Describes the history, government, economy, people, geography, and cultural life of Poland.

"The author's search for the annihilated Polish community captured in his grandfather's 1938 home movie. Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community--an entire culture--that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty-six-year-old man who appears in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world"--

Illustrating the first 75 years of Chicago's influential Polish neighborhood. Polish Downtown is Chicago's oldest Polish settlement and was the capital of American Polonia from the 1870s through the first half of the 20th century. Nearly all Polish undertakings of any consequence in the U.S. during that time either started or were directed from this part of Chicago's near northwest side. Chicago's Polish Downtown features some of the most beautiful churches in Chicago - St. Stanislaus Kostka, Holy Trinity and St. John Cantius - stunning examples of Renaissance and Baroque Revival architecture that form part of the largest concentration of Polish parishes in Chicago. The headquarters for almost every major Polish organization in America were clustered within blocks of each other and four Polish-language daily newspapers were published here. The heart of the photographic collection in this book is from the extensive library and archives of the Polish Museum of America, still located in the neighborhood today.

Czes?aw Siegieda, born the son of Polish immigrants to England in Leicestershire in 1954, showed an interest in photography from an early age. From his teens he photographed the Polish community he grew up in, moving through fêtes and funerals with an ease only available to an insider.0The images in the book, taken between 1974 and 1981, show the staunchly Catholic traditions and national customs so faithfully maintained by the community as they rebuilt their lives following the trauma suffered during and after the Second World War. Whilst many of Siegieda?s images display a sharp eye for the absurd and all are marked by a visible affection for his subjects, his photographs of his close family are notable for their intimacy. His mother Helena, though physically robust, looks careworn and vulnerable, clutching a bucket of vegetable peelings or a picture of the Virgin Mary like a life raft whilst her husband (Czes?aw?s stepfather) hovers in the background, as if ready to lend a hand if needed but not wishing to intrude.0For many years the archive remained private, initially out of respect for the sensitivities of his parents? generation: nervous of their position as ?guests? in a foreign land, they were determined not to draw attention to themselves. This initial impulse of discretion soon gave way to the more prosaic demands of life and work. For decades the negatives sat unheeded in a drawer until, in 2018, two years after his mother?s death, Siegieda decided that it was time to bring them out into the world.0The book contains over 80 images from this archive, with an essay by author and historian Jane Rogoyska as well as a foreword by Martin Parr. The book is available in an edition of 600, including 30 copies with a signed and limited pigment print.

John Vachon was in Poland to witness this transformation of almost mythic proportions. Assigned to cover United Nations relief efforts, this American photographer documented in images and letters a nation at the crossroads of the postwar East and West.

Answering questions such as What did Polish roads, towns, and villages look like a hundred years ago? and What did the faces of the people and their clothes look like? these yellowing, faded photographs from the State Archives help to preserve many events, customs, and places of a vanished period. This stunning album brings back the time during which Poland suffered through two world wars and the Communist regime that followed.