History column

‘It seemed with my wife I was safe, that with her, nothing bad could happen to me’ – this is how Alicja Guz’s husband, Leon,…

The first Jews moved to Łódź in the late eighteenth century. Their accelerated influx to the city, however, began in the 1860s, with the rapid…

On 1 August 1944, the Warsaw Uprising began. There had been another uprising in occupied Warsaw – the first one broke out on 19 April…

The perpetrators of genocides often pay little attention to the number of people murdered. The ultimate act of dehumanising the victims is to completely strip…

‘We are at war, he who trades stays alive’, went the smuggler’s anthem.

‘Perhaps if we had not started this work, the remnants of Jewry would have survived, and not perished from fires and bullets’, wrote ‘Rudy Paweł’,…

‘Daughter of Anna, granddaughter of Krystyna and Janina’. This is how Zuzanna Hertzberg, an artist whose banners from the Mechitza series are part of the…

On 19 April 1943, an uprising began in the Warsaw Ghetto – the largest armed resistance by the Jewish people during World War II and…

A major activist in the Polish Socialist Party, charismatic, energetic, skilled opponent of both fascism and communism, Lidia Ciolkoszowa was born as Lidia Kahan on…

During the Second World War, she was Poland’s most famous ‘spy in a skirt’. A Polish aristocrat on her father’s side, Skarbek’s mother had Jewish…

She was one of the most important figures in the Polish post-war émigré community. Together with her husband Zygmunt Hertz and Jerzy Giedroyc, she ran…