My Polish grandparents
Thursday, June 25th, 1992
Babcia i Dziadzio, Warszawa, 1930s
The photo of my Polish grandfather Stanislaw was taken in a forced labor camp during the Second World War, before he was sent to Stutthof concentration camp by the Nazis. The purple “P” on his coat is to indicate he was a Polish prisoner.
My grandfather survived, but in addition to about three million Polish Jews, some 2.5 million non-Jewish Polish citizens were killed during the Second World War.
Respected British historian Norman Davies explains how the Polish holocaust came to be largely written out of history in his great book “Rising ’44, The Battle for Warsaw.”
When I was a kid, my mother told me the stories in this book, but they had not yet been published in Poland or the West.
I became fascinated by other untold stories in history. We would drive through Eastern Europe to visit my Polish family every year throughout the 1970s & 80s, in the final decades of the Cold War. These adventures made me want to become a journalist.
Washington Post article about the Warsaw Uprising
New York Times review of “Rising ’44″
Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles
Oscar-winning Polish film director Andrzej Wajda
