JAN KARSKI

STORY OF A SECRET STATE

ORYGINALNE PIERWSZE ANGIELSKIE WYDANIE

JAN KARSKI

TAJNE PAŃSTWO

_________________

Oryginalne pierwsze wydanie

Jedna z najważniejszych książek w światowej literaturze. Książka Jana Karskiego (1[zasłonięte]914-20), po raz pierwszy przekazała światu obraz unikalnego zjawiska, jakim było Polskie Państwo Podziemne.

Wydawnictwo: Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston. & The Riverside Press, Cambridge. Boston 1944.

Stron: 398

Okładka twarda, wymiary 20 x 13,5 x 3 cm

Książka w języku angielskim

Oryginalne wydanie z 1944, ale książka wygląda jakby nie była czytana.

GWARANTUJĘ BARDZO DOBRE ZAPAKOWANIE I ZABEZPIECZENIE PRZESYŁKI

Zobacz moje pozostałe aukcje i książki o Karskim!
___________________

DARMOWA WYSYŁKA W POLSCE PRZY JEDNORAZOWYM ZAKUPIE NA MINIMUM 7 AUKCJACH !!!
(z wyjątkiem przedmiotów o wartości mniejszej niż 2,50 zł)

ZOBACZ POZOSTAŁE AUKCJE !!!

ZAKUP NA KILKU AUKCJACH - JEDEN KOSZT WYSYŁKI (jak przy aukcji, na której jest on najwyższy).

OPCJE WPŁATY:

1) PayU - najsprawniej i najbezpieczniej (kartą Visa, Master Card lub e-przelewem),

2) Na konto bankowe

Karski spent time with the Polish Underground and wrote this expose of the German atrocities during the occupation. In German-occupied Poland, schools, courts and newspapers were operated by the Polish Underground secretly, right under the nose of the Gestapo. The author who was liaison officer between the underground and the exiled Polish government in London, wrote this amazing report.

The Polish Underground State (Polish: Polskie Państwo Podziemne, also known as the Polish Secret State) is a collective term for the underground resistance organizations in Poland, both military and civilian, that remained loyal to the Polish Government in Exile in London during World War II. The Underground State was perceived by supporters as a legal continuation of the pre-war Republic of Poland (and its institutions) that waged an armed struggle against the country's occupying powers: Germany and the Soviet Union.
The more widely used term Polish Underground State was first used on 13 January 1944 by the official underground publication of the Polish underground authorities, the Biuletyn Informacyjny. Polish Secret State was a term coined by scholar Jan Karski in his book Story of a Secret State (Polish: Tajne państwo), written and first published in the second half of the 1944 in United States.

_________

Story of a Secret State – książka Jana Karskiego dotycząca przeżyć wojennych, napisana między marcem a sierpniem roku 1944. Po raz pierwszy była wydana jeszcze podczas II wojny światowej, w 2. połowie roku 1944 w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Wydanie szwedzkie pojawiło się w roku 1945, norweskie w 1946, francuskie – 1948. W '44 jej fragmenty ukazały się w magazynach: "Harper's Baazar", "Collier's", "Life", "American Mercury", "Jewish Forum". W październiku ogłoszona przez Book of a Month Club za książkę stycznia 1945 w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Uzyskała wiele pozytywnych recenzji, lecz spotkała się z ostrą krytyką dziennikarzy piszących do "Soviet Russia Today".

'I do not pretend to have given an exhaustive picture of the Polish Underground, its organization and its activities. Because of our methods, I believe that there is no one today who could give an all-embracing recital... This book is a purely personal story, my story.' Jan Karski's 1944 war memoir is a heroic act of witness: the courageous testimony of a man who risked everything for his country. At times overwhelming in the details it reveals of the suffering of ordinary people, it is an unforgettable and deeply affecting record of brutality, courage, and survival under conditions of extreme bleakness. During the first four years of World War II, Karski worked as a messenger for the underground, risking his life in secret missions. He was captured, tortured, rescued, smuggled through a tunnel into the Warsaw ghetto and, finally, disguised himself as a guard to infiltrate a Nazi death camp. Then, travelling across occupied Europe to England, with his eye-witness report smuggled on microfilm in the handle of a razor, he became the first man to tell the Allies about the Holocaust - only to be ignored.

_____________________

Recenzje:

Karski introduces himself as a somewhat unlikely hero: a young man who wanted to be a demographer rather than a cavalryman or fighter pilot. Yet he discovered a diamond-hard resourcefulness that enabled him to escape from Soviet captivity – he was among the Polish troops who fled the Nazi Blitzkrieg only to be taken prisoner by the Soviet forces that seized eastern Poland – and to carry microfilmed documents across Nazi-controlled Europe, including Germany itself, to the West.

His is not a story of conventional heroism: the cavalryman's charge or the fighter pilot's knightly combat. It is a morally grave resistance in which any attack or escape is likely to cause the deaths of comrades or civilians, because the occupiers follow a doctrine of "collective responsibility". When one underground printing press in Warsaw was raided, German forces not only killed the workers but executed the tenants of neighbouring houses: 83 people died in all. The underground minimised contacts between operatives in order to minimise the names that might be extracted under torture if agents were arrested. By the nature of their role, liaison agents had a wider network of contacts; the life expectancy of the women who carried out these duties was correspondingly short.

Karski himself was a political liaison agent. The underground was much more than an armed resistance organisation, and much more than a secret security state. It attempted to maintain the life of the nation by running clandestine schools, not just because the Nazis had shut down education above primary level, but also to counter what the underground saw as Nazi attempts to corrupt the morals of Polish young people with indecent forms of entertainment.

Most remarkably, it asserted democratic values not just against Nazism but against the colonel-ridden regime that had ruled Poland as the dictatorships rose around its borders. Imitating foreign dictators had failed to save the nation: the proper response to totalitarian oppression was to practice democracy within the resistance. In effect, the politicians who had opposed the colonels used the destruction of the Polish state to stage a democratic counter-coup.

The underground was based on a grand alliance between four parties, ranging from the socialist left – a strong current in Polish politics before the post-war Soviet takeover – to the nationalist right. Such co-operation would have been impossible in peacetime, as anybody who tries to follow Polish politics today will readily appreciate, but in extremis patriotism supervened. Karski's role in this alliance was pivotal. His job was to confer with party representatives and to report their positions, so that consensus agreements could be reached. It was in the course of his political liaison work that he met representatives of Jewish parties, who took him into the Warsaw ghetto.

Karski provides an astonishing insight into the operation of the secret Polish state, but of course his account is a product of the frightful moment in which it was written. It is obliged to maintain security and to emphasise unity; it is unable to reveal the incredulity and inaction with which his reports about the fate of Poland's Jews were received in Western offices of power. His story deserves not just revival but reflection, now that enough time has passed for the agonising wartime histories of central and eastern Europe to be reconstructed.

Reviewed by Marek Kohn (THE INDEPENDENT)

______

The Polish Underground State - Although the Underground State enjoyed broad support throughout much of the war, its influence declined amid military reversals and the growing hostility of the Soviet Union, which eventually supported the creation of a post-war government in Poland that was more amenable to Soviet interests. In the years immediately following the war, many of those involved with the Underground State were treated like criminals. During the Cold War era, research on the Underground State was curtailed by Polish communist officials, who emphasized the role that communist partisans played in the anti-Nazi resistance. Hence, until recently, the bulk of research done on this topic was carried out by Polish scholars living in exile.