ORCHARD LAKE, Michigan (2-5-24) – The Polish Institute of Culture & Research at Orchard Lake invites you to a discussion by author and professor Dr. Jadwiga Biskupska who will present her award-winning book, Survivors: Warsaw under Nazi Occupation, on Friday, February 16, 2024, at 6:30 PM in the Burkacki Academic Center. The book explores the fate of Polish Christian intelligentsia during the German occupation and their role in making Warsaw the epicenter for Europe’s most extensive underground resistance movement.
Survivors: Warsaw under Nazi Occupation tells the harrowing story of life in Warsaw under this occupation. As the epicenter of Polish resistance, Warsaw was subjected to violent persecution, the ghettoization of the city’s Jewish community, the suppression of multiple uprisings, and an avalanche of restrictions that killed hundreds of thousands and destroyed countless lives. In this study into the unique brutality of wartime Warsaw, Biskupska traces how Nazi Germany set out to dismantle the Polish nation and state for long-term domination by targeting its intelligentsia. In nine chapters drawing on a wide variety of source material in Polish, German, and English, the book traces Nazi efforts to kill and “neutralize” the Polish intelligentsia in 1939-40, Nazi occupation institutions built to control and terrorize them, and then assesses how the surviving intelligentsia responded to this persecution for the rest of the war.
The author explores how myriad resistance projects emerged within the intelligentsia who were bent on maintaining national traditions and rebuilding a Polish state, from information trafficking networks to secret schooling, Catholic initiatives, and outright insurgency in the final year of occupation. In contrast to other studies on the Holocaust and Second World War, this book focuses on Polish behavior and explains who was able to contest the occupation or collaborate with it, while answering lingering questions and addressing controversies about the Nazi empire and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. This prize-winning book has been called “highly engaging,” “meticulously researched and fluidly written,” and “a great gift for all history lovers.”
Dr. Jadwiga Biskupska is associate professor of military history at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and co-director of the Second World War Research Group, North America (SWWRGNA). She received her PHD in history from Yale University. She studies violence, warfare, and nationalism in twentieth-century central Europe. Her first book, Survivors: Warsaw under Nazi Occupation, was published in 2022 with Cambridge University Press in their Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare series and is the 2022 winner of the Heldt Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) and a recipient of the 2023 honorable mention for the Witold Pilecki International Book Award.
This event is free to the public. Please join us Friday, February 16, at 6:30 PM in the Burkacki Academic Center, Main Floor, adjacent to the Trzcinski Quad of the Orchard Lake Schools campus at 3535 Commerce Rd., West Bloomfield, Michigan. For additional information, visit www.picrol.org
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Ania Bieciuk
Associate Director of Polonia Affairs
Polish Institute of Culture & Research
(248) 836-1284 (Office)
Abieciuk@picrol.org