Polish Resettlement Camps in England and Wales PDF Download

Author: Zosia Biegus
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780956993496
Category : Polish people
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Author: Urszula Szulakowska
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 152755421X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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This book presents the history of the Polish resettlement camps in the context of the post-war reconstruction of Britain during the 1950s. The Polish Resettlement Act (1947) concerned some 200, 000 Poles stranded in the country after the war. There are very few studies available in English concerning this migration to the UK and a limited number of Polish ones. The focus of this study is the Husbands Bosworth camp in Northamptonshire which was located on a decommissioned RAF aerodrome at Sulby Hall, between Welford and Naseby. The text relies both on eye-witness testimony, including the author’s own experiences as a child in the camp, as well as on rare documentation located in private archives. In particular, the nationalistic culture of the Poles within the British Isles is examined critically as an indigenous development. The Polish society that emerged out of the hundreds of rural Polish camps, urban Polish clubs, churches, schools, newspapers, libraries, museums and art-galleries was a nationalistic culture of its own kind which drew on pre-war life in Poland and yet also grew along quite different lines. It was a culture created in reaction and in antagonism to the political authorities of the host country. This study will be of interest to anyone concerned with the history of multicultural Britain.

Author: Irena Protassewicz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350079936
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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This hitherto unpublished first-hand witness account, written in 1968-9, tells the story of a privileged Polish woman whose life was torn apart by the outbreak of the Second World War and Soviet occupation. The account has been translated into English from the original Polish and interwoven with letters and depositions, and is supplemented with commentary and notes for invaluable historical context. Irena Protassewicz's vivid account begins with the Russian Revolution, followed by a rare insight into the life and mores of the landed gentry of northeastern Poland between the wars, a rural idyll which was to be shattered forever by the coming of the Second World War. Deported in a cattle truck to Siberia and sentenced to a future of forced labour, Irena's fortunes were to change dramatically after Hitler's attack on Russia. She charts the adventure and horror of life as a military nurse with the Polish Army, on a journey that would take her from the wastes of Soviet Central Asia, through the Middle East, to an unlikely ending in the highlands of Scotland. The story concludes with Irena's search to discover the wartime and post-war fate of her family and friends on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and the challenges of life as a refugee in Britain. A Polish Woman's Experience in World War II provides a compelling, personal route into understanding how the greatest conflict of the 20th century transformed the lives of the individuals who lived through it.

Author: Halik Kochanski
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674071050
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 911

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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'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' 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-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.

Author: Jordanna Bailkin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192545264
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Today, no one really thinks of Britain as a land of camps. Camps seem to happen 'elsewhere', from Greece, to Palestine, to the global South. Yet over the course of the twentieth century, dozens of British refugee camps housed hundreds of thousands of Belgians, Jews, Basques, Poles, Hungarians, Anglo-Egyptians, Ugandan Asians, and Vietnamese. Refugee camps in Britain were never only for refugees. Refugees shared a space with Britons who had been displaced by war and poverty, as well as thousands of civil servants and a fractious mix of volunteers. Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain explores how these camps have shaped today's multicultural Britain. They generated unique intimacies and frictions, illuminating the closeness of individuals that have traditionally been kept separate -- 'citizens' and 'migrants', but also refugee populations from diverse countries and conflicts. As the world's refugee crisis once again brings to Europe the challenges of mass encampment, Unsettled offers warnings from a liberal democracy's recent past. Through lively anecdotes from interviews with former camp residents and workers, Unsettled conveys the vivid, everyday history of refugee camps, which witnessed births and deaths, love affairs and violent conflicts, strikes and protests, comedy and tragedy. Their story -- like that of today's refugee crisis -- is one of complicated intentions that played out in unpredictable ways. The aim of this book is not to redeem camps -- nor, indeed, to condemn them. It is to refuse to ignore them. Unsettled speaks to all who are interested in the plight of the encamped, and the global uses of encampment in our present world.

Author: Norman Davies
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472816056
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1043

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A detailed and highly illustrated account of the Polish II Corps' (or 'Anders Army') perilous journey to fight side by side with Allied forces at the height of World War II. Following the conquest of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, hundreds of thousands of Polish families were torn from their homes and sent eastwards to the arctic wastes of Siberia. Prisoners of war, refugees, those regarded as 'social criminals' by Stalin's regime, and those rounded up by sheer chance were all sent 'to see the Great White Bear'. However, with Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa just two years later, Russia and the Allied powers found themselves on the same side once more. Turning to those that it had previously deemed 'undesirable', Russia sought to raise a Polish army from the men, women and children that it had imprisoned within its labour camps. In this remarkable work, renowned historian Professor Norman Davies draws from years of meticulous research to recount the compelling story of this unit, the Polish II Corps or 'Anders Army', and their exceptional journey from the Gulag of Siberia through Iran, the Middle East and North Africa to the battlefields of Italy to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with Allied forces. Complete with previously unpublished photographs and first-hand accounts from the men and women who lived through it, this is a unique visual and written record of one of the most fascinating episodes of World War II.

Author: Clair Wills
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141974966
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 525

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2018 TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 'Generous and empathetic ... opens up postwar migration in all its richness' Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian 'Groundbreaking, sophisticated, original, open-minded ... essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not only the transformation of British society after the war but also its character today' Piers Brendon, Literary Review 'Lyrical, full of wise and original observations' David Goodhart, The Times The battered and exhausted Britain of 1945 was desperate for workers - to rebuild, to fill the factories, to make the new NHS work. From all over the world and with many motives, thousands of individuals took the plunge. Most assumed they would spend just three or four years here, sending most of their pay back home, but instead large numbers stayed - and transformed the country. Drawing on an amazing array of unusual and surprising sources, Clair Wills' wonderful new book brings to life the incredible diversity and strangeness of the migrant experience. She introduces us to lovers, scroungers, dancers, homeowners, teachers, drinkers, carers and many more to show the opportunities and excitement as much as the humiliation and poverty that could be part of the new arrivals' experience. Irish, Bengalis, West Indians, Poles, Maltese, Punjabis and Cypriots battled to fit into an often shocked Britain and, to their own surprise, found themselves making permanent homes. As Britain picked itself up again in the 1950s migrants set about changing life in their own image, through music, clothing, food, religion, but also fighting racism and casual and not so casual violence. Lovers and Strangers is an extremely important book, one that is full of enjoyable surprises, giving a voice to a generation who had to deal with the reality of life surrounded by 'white strangers' in their new country.

Author: Catherine Czerkawska
Publisher: Saraband
ISBN: 1915089832
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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An intimate story of a Polish family torn apart by war: of heartbreak, loss, and survival against the odds. Julian Czerkawski was born in 1926 near Lwow, in Polish Galicia, on a farm with fertile grain fields and orchards. He was the son of a Polish lancer—one of the famous cavalrymen who carried forward the legacy of the hussar knights. But there would be no idyllic childhood for young Julian. Soviet annexation and then, in 1941, the German occupation of Lwow changed everything. At the age of 18, he was sent to a labour camp. Fortunate to escape after the war with his life, eventually he made his way to the UK, where he married and started a family. But an ache remained for the people and places of his childhood memories, even if he spoke of them only rarely. In 2022, Putin’s war in Ukraine and the sight of refugees passing through Lviv—the former Polish city of Lwow—added urgency to his writer daughter Catherine’s project of a lifetime, to try to uncover for herself everything that had been lost a generation before. The Last Lancer pieces together glimpses of how the Czerkawski family lived and died in a region with a proud but turbulent history. It sheds light on their trauma, at the same time offering a deep and very personal understanding of a troubled place.

Author: Paul Wojdak
Publisher: FriesenPress
ISBN: 103919687X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Paul Wojdak’s father, Pawel, was born in 1912 in Novosibirsk, Siberia. During the 1800s, many Polish people were banished to Siberia for rising against czarist Russia’s repressive policies aimed to destroy Polish language and culture, and they eventually lived in Siberia for generations. By the 1920s, war and chaos followed the Russian Revolution, and Poles were cast as “enemies of the people,” fleeing east as refugees. Most died from disease, starvation, cold, or violence, including Pawel’s parents, and many Polish children were tragically trapped in Siberia—a seven-year-old Pawel among them. Later in life, living in Canada with his wife and son, Pawel physically could not speak about his childhood and refused to speak about his life as a young adult, but his memories were sometimes triggered by chance events, leaving mysterious tidbits for his son, Paul. Why could his father sing the Japanese national anthem? How did he come to see a tractor as a young boy in the United States? Inspired by his love for his father combined with a desire to understand Pawel’s complicated life, after his father’s death, Paul takes on the daunting task of trying to piece together his father’s past, determined to uncover the truth in the hopes of learning the story of a man who, despite all his hardships, was respectful, loyal, dedicated, and loving. Only knowing bits and pieces of his father’s childhood and knowing his father fought in World War II, Paul begins by connecting his father’s story with the stories of other Polish children and men in Siberia and Eastern Europe from 1917 to 1945. From there, he brings to light the remarkable story of the Polish Rescue Committee and their plight to rescue Polish children in Siberia after World War I and of the compassion of the Japanese people in harbouring these children. Following records of his father’s trail, he shares the incredible journey these children then took before finally arriving in Poland in late 1922, only to find their lives in upheaval again in 1939, when Poland was invaded by Russia and Germany. Escape from Siberia, Escape from Memory not only shares an extraordinary story of heroism and survival, but also explores the struggle to recapture and preserve cultural and personal memory and the impact of war on children and young adults.

Author: Urszula Muskus
Publisher: Sandstone
ISBN: 9781905207558
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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A woman's account of departure from middle class life in Stalinist Russia, to the gulag. With an uplifting view of the world and human nature born of the author's natural compassion and struggle to survive.