personal narratives, polish

As German troops and bombs descended upon Poland, Krysia struggled to make sense of the wailing sirens, hushed adult conversations, and tearful faces of everyone around her. Within just days, the peaceful childhood she had known would disappear forever.

Recounts the experiences of the author who, as a young Polish girl, hid and saved Jews during the Holocaust.

Descended from an ancient Lithuanian family, the author's forebears were princes in their native Lithuania. Born in what is now Belarus, his family was ousted in 1939 as the Germans and Russians carved up Poland, and the area round it, between them. His family, along with thousands of others, was deported to Soviet Siberia to work and die. Before all hope was gone, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and Stalin needed help wherever he could get it. An army of Polish ex-prisoners, and part of the deported male civilian Polish population, fought the Germans. The rest of the deported civilians had to fend for themselves and Michal's mother and her children set off on a second grueling journey that would eventually take them to England.

This vividly written memoir describes the author's experiences as a young girl growing up in an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear during and after World War II, when her family's hometown was seized and occupied during the Nazi invasion of Poland.

in 1941, the author and six fellow prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp in Yakutsk where hunger, cold, untended wounds. untreated illness, and daily executions were everyday fare. Their route took them thousands of miles on foot---out of Siberia, through China, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and over the Himalayas to British India and freedom.

Karolina Lanckoronska recounts her experiences teaching art history to her fellow prisoners at the notorious Ravensbr?ck concentration camp during World War II.