This has been a light year for major elections in the West, but Poland currently offers more than its share of political theater. The country will hold parliamentary elections on Oct. 15. At stake is the direction of a country…
Poland already boasts notable saints from the 20th century — Pope John Paul II, Faustina Kowalska, and Maximilian Kolbe, to name a few. Today, those great saints look on as the Ulma family is beatified in their hometown of Markowa,…
Those cheeky, ungrateful and xenophobic Poles really went too far this time around! In their resistance against immigration, they have resorted to “blackmail” against the European Union (EU), according to the left-leaning Dutch newspaper NRC. Which also accuses critics of…
Politicians and pundits want to declaim the lessons we should learn from Russia’s war against Ukraine despite the fact that the war — now eighteen months old — may not yet have reached its halfway point. Russian President Putin, as…
Much is being said right now about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. The reason, of course, is the new film on Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan. The film has opened old debates and wounds about Oppenheimer’s communist…
I It is Aug. 13, 1944, and the streets of Warsaw are clogged with barricades and mounds of rubble, burn-out vehicles and fallen streetlamps, bent iron pipes and tangled electrical cables, all interspersed with spent cartridges and dead bodies. An…
Some cities seem to burst with saints. Home to well-known twentieth century saints like St. Faustina Kowalska, and St. Maximilian Kolbe, and St. John Paul II — as well as older saints less familiar to Americans, like St. Stanislaw and…
In 1946, George Kennan, the U.S. Charge D’Affaires in Moscow, sent an 8,000 word telegram to the State Department warning of Joseph Stalin’s aggressive foreign policy. The following year, writing under the pseudonym “Mister X,” he reiterated his warning in…
There are two places in Poland where crutches pile up. One is the Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, a site of miraculous healings; the other is Auschwitz, a site of unspeakable horror. Death and life are wound tightly together…
“Even by today’s low standards, this is shockingly delusional,” I thought after reading Kati Marton’s diatribe against the current Polish and Hungarian governments in the Los Angeles Times last week. Most such pieces are relatively standard and don’t warrant a…