802 Prisoners attempted escape from Auschwitz. 144 were successful. Kazimierz Piechowski, a Polish boy scout, was one of them. Today, at age 91,
he tells his story.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 13, 2011 -
30 comments
"Habsburg! A vile being, heir to an illustrious name, born to a fortune, to honours, to soldiers, to prestige, and who finished as the lowest of Montmartre pimps, living from the money of a poor and unstable girl whom he sent to commit his foul deeds in his place!"
That was
after this Polish scion of the most famous family in Europe and commander of a
soi disant "Ukrainian Legion" failed to finagle the crown as a Socialist king of The Ukraine, and became instead a patron of the rent boys of Paris who
"handled women by necessity and men for pleasure". And all that
before he turned successively a Nazi sympathizer, a British spy, and finally came, for the first and last time, to Ukraine's capital Kiev as
a victim of Stalin and the Twentieth Century.
posted by orthogonality
on Feb 7, 2009 -
24 comments
At
One Minute Languages you can learn greetings, talking about names, counting, and more in
Catalan,
Danish,
French,
German,
Irish,
Japanese,
Luxembourgish,
Mandarin,
Norwegian,
Polish,
Romanian, and
Russian.
posted by sveskemus
on Nov 11, 2008 -
25 comments
Apparently whenever US movies were released in Soviet-era Poland, the posters were discarded and replaced by
new versions by Polish artists. Alternately disturbing and frickin' awesome, and often containing political comments of varying subtlety.
Previously.
posted by genghis
on Sep 6, 2008 -
60 comments
Stanislav Szukalski was born in Warta, Poland on December 13, 1893. When he was only six years old, a teacher sent him to the headmaster's office for whittling a pencil. The headmaster examined the pencil more closely and discovered that young Stanislav had carved a tiny, near-perfect figure. [more inside]
posted by louche mustachio
on Jan 23, 2008 -
8 comments
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz ,
Witkacy for short.
Artist, photographer,
absurdist playwright, surrealist novelist,
philosopher,
witness to the Russian revolution, art theoretician and
critic, the
Great Malinowski's closest friend,
drug fiend, and by most accounts a
raving maniac and
self-involved pain in the ass. His
greatest novel was sadly prophetic: fleeing east to escape the invading Nazis, and then hearing the news that the Communists were also on the way, he slit his wrists on September 18, 1939 in the village of Jeziory,
a martyr and victim to his obstinate belief in the freedom and independence of man against the bankruptcy of ideology and the coming wave of totalitarianism.
Previously
here, but this guy's work is just too
bizarrely compelling, and his legacy too obscure, to not get a little bit more attention.
posted by Meatbomb
on Nov 18, 2006 -
16 comments
The Real-Life Vesper Lynde. Known to history as Christine Granville, Krystyna Skarbek was first Polish nobility and later Churchill's favorite spy. Undaunted by weather, Christine skied over the
Tatras from Hungary to Poland to gather intelligence and participated in the liberation of France. She was awarded the
Croix de Guerre, but found herself ill-suited to normal employment, and worked as a saleswoman at Harrods and as a telephonist before becoming an oceanliner stewardess. Along the way, Christine met
Ian Fleming, who may have
based his first "Bond Girl" on the intrepid spy. Want to know more? Read her recently republished
biography or
order her file from the Briish National Archives.
posted by Medieval Maven
on Aug 6, 2006 -
6 comments
Slavomir Rawicz was a Polish calvary officer, who was imprisoned by the Soviets and eventually taken to a prison in Siberia. With 7 companions, including one mysterious american, he escaped and journeyed to the south, crossing Mongolia, the Gobi Desert and Tibet before making it to British India. Or at least this is what he claims in his book "
The Long Walk." Nobody has ever found
evidence that he was ever in russia or that any of his
companions ever existed. Oh and he also claims to have seen
Yetis.
posted by afu
on Mar 17, 2006 -
21 comments
Happy Dingus Day! The little known day-after-Easter holiday originally celebrated in Poland involves men dumping water on women and women chasing men around with sticks or pussywillows.
posted by tsarfan
on Mar 28, 2005 -
28 comments
Freedom on the Fence: The Polish Poster. While we're at it:
The history and culture of the Polish poster and an analysis of
American Films in Polish Posters. Or, if you'd prefer,
The Classic Polish Film Poster database (where the
Disney/Children's film posters are quite lovely). Also,
The Wallace Library at the Rochester Institute of Technology has a fantastic searchable and browse-able database, with many hi-res images. Finally, some other
Polish Poster Galleries. (What's that? You want more? You want artist-specific galleries? Okay. Here's work by Mieczyslaw Gorowski, Piotr Kunce, Wieslaw Walkuski, and Jan Sawka. Oh, you wanted Communist-era Polish propaganda posters? Fine. Here ya go.) [previous MeFi discussion on Polish film posters; also, some of the images from these links may be NSFW, depending on how S your W environment is.]
posted by .kobayashi.
on Mar 13, 2005 -
10 comments
