use spaces, institutions, interpersonal exchanges, and cultural representations to make sense of their historical inheritances.
How did communities come to terms with the collapse of communism? In order to guide the wider narrative, many former communist countries constructed museums dedicated to chronicling their experiences. Museums of Communism explores the complicated intersection of history, commemoration, and victimization made evident in these museums constructed after 1991. While contributors from a diverse range of fields explore various museums and include nearly 90 photographs, a common denominator emerges: rather than focusing on artifacts and historical documents, these museums often privilege memories and stories. In doing so, the museums shift attention from experiences of guilt or collaboration to narratives of shared victimization under communist rule. As editor Stephen M. Norris demonstrates, these museums are often problematic at best and revisionist at worst. From occupation museums in the Baltic States to memorial museums in Ukraine, former secret police prisons in Romania, and nostalgic museums of everyday life in Russia, the sites considered offer new ways of understanding the challenges of separating memory and myth.
Every political movement creates its own historical memory. The communist movement, though originally oriented towards the future, was no exception: The theory of human history constitutes a substantial part of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s writings, and the movement inspired by them very soon developed its own strong historical identity, combining the Marxist theory of history with the movement’s victorious milestones such as the October Revolution and later the Great Patriotic War, which served as communist legitimization myths throughout almost the entire twentieth century. During the Stalinist period, however, the movement ́s history became strongly reinterpreted to suit Joseph Stalin’s political goals. After 1956, this reinterpretation lost most of its legitimating power and instead began to be a burden. The (unwanted) memory of Stalinism and subsequent examples of violence (the Gulag, Katyń, the 1956 Budapest uprising and the 1968 Prague Spring) contributed to the crisis of Eastern European state socialism in the late 1980s and led to attempts at reformulating or even rejecting communist self-identity. This book’s first section analyzes the post-1989 memory of communism and state socialism and the self-identity of the Eastern and Western European left. The second section examines the state-socialist and post-socialist memorial landscapes in the former German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia. The final section concentrates on the narratives the movement established, when in power, about its own past, with the examples of the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.