Szczecińscy weterani - okładka

Paper presents an overview of the position of Polish World-War-One veterans in interwar period, framing theirs’ situation within a broader European context. I underline the dichotomy between ex-servicemen from former Austro-Hungarian, German or Russian armies (vast majority of veterans in the Second Republic of Poland) and the ‘independence fighters’ (i.e. soldiers from the voluntary Polish formations like Legiony Polskie) in terms of their legal and symbolic position in the state. State ideology often referred to the idea of the ‘independence deed’ and offered various privileges to the group of former Piłsudski’s Legionnaires and other ‘independence fighters’ Majority of ‘ordinary’ veterans was offered only ‘a pity’ and, unlike in Germany or France, they did not form any important mass movement, nor a ground for it. Dominating role of relatively small group of ‘Polish soldiers’ over masses of ‘soldiers-Poles’ could be therefore treated as rather specific feature of states like interwar Poland or Czechoslovakia.

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Past and New Polish Regions after 1944, Göttingen 2019, 2019

Historijski pogledi, 2022

first of all, we would like to thank all the participants. The conference and the succeeding collection wouldn't have been possible without their active contribution which helped creating an atmosphere of constructive debates at the conference and made this volume worth reading.

On May 8, 1967 the national contest for written memoirs concerning women's participation in the WWII was announced. The organisers were three official institutions represented the women, the army, and the war veterans; respectively the National Council of Polish Women, the Polish Army Political Board, the Main Board of the Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy. Soon more than 200 time witnesses, mostly women, responded to the announcement. The large number of memoirs should have been no surprise, as memory of war was still an important and meaningful part of personal experiences, and the public discourse on the national identity of Poles. It was not without significance that memoirs contests had in Poland a long tradition and the pattern of making personal recollections a part of the public memory, what has been, in words of Paul Thompson, a unique feature of the Polish memory culture. 1 In the aftermath of the contest, two years later (on the 25th anniversary of the end of the war) the Ministry of National Defence published a book " Woman in the battle " with collection of chosen memoirs. The collection is 2 a good example of role and significance of gender in the Polish memory of war. The book demonstrates how women constructed their self-identities by telling their war stories, how the official memory used women's participation in WWII, and how the gender order framed Polish collective memory? Here is a quite representative excerpt from an anonymous introduction to the collection describing in a very grandiloquent 3

Grzegorz Piątkiewicz, 2023

The Polish Armed Forces (Polish Armed Forces) have been participating in military missions since 1953. By 2023, Polish Armed Forces soldiers had actively participated in 92 missions around the world. These missions were of an observational, peacekeeping, humanitarian, police, war, stabilization, and training nature. A series of two articles will present the basic principles of NATO, UN and EU military missions, the history of selected Polish military missions, the idea of ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), and the evolution of the Polish Military Contingent of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF PKW) in Afghanistan. The articles will also include the results of scientific research by G. Piątkiewicz obtained for his doctoral dissertation entitled. “Socio- Occupational Inclusion of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Soldiers in Afghanistan,” presenting the characteristics of Polish soldiers participating in the 9th quota of the PKW ISAF in Afghanistan. The first article presents the basic premises of military missions and the history of selected Polish military missions.

Literary Journalism Studies, vol. 13, no. 1 & 2, 2021

Review of Magdalena Grzebalkowska's POLAND 1945. WAR AND PEACE. Translated from the Polish by John Markoff and Malgorzata Markoff. 2020

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2014

This article focuses on the unique and hitherto unknown history of disabled ex-servicemen and civilians in interwar Poland. In 1914, thousands of Poles were conscripted into the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian armies and forced to fight against each other. When the war ended and Poland regained independence after more than one hundred years of partition, the fledgling government was unable to provide support for the more than three hundred thousand disabled war victims, not to mention the many civilians left injured or orphaned by the war. The vast majority of these victims were ex-servicemen of foreign armies, and were deprived of any war compensation. Neither the Polish government nor the impoverished society could meet the disabled ex-servicemen's medical and material needs; therefore, these men had to take responsibility for themselves and started cooperatives and war-invalids-owned enterprises. A social collaboration between Poland and America, rare in Europe at that time, was initiated by the Polish community in the United States to help blind exservicemen in Poland.

International Journal of Historical Archaeology , 2017

Many sites related to the First World War are forgotten and neglected in today’s Poland. This paper shortly presents the ways of practicing conflict archaeology in Poland and it discusses results of the non-invasive archaeological survey conducted in Tuchola and Czersk, places where during the First World War Germans built and run prisoners of war camps. In the article the material remains of the camps that have survived in the local landscapes till the present are analyzed. Both sites are at the same time remembered and forgotten by local communities. This paper tries to account for oblivion as an inherent part of local landscapes that adds a unique value to them.