A scene from The Peasants. Image: Sony Pictures Classics.
Last week, the Wall St. Journal gave a glowing review of the new Polish film based on Władysław Reymont’s sweeping novel The Peasants, about a beautiful young woman in 19th century Poland and the men who feud over her. The novel won the 1924 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The film is Poland’s official entry for Best International Feature at the 2024 Oscars, and is also entered in the Best Animated Feature category. Written and directed by the husband-and-wife team of Hugh (who is British) and DK (who is Polish) Welchman, The Peasants has already won or been nominated for a number of other awards.
Sony Pictures snapped up rights for North America, Latin America, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2023. Filmed in Polish with English subtitles, The Peasants is currently in a limited theatrical release.
According to the WSJ:
“They created a mesmerizing and unusual style by photographing the actors in live action and then presiding over a team that fashioned several oil paintings per second to correspond to the images…. The effect is stunning: Virtually every frame of the film looks like an exquisitely rendered tableau, sometimes seemingly alluding to great artists such as Jean-François Millet or Vincent van Gogh…. The picture immerses viewers in traditional Polish cultural activities alien to most of us—charming wedding rituals, raucous dances, a funeral, and a night of revelry in which men frolic while wearing gigantic simulated animal heads….”
Calling the film “a magnificent visual achievement,” the WSJ concludes: “With its feel for both beauty and ugliness, the film transports us to this unfamiliar milieu with a richness rarely attempted in the cinema anymore.”
Władysław Reymont. Painted by Jacek Malczewski (1905).
Reymont wrote the novel over five years, from 1904 to 1909, in four parts. Each part represents a season in the life of the peasants—Autumn (published in 1904), Winter (published in 1904), Spring (published in 1906), and Summer (published in 1909).
Thanks to one of my friends, I’ve learned that there’s a little-known historical footnote to Napoleon and the Polish Legions (see January 25, 2024 blog post).
In the late 18th century, Saint-Domingue or Santo Domingo (which occupied the western half of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, roughly the location of Haiti today) was one of the richest of the French colonies in the New World—its sugar and coffee fields, worked by black slaves, produced roughly half the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe and the Americas.
The ferment of the French Revolution, with its adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789, helped fuel several years of rebellion and civil war in Saint-Domingue beginning in about 1791.
Polish General Władysław JabłonowskiThe Battle for Palm Tree Hill, Saint-Domingue, painted by January Suchodolski (1845).
In 1802, Napoleon sent some 31,000 troops to Saint-Domingue to re-establish French control over the island. Napoleon’s forces included units of the Polish Legions under the half-black Polish General Władysław Jabłonowski. Unfortunately, Jabłonowski died of yellow fever shortly after arriving in the islands, as did a number of the French and Polish soldiers.
As the fighting evolved, many of the Polish soldiers found that their sympathies lay with the slaves, who were rebelling to secure their freedom. These Poles fought for the French without enthusiasm—and even switched sides altogether to fight against the French. By the end of 1803, the French were defeated. On January 1, 1804, the former French colony declared its independence and changed its name to Haiti.
After the fighting was over, about 400 of the Polish soldiers decided to stay in Haiti.
The first ruler of the newly independent Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, called Poles “the white Negroes of Europe” (considered a great compliment at the time). While the Haitian constitution prohibited white people from living in or owning land in Haiti, this did not apply to Poles. Dessalines granted Haitian citizenship to the Poles who stayed.
Still image from C. T. Jasper and Joanna Malinowska’s multichannel video projection, Halka/Haiti. 18°48’05″N 72°23’01″W, 2015, showing soloists from the Poznan Opera House with local audiences during a rehearsal in Cazale.
Official invitation sent to Poland by NATO Secretary General Javier Solana, dated January 29, 1999.
January 29, 2024 marks 25 years since NATO Secretary General Javier Solana sent official invitations to Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg praised Poland’s commitment to the Alliance and its support to Ukraine, during a visit by President Andrzej Duda to NATO Headquarters on February 15, 2023. He noted Poland’s significant contribution to the NATO alliance, saying “You host one of NATO’s battlegroups, you spend well over 2% of your GDP on defence, and invest in new modern capabilities.”
The Secretary General highlighted that NATO’s strong presence in Poland helps to deter aggression: “Together, we send a clear message, so there can be no room for miscalculation in Moscow. NATO will defend every inch of Poland. And of the whole Allied territory.”
Poland has been the most strategically important country on NATO’s eastern flank since it joined in 1999.
With Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine two years ago on February 24, 2022, Poland’s role has become even more important, as it shares a 330-mile border with the Ukraine. Poland has been providing a strategic military staging area and conduit for Western weapons to reach the Ukraine, as well as refuge and assistance to more than two million Ukrainian civilians fleeing the war.
The front gate at Auschwitz bears the inscription “Arbeit macht frei” (Work liberates you).
January 27 was designated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the UN General Assembly in 2005. That date marks the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945, and is intended to honor the victims of the industrialized killing perpetrated by the Germans during World War II—not just at the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau, but also at the other German killing centers such as Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec and Majdanek.
Captain Witold Pilecki
In 2013, the theme for international remembrance events centered on individuals and groups who risked their lives to save tens of thousands of Jews, Roma and Sinti, and others from near certain death under the Germans during the war.
We were highly honored that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in cooperation with the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C., chose as the topic of its 2013 Holocaust Remembrance Day event Captain Witold Pilecki and his most comprehensive report on his secret undercover mission at Auschwitz, which we published in English for the first time in our award-winning book The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery.
L-R: Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz, Dr. Edna Friedberg, and Dr. Timothy Snyder.
The event featured Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz, Director of Research at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, and Dr. Timothy Snyder, Housum Professor of History, Yale University, in a discussion moderated by Dr. Edna Friedberg, Historian, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Dr. Timothy Snyder, in concluding his remarks at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum event honoring Captain Witold Pilecki and The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery, sums up three extraordinary things about Pilecki’s report, below:
SkyHistory has an intriguing article that names 10 great military generals from history. They introduce them as follows: “The course of human history has been changed time and time again by the strategic genius of a handful of exceptional military commanders. From a young Greek king who carved out an empire in just 12 years, to a formidable Russian commander who halted the Nazis at the gates of Moscow, we take a look at some of history’s greatest generals.”
Here’s their list:
1. Alexander the Great
2. Hannibal
3. Julius Caesar
4. Attila the Hun
5. Saladin
6. Genghis Khan
7. Frederick the Great
8. Napoleon Bonaparte
9. Erwin Rommel
10. Georgy Zhukov
Napoleon Bonaparte, painting by Jacques-Louis David (1812).
Napoleon Bonaparte is of particular interest to us. Following the Partitions in 1795, Polish soldiers flocked to join Napoleon’s army as it fought its way across Europe. The French Revolution had overthrown the French monarchy a few years before, and now Revolutionary France’s enemies included the monarchies Prussia, the Austria-Hungarian Empire and Russia—the same three enemies that had partitioned Poland among themselves. Many Poles believed that aiding France to defeat those enemies would assist Poland in regaining its independence.
General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski, painting by Juliusz Kossak (1882).
Those Polish soldiers became known as the “Polish Legions,” with Polish military ranks and Polish commanders under overall French command (not to be confused with the Polish Legions that fought in World War I). The best-known Polish commanders of the Napoleonic Polish Legions included Jan Henryk Dąbrowski, Karol Kniaziewicz and Józef Wybicki. Estimates of the number of soldiers in the Polish Legions vary from about 20,000 to about 30,000.
However, Polish general and leader Tadeusz Kościuszko, who had helped the Americans defeat the British during the American Revolution, was among those who felt that Napoleon would not substantially aid Poland, and he declined to join the Polish Legions.
Poland’s national anthem dates from the Napoleonic period—”Poland Is Not Yet Lost,” also known as the “Dąbrowski’s Mazurka,” and the “Song of the Polish Legions in Italy.” Its lyrics were written by Józef Wybicki, and assert that so long as any Poles live, the country is not yet lost. This is the English translation of its opening stanzas:
Poland has not yet perished,
So long as we still live.
What the foreign force has taken from us,
We shall with sabre retrieve.
March, march, Dąbrowski,
From Italy to Poland.
Under your command
We shall rejoin the nation.
In recent months, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been in the news a lot. Some of you may already be experienced in using the various types of AI software currently available. But some of you may have questions about AI and/or would like to learn more.
Earlier this week, the Wall St. Journal published a standalone section titled “Artificial Intelligence.” The lead article was “What Readers Want to Know About Artificial Intelligence.” We thought it was a good primer about AI, and wanted to share with you in case you haven’t seen it.
As publishers, we care about AI because our basic product is intellectual property, and AI developers have been “training” their software by scouring the web for everything that appears, whether words or images, and appropriating it for free regardless of whether the material is protected by copyright or trademark. The New York Times recently sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, claiming that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train AI-powered chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information. This is only one of many lawsuits that have been filed by copyright owners against AI developers in recent months, including suits by the Authors Guild, several bestselling authors, and Getty Images. At the beginning of this year, TechTarget published a roundup of then-pending litigation against AI developers.
Here are the questions which this week’s WSJ article answers:
1. I really do not understand artificial intelligence and where it’s heading. Please explain what it is.
2. What about those “chatbot” AI systems?
3. How can these new AIs answer almost any type of question?
4. What are the implications of this for average citizens?
5. What about “hallucinations,” when an AI makes something up but presents it as a fact?
6. What are AI providers doing to minimize hallucinations?
7. Do chatbots warn people about the possibility of giving bad information?
8. What about people using AI to created phony news reports, photos or videos? Can it be stopped?
9. Wouldn’t it be better if we could see the sources AIs use in their responses, like footnotes or citations in a report?
10. What other measures should be considered to help us discern the quality of the information AI produces? Would some type of rating system work?
11. Executives from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and other experts warned publicly in 2023 about the dangers of AI. What do they fear?
12. In March 2023, many in the AI industry signed a statement calling for a pause in moving ahead with ever more powerful versions. Did that pause happen?
13. Some say governments need to regulate AI to make it as safe as possible. What might that look like?
14. I’ve heard a lot of doomsday speculation about AI, but what are some of the ways it is doing good?
To see the WSJ’s answers to these questions, read the entire article online, or in pdf….
Before World War II, Helena Marusarzówna was the leading Polish women’s ski champion. Born January 17, 1918 in Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains of southern Poland, even as a young child she showed great ability as a skier. Marusarzówna was a keen competitor, seven-time Polish champion in alpine competitions (downhill running, slalom and Nordic combined).
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Marusarzówna volunteered her services to the Polish Underground. Beginning in October 1939, she served as a secret courier of the “Zagroda” cell of the Conspiracy Communications Department of the SZP-ZWZ Headquarters to the “Romek” base in Budapest, carrying mail and leading people along the mountain trails.
In March 1940, she was captured by Slovak authorities, who were then cooperating with the Germans, and handed over to the Gestapo. She was imprisoned, and tortured many times. But she did not betray any of her fellow resistance members.
It is believed that the Germans executed her by shooting on September 12, 1941, in Pogórska Wola near Tarnów. However, according to another version, she was shot on July 23, 1941 in the Kruk forest in Skrzyszów, together with Janina Bednarska and Stefania Hanauskówna and three other women. Marusarzówna was only 23 years old.
Polish ski champ, Helena Marusarzówna (prewar photo).
Her remains were later exhumed and on November 27, 1958 she was buried with ceremony at the Cemetery of Merit at Pęksowy Brzyzek in Zakopane. Marusarzówna was posthumously awarded the Order of Virtuti Militari with the Cross of Valor in 1967. On September 21, 2019, during the gala celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Polish Football Association, she was posthumously awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, for her outstanding contributions to the independence of the Republic of Poland, sports achievements, and activities for the development of winter sports.
Polish soldiers man a machine gun position during the Battle of Warsaw, August 1920.
In late December 1932 Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski, working with pencil, paper and advanced mathematical theory, broke the Germans’ “unbreakable” Enigma code. One of the most closely guarded prewar secrets was the fact that Polish Intelligence was reading the Germans’ encrypted communications for nearly seven years before the outbreak of World War II in September 1939.
Twenty-three years earlier, in 1919 during the Polish–Bolshevik War that followed World War I, an earlier generation of Polish mathematicians was similarly successful in breaking the Bolshevik Russian codes. Access to encrypted communications of their enemy helped the fledgling Polish nation defeat the Bolshevik Russians.
One of the turning points of that war occurred during the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920—also known as the Miracle on the Vistula, on August 15, 1920 the ragtag Polish 5th Army commanded by General Władysław Sikorski was able to stop the Bolshevik forces practically at the gates of Warsaw, and then chase them eastward back toward Russia.
The Cipher Section of the Polish Army was put together by Lieutenant Jozef S. Stanslicki. The section set up shop in a small room in the Saxon Palace [in Warsaw] that also served as the headquarters for the General Staff. Soon the unit was renamed the Cipher Office and placed under the supervision of the General Staff. The Cipher Office was tasked with the responsibility of securing Polish military and government communications and breaking the ciphers and codes in Russian and German messages. The second part of the Cipher Office mandate was soon accomplished by Lieutenant Jan Kowalewski whose expertise in the Russian language allowed him to decrypt the codes employed by the Soviets. As a follow-up to his success, Kowalewski set up a radio intercept and deciphering unit within the Cipher Office in August 1919.
The lieutenant, himself a gifted technology institute graduate, made sure that only the most capable people filled the ranks of the cryptology department. Brilliant mathematicians such as Stefan Mazurkiewicz, Waclaw Sierpinski, and Stanislaw Lesniewski were among those brought on board….
During the crucial month of August, the unit decrypted 410 enemy signals, including ones to and from Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, commander of the Western Front; Leon Trotsky, Soviet commissar for war; and all the individual Russian Army commanders facing Poland. The decoded messages allowed the Polish Army to follow with exact precision the enemy forces arrayed against them….
The “Miracle on the Vistula” kept the Polish nation free for the next 19 years. That outcome was due to the fighting spirit and quality of the Polish Army, but it was made possible in large part by the professionalism and tireless work of the Cipher Office. Such outstanding capability made possible the Poles’ stunning success in discovering the workings of the German armed forces’ top-secret Enigma machine in late 1932. Like its effects on the outcome of the Battle of Warsaw 12 years earlier, the breaking of the Enigma code would provide another miracle weapon to help the Allies destroy another totalitarian regime’s quest for world domination a decade later.
The crew of ORP Sokół displaying the Jolly Roger recording their victories, and a captured Nazi German ensign.
On January 19, 1941, the Polish Navy welcomed into its fleet the submarine ORP Sokół (Falcon). Thus began the career of one of “the Terrible Twins.”
ORP Sokół was a brand-new British U-class submarine that was leased to the Polish Navy by the Royal Navy for the duration of WWII, along with its sister sub, ORP Dzik (Wild Boar). The designation “ORP” is an abbreviation of Okręt Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, “Warship of the Republic of Poland.”
The Polish banner was raised for the first time over ORP Sokół under the command of Commander Borys Karnicki. As described by Michael Peszke in his book Poland’s Navy: 1918–1945, the Poles and the British went out of their way to make this a big publicity occasion.
As the war progressed, ORP Sokół and ORP Dzik racked up such an outstanding record in sinking enemy ships in the Mediterranean, that the British dubbed them “the Terrible Twins.”
In November 1941, after Sokół had already begun its illustrious string of victories, Polish Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief General Władysław Sikorski presented the sub with a Jolly Roger flag, on which its exploits would thereafter be recorded.
Altogether, during her wartime service Sokół sank or damaged 19 enemy vessels of about 55,000 tons in total. All of the commanding officers of the boat—Lieutenant Commander Karnicki, Lieutenant Commander Koziołkowski and Captain Bernas—were awarded the Virtuti Militari. The full patrol records of the ORP Sokół are stored at the National Record Office, Kew, England.
The Sybir Memorial Museum in Białystok has been named the best in Europe after being awarded the prestigious pan-European museum prize by the Council of Europe. Read more about this award at First News.
Awarded annually since 1977 the Council of Europe’s Museum Prize is given to museums which have been judged to have made a significant contribution to the understanding of European cultural heritage.
Opened in 2021, the Sybir Memorial Museum is Poland’s first museum devoted to telling the story of Poles in Siberia (in Polish ‘Sybir’), not only of the 20th century deportations of Poles to the region, but also of the 19th century exiles, earlier tsarist repressions and stories of voluntary settlement as well as the study of the region by Polish explorers.
The 20th century deportations are one of the little-known aspects of World War II. The Germans invaded Poland from the west on September 1, 1939. Two weeks later, on September 17, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. The Soviets captured approximately 200,000 Polish soldiers during the September 1939 campaign and sent them to Siberian POW labor camps.
Visitors explore the Sybir Memorial Museum
In addition, beginning in February 1940, the Soviets forcibly deported hundreds of thousands (some estimates range as high as 1.5 million) of innocent Polish civilians — men, women, children of all ages, entire families arbitrarily designated as “enemies of the people” — to Siberian slave labor camps. According to some estimates, as many as 50% of these deportees died under the harsh conditions.
Two of our award-winning books — The Ice Road and Maps and Shadows — deal with these deportations. The Ice Road is a nonfiction memoir by Stefan Waydenfeld of his experience as a teenager being deported with his parents. Maps and Shadows is a fictionalized account of the author’s family’s deportation experience.
View looking up at the destroyed Monte Cassino monastery atop the hill (Signal Corps photo, May 20, 1944). From the Collection of the National WWII Museum 2002.337.524
The Battle of Monte Cassino was one of the bloodiest battles fought on the Italian front of WWII.
Beginning January 17, 1944, and lasting four months and one day, 240,000 Allied troops fought to break through the German 10th Army around the mountain monastery of Monte Cassino. The Allies outnumbered the Germans nearly two to one, but the Germans commanded the high ground. Dug in at the hilltop monastery of Monte Cassino, elite units of German paratroopers ably controlled the surrounding hillsides and valleys to defend against Allied assaults.
During the course of the battle, Axis forces battled against the multinational formation of the Western Allies that included many British Commonwealth Nations, Free France, the United States and Poland. Italian soldiers fought on both sides of the battle as well.
By May 1944, Allied forces had finally managed to rupture the Axis defenses around Monte Cassino, with Polish troops from General Władysław Anders’s Polish II Corps at the heart of the battle. For three days, Poles and Germans fought hand to hand for control of the summit, until soldiers of the 12th Podolian Uhlans finally raised the Polish flag on top of the mountain to mark the end of the battle—finally opening the route to Rome for the Allies.
Allied forces suffered 55,000 casualties during the battle, including over 1,000 Polish soldiers who are buried at the Polish War Cemetery near Monte Cassino.
According to its website, it is the oldest, continuously operating place of this kind in Poland. It is still located in the same building, built especially for the needs of the Stained Glass Workshop and completed in 1908. Here you can take individual (at least 2 people) or group guided tours to observe artists at work, and even take workshops or more extensive courses in stained glass making to produce an artwork yourself, study the permanent and temporary exhibitions, enjoy the cafe and browse the museum store. Click here for more info on the many options available for experiencing the Muzeum Witrazu.
Stained Glass Workshop and Museum
al. Zygmunta Krasińskiego 23
31-111 Kraków
tel.: +48 512 937 979
info@muzeumwitrazu.pl https://muzeumwitrazu.pl
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