We wrześniu br. nakładem amerykańskiego wydawnictwa Rowman & Littlefield ukazała się książka Aleksandry Ziółkowskiej - Boehm pt. "A Better Day Has Not Come". W języku polskim wydana została w 2012 roku przez ISKRY. "LEPSZY DZIEŃ NIE PRZYSZEDŁ JUŻ" to trzy opowieści o losach rodzin zamieszkujących przed wojną Kresy Wschodnie. Niektóre wątki, znane miłośnikom twórczości Aleksandry Ziółkowskiej-Boehm, powracają tu uzupełnione i rozwinięte po latach, na przykład historia Hubalczyka Romana Rodziewicza, czy dzieje rodu Jaxa Bąkowskich i ich krewnych Wartanowiczów - polskich Ormian, przed laty właścicieli rozległych winnic na Podolu. PRZECZYTAJ WIĘCEJ.
Poniżej publikujemy kilka recenzji angielsko języcznego wydania:
"A remarkable and highly personal account of the human suffering the victims of both Hitlerism and Stalinism had to endure … beyond comprehension of most Americans"— Zbigniew Brzezinski, John Hopkins University and Center for Strategic and International Studies, Former National Security Advisor to President Carter
"In World War II the Poles suffered oppression and murder from both Nazi Germanyand the USSR , which attacked their country and divided it between them in September 1939.The Wartanowicz and Michalak families were deported from former eastern Poland to Soviet labor camps near Archangel or farms in Kazakhstan. Freed after the German attack on the USSR, they left in 1942 with the Anders Army for Persia (Iran) and then scattered all over the world. Reserve Captain, PilotWitold Krasicki was shot by the Soviets in spring 1940, along with thousands of Polish POWs and other prisoners. His family survived the German occupation in Warsaw, including the two-month Polish Home Army uprising against the Germans in 1944. Wanda Ossowska worked for the Polish resistance, survived brutal Nazi torture, three Nazi death camps, and risked her life to save a Jewish girl.In the author's interviews with the survivors and theirrelatives, theytelltheir poignant stories withvivid, personal memories of wartime life and death, as well astheir lives in postwar Communist Poland or elsewhere. We should be grateful to Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm who has savedthese memories for us" — Anna M. Cienciala, University of Kansas
"Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm has written on a wide variety of subjects. But she writes with particular feeling when describing, as she does in this new book, the heroism and suffering of Poles during the Second World War. These are stories that must be told—and she tells them very well, indeed" — Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson, authors of A Question of Honor: The Kosciuszko Squadron—Forgotten Heroes of World War II
"These accounts of Polish family life in Russian and German camps during World War II describe people subsisting on weeds and horse heads, living sometimes in pig sties. Children watch as fathers and mothers wither and die amidst “the calm of terror.” Bodies are thrown out of running trains. Prisoners shiver in the intense cold of long winters, always hungry, amidst bedbugs that somehow survive even the coldest nights. Meet Wanda Ossowska, interrogated 57 times by the Gestapo, tortured “to the limits of her endurance,” refusing to name names. It’s another time, another world, “the true valleys of death,” when even hospitals were “houses for dying”—genocide one by one, or by the thousands (as in the Katyn massacre). These evocative, descriptive accounts become terrifyingly haunting and personally intimate" — Bruce E. Johansen, University of Nebraska at Omaha
"An unforgettable picture of the martyrdom of women and children sent from Poland behind the Urals. A powerful work of art that should be read and re-read" — Karl Maramorosch, Rutgers University
"Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm tells stories that are the substance of history and of dreams. She tells the stories of individuals who are both ordinary and heroic... . The book is an easy read in spite of its spellbinding intensity" — Ewa Thompson, Rice University