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In this paper, the author explores the entanglements between time and HIV/AIDS activists' biographies in Poland. More specifically, the aim is to analyse how people living with HIV, activists, professionals, therapists – all of them engaged in constructing and shaping HIV/AIDS policy worlds – experienced the first years of responding to the epidemic and how they frame these past experiences from the present perspective. By looking at different biographies and trajectories of engagement in the HIV/AIDS field, the author examines how various actors conceptualize and reflect upon the 'thick times'. The intersection of the first responses to the epidemic with transitional changes taking place in Poland in the early 1990s is crucial for understanding the notion of 'thick times', its ambivalences and ways in which activists frame their experience from that period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the annihilation of 90% of the Jewish population of Poland during the Second World War, the new Communist regime's official fight against anti-Semitism and its granting of equal rights for the tens of thousands of survivors who chose to remain in their home country, the 'Jewish question' remained a burning issue in post-war Poland. Yet, after episodes of anti-Jewish violence in 1945-46, the issue seemed to vanish precisely at a time when it was manipulated through an 'anti-cosmopolitan' campaign launched in the Soviet Union and spread through most of the Eastern Bloc. This paper focuses on the reaction of Polish authorities and society to this campaign. Could the slogan of 'cosmopolitanism' work against Polish citizens of Jewish origin viewed mostly, within Polish society, as non-national and communists? Did Poland follow a particular path during the years 1949-54, when compared to neighbouring countries of the Eastern Bloc; and if so, how can it be explained? The paper argues that a specific vocabulary was used in Poland and that the consequences of this campaign are more to be sought in the background and against 'invisible Jews' rather than in the spotlight of show trials or any persecution of the small Jewish community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on materials in Polish archives and unpublished papers in the Hoover Institution, this article examines the question of Polish war-time collaboration with the Nazis by focusing on the actions of Władysław Studnicki and Leon Kozłowski, prominent members of the Polish pre-war political elite. These two biographies highlight the nature of contacts between Polish conservatives and German authorities. Studnicki's story demonstrates the futility of collaborationist initiatives in Poland due to Nazi indifference. Insinuations of collaboration against Kozłowski, a member of the pre-war government, reflected the tension between pro- and anti- Sanacja politicians. In the end, the actions of these two men demonstrate that in the absence of a 'Quisling' regime in Poland there was a sliding scale between 'collaboration' and 'co-operation'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jewish children who managed to survive Nazi attempts to exterminate them are a clear, yet still under-examined, example of a group who managed to resist the path to genocide. It was only by changing their individual social identity that they were able to survive. By more or less consciously breaking their ties with Judaism and converting to Catholicism, they abandoned membership of the group destined for extermination and strove to become unidentifiable as Jews. This article focuses on the issue of the identity of the Jewish children raised or born in Poland during the Nazi persecution and who survived the Shoah under an assumed non-Jewish identity. It will examine the war's impact on these Polish ‘hidden children’ and its consequences for their ethnic and religious identity. Many children were intentionally deprived of their Jewish identity by their parents or saviours since such a renunciation was the only way to survive. Therefore the role of non-Jewish rescuers and the attitude of the Jewish authorities towards these children's fate during and after the war is also discussed. The survival of these children hinged upon questions of identity and how successfully they were able to conceal their life-threatening origins and adopt the much safer disguise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article centralises a unique collection of ego documents created under Communism in which Polish former child forced labourers articulate their war experiences. A comparative analysis of them with recent testimonies reveals that these ego documents offer a more nuanced depiction of Germans and display richer information on the specific working conditions and daily routine for children than the contemporary ones. A comparative reading of the archival testimonies with their published equivalents shows how the streamlining of a publicly acceptable version of the past under Communism went both ways, that is, at times foregrounding the propaganda content of autobiographical wordings, but also at other moments downplaying this element. The collection increases our understanding of child forced labour experiences during the Second World War, specifically the ways in which children perceived that experience, and offers insights into the negotiated appropriation of Communist ideology at the individual level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on Polish economic policy during the détente era to explore Poland's growing connection with the West as well as assesses the importance of domestic and external factors in influencing the choices of the Polish ruling elite. The two party first secretaries of the period, Gomułka and Gierek, were often opposed to each other, and the merit of Poland's opening up to the West is usually attributed to the second. By analysing Gomułka's and Gierek's leadership respectively, the author appraises the different ideas that characterised their economic policy, as well as the domestic and external constraints they faced, in order to assess the limits and flaws of their attempts at integrating the country into the world economy. This article offers a double reappraisal of the Polish leaderships' policies. First, it demonstrates that the economic opening up to the West had already started in the 1960s under Gomułka, despite limited East–West contacts at the time, and was driven by a proactive Polish government. Second, it downsizes the success of Gierek's economic policy and shows that it was mostly merely reactive to domestic pressure and foreign trends; its shortsightedness got Poland into the trap of spiralling indebtedness and irremediable social discontent with the regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the meanings of 'commemoration' and 'memory' in the context of a Holocaust memory that is often described as global or globalised, or indeed of Holocaust commemoration. The authors examine the 'globalised' as well as the rather national aspects of some emblematic recent events in this context including the Stockholm Declaration and the first Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain and discuss some of the classical sociological theory of 'collective memory' (Halbwachs) as well as some more recent theoretical contributions (Nora; Levy/Sznaider). They ask in particular who the agents and the carriers of memory and commemoration are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing the example of two Polish technical experts - the metallurgist Jan Czochralski and the architect-urbanist Szymon Syrkus, who both reached the peak of their careers in the Interwar period - this article sketches a particular space of expertise in the newly developing states of Central Europe after 1918 and in Poland in particular. For experts like Czochralski and Syrkus a new and pronounced state activity helped to create a space of opportunities but was also a source of severe restrictions and demands for loyalty. With the Second World War and then with the establishment of a socialist regime this space vanished and a particular type of expert, relying heavily on the transnational structures still in place in Central Eastern Europe before the war, almost ceased to exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to compare the Spanish and Polish road to NATO from the perspective of the shape of the foreign policy and its possible restructuring in states undergoing the process of democratic transformation. The study of both cases shows that the reorientation of the foreign policy of a democratising state results to a large extent from external conditions at the global and regional levels although the internal conditions may hinder or accelerate the reorientation. The example of Spain demonstrates that in a firm and stable international system (the bipolar system) it is extremely difficult to change the direction of foreign policy, even if there are internal premises such as democratisation, well-organised opposition supporting the change and social support. In the case of Poland, the flexible and unstable international system made it possible to radically change the direction of its foreign policy. The existing internal premises without the appropriate external context would not have been enough to generate the reorientation of foreign policy. The comparative study of Spanish and Polish cases should be treated as an introduction to the broader analysis on the subject of the restructuring of foreign policy in the democratising state. Democratic transformation processes which took place in Europe from the mid-1970s provide broad empirical material for further scientific work in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terror, exploitation and demographic restructuring (which included ethnic cleansing, deportation, colonisation and genocide) that the Nazis implemented in Poland had no parallel in Europe. Unlike in Belarus and in Ukraine, where the Nazis sought (and found) collaborators, no Poles were given positions of authority. This policy ruled out any kind of legal collaboration at the political and economic level. The Poles reacted in different ways to the prospect of being subjugated and exterminated: complying with the occupiers or passively and actively resisting them. The Polish elites created a vast network of informal social institutions, including an extensive clandestine press, schools and universities. However, the ease with which the Poles created a split reality, where the occupiers were circumvented and ignored, was not due to specific anthropological qualities of the Poles, but to their experience of foreign occupation in the nineteenth century. It was the combination of these two factors (the hatred and ignorance of the Polish reality and the ability to defy Nazi rule) that led to the failure of the Generalplan Ost in Poland. Hence only one component of the plan was carried out, namely, the mass murder of the Jews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the myth of Tadeusz Kosciuszko who was an artificially initiated legend and became deep-rooted in the imagination and memory of the masses. Development of the myth by a group of Polish republican patriots; Factors that impaired Kosciuszko's cult; What shaped the legend of Kosciuszko in the first half of the nineteenth century; Revaluations of the legend of Kosciuszko; Impact of Kosciuszko on artists in literature; Significance of the year of the centenary of his death.