Jedwabne: The Politics of Apology and Contrition, Defamation. The Price of Poland's Heroism

Jedwabne: The Politics of Apology and Contrition, Defamation. The Price of Poland's Heroism


Jedwabne: The Politics of Apology and Contrition, Defamation: The Price of Poland's Heroism
Presented at the Panel “Jedwabne – A Scientific Analysis”
Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, Inc.
Annual Meeting, June 8, 2002

Georgetown University, Washington DC

A Historic Narrative

Today, as we are contemplating the tragedy of Jedwabne of sixty years ago, it is a bitter irony to see what has been called the "politics of apology and contrition" being used by post-communist leaders in an attempt to re-write the historical record. This irony is particularly cruel to my generation of Polish survivors of Nazi and Soviet terror.

It is entirely fitting and proper that Mr. Miller, the Prime Minister of Poland, remember with reverence the sufferings of Jewish people in Poland and elsewhere. It is not appropriate, however, to falsely implicate innocent nation for the crime of Jedwabne, and to exonerate German perpetrators, by convenient selective memory of the historical facts, and in process to obscure the crimes of the communist party.

The great heroic deeds of Poland of the 20th century benefited the entire world. Such was the derailing of Lenin's world revolution based on the Moscow- Berlin axis in 1920 as well as derailing of Hitler's strategy for domination of the entire world in 1939. Poland's heroism lived on in the wartime combat of Polish soldiers, airmen, and seamen, as well as Europe's largest resistance movement and the very existence of the Polish underground state under enemy occupation. Polish armed resistance continued during the postwar years of pacification by the Soviet terror apparatus.

After World War I the Poles declared their independence on Nov. 11, 1918. To keep their independence, the Poles had to win borderland wars. By far the most important was the Polish victory, led by Marshal Józef Pilsudski, over Lenin's Red Army in 1920. Lenin had attempted to overrun Poland and form a Moscow-Berlin alliance in order to stage a worldwide communist revolution. Germans resented their defeat in World War I; at the time millions of Germans were ready to accept a communist government in return for the re-annexation of western and northern Poland, once those lands would be occupied by the Soviets. The Polish victory deprived Lenin of a chance for a worldwide revolution. The Soviets then retaliated with terror and eventually murdered more Polish nationals than did the Germans, during the World War II, in 1939-1941. In the Spring of 1940 alone the NKVD executed 21,857 members of Polish leadership community. About four-fifths of all victims were betrayed to the NKVD by local leftists mostly of Jewish background.

In 1939 Poland again decisively shaped world's history, as Germany and Japan had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936 and Japan attacked the USSR in 1938. Hitler, in an advanced stage of Parkinson's disease, was in a hurry to start an anti-Soviet crusade to build his "1,000 year Reich" from Riga to the Black Sea and control world's main oil resources for his "war of the engines." Poland, a physical barrier between Germany and the USSR, was to become an impediment on Hitler's road to the domination of the world.

Hitler, warned by his generals that Germany had insufficient military manpower for his grandiose schemes, strived in 1935-1939 to have on his side Poland's potential 3,500,000 soldiers. The Berlin government felt that combining German and Polish forces in Europe with Japanese forces in Asia would bring a decisive victory over the USSR German control over the world's main oil fields was essential to secure Hitler world domination.

The Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Józef Beck, while following the strategic advice of the late Marshal Pilsudski, held both the Germans and the Soviets at bay as long as it was possible. The Polish refusal in January 1939 to join the Anti-Comintern Pact derailed Hitler's plans and caused him to lose his chance to join Japan in the attack on the USSR. Poland, Great Britain, and France exchanged common defense guarantees on March 31, 1939. Hitler signed Fall Weiss plan on April 11 and ordered the attack on Poland on September 1, 1939.

On July 25, 1939, Poland gave Great Britain and France each a copy of a linguistic deciphering electro-mechanical device for the German secret military code system Enigma, complete with specifications, perforated cards, and updating procedures. Thanks to the Polish solution for breaking the Enigma, the British project Ultra was able to interpret German secret messages during the entire war of 1939-1945. The invasion of Normandy would not have been possible without it. In 1999, the American code expert David A. Hatch of the Center of Cryptic History, NSA, Fort George G. Meade, Maryland wrote that "the breaking of the Enigma by Poland was one of the cornerstones of Allied victory over Germany."

As we all know, despite the crucial Polish contributions and sacrifices for the Allies' victory, Poland was betrayed by Roosevelt and Churchill first at Teheran and then at Yalta; it was handed over to become a Soviet satellite state, after a ruthless pacification by the communist terror apparatus which followed German mass executions.

The Tragedy of Jedwabne Explained by the Evidence of Two Graves and German Archives

Thus, on July 10, 1941 German executioners collected Jews of Jedwabne in the town square and drove them by physical violence to the site of their murder. First they shot some 50 Jews and then burned alive 250 others (not 1600 or 1800 as inaccurately reported in the American press on the basis of false information published by J. T. Gross who ignored Soviet and other sources as well as German archives in his book Neighbors).

The executioners of the Einsatztrupen enlisted help of several ethnic Germans (the "Volksdeutche" known as traitors and spies), and a group of primitive and illiterate criminals, both local and from out of town, as well as possibly a few "avengers." The latter must have believed that they and their relatives had suffered murderous persecution by Soviet security officers and deportation to the Gulag because of the betrayal by some of the Jews living in Jedwabne. German executioners forced an additional number of Poles, at gunpoint, with blows of rifle butts, and with threats, to help bring Jewish victims to the town square (the marketplace) ostensibly to clean the pavement.

According to eyewitnesses still living today, uniformed Germans committed this wartime atrocity. They forced some 300 Jews to march in a mock-funeral procession while carrying a concrete head of Lenin that had been removed from a monument.

The Germans of the Einsatzgrupen divided the marchers into two groups. The first group consisted of some 50 Jews, men strong enough to put up a fight. The second group was formed from the approximately 250 remaining Jews, mostly old people, women, and children.

While the second group was held back, the first group was directed into a 62.4 by 23 feet wooden barn. The keys to the barn were confiscated a day earlier by uniformed Germans, who removed agricultural machinery from it and prepared it for the execution of the Jews next day. (The daughter of the owner of the barn repeatedly testified about this facts, most recently on the CBS "60 minutes" on March 24, 2002.)

The 50 Jewish men were ordered to dig a large grave inside the barn, ostensibly for burying Lenin's concrete head. (J. T. Gross wants his readers to believe that the head of Lenin was buried in the Jewish cemetery.) As the diggers stood near the grave, the Germans shot them and then ordered several Poles to drag into the shallow grave the bodies of the Jews, some slain and some wounded but possibly still alive. Lenin's concrete head was placed on top of the victims in the grave #1. The German executioners then ordered the second, more defenseless, group into the barn, which moments later would be turned into a gigantic funeral pyre.

Stefan Boczkowski, Roman Chojnowski and five other eyewitnesses reported seeing the following: A small German military truck loaded with soldiers and gasoline canisters quickly pulled up to the barn crowded with Jews. Some of the soldiers jumped down from the truck, and those soldiers staying in the truck handed them the canisters, whose contents they poured on all outer walls of the barn. The flames engulfed the barn at once. Pyrotechnic analysis indicates that the Germans used approximately 100 gallons (over 400 liters) of gasoline to soak some 1000 square ft. of walls of the barn in order to engulf all of it with fire, burn it and in process suffocate the victims (by inhalation of the hot smoke). Later (reportedly the next day) the Germans ordered Poles at gunpoint to bury the partly burned bodies emanating a horrible odor. Remains of about 250 victims were buried in the grave #2 located along the barn (the high content of water in human bodies requires temperature of some 800 degrees Centigrade for more than thirty minutes in order to obtain a complete cremation).

At that time there was no gasoline available to the local population of Jedwabne (only a small amount of hydrocarbons in form of kerosene for lamps was available to the rural population). Such small amounts of kerosene (as mentioned by J. T. Gross) with its flashpoint of about 50 degrees Centigrade could not produce a sudden fire to engulf the entire barn at once.

In the 2001 investigation by the Polish government bodies of the victims of the July 10, 1941 massacre were found buried in the graves #1 and #2. Thorough search and drilling some 170 test cores in the vicinity found no other graves of the 1941 massacre of the Jews in Jedwabne; however, at the request of an Orthodox Rabbi who objected, rigorous forensic studies and full exhumation of all victims and the determination by autopsy of causes of death of every one of them was prematurely terminated. Thus, only an approximate number of victims could be estimated by the size of the two graves. Unfortunately these unanswered questions inevitably discredit the veracity of the final report of the official investigation by the Polish government's agency, the Institute of National Memory (IPN).

The veracity of Grosses book and the film Neighbors is further compromised by a baseless, non-corroborated claim that a cut off head of a Jewish female was kicked around in Jedwabne. Jerzy Robert Nowak, the author of the book 100 Lies By Gross (published in Poland) claims that after its publication he determined additional factual errors in Neighbors.

"The book of Prof. Gross can not be considered as a serious scholarly work: it is rather a tendentious propagandistic pamphlet. He jumps to farfetched conclusions before examining the existing evidence." wrote to the New York Times M. K. Dziewanowski, Professor of History, author of: History of Soviet Russia, 5th edition, Prentice Hall, 1996.

As Alexander B. Rossino, historian at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. writes in an article to be printed in Polin, Volume 16, 2003:

"The evidence collected by the West Germans, including the positive identification of [Hauptsturmfuehrer Herman] Schaper by witnesses from Lomza, Tykocin, and Radzilów, suggested that it was indeed Schaper's men who carried out the killings in those locations. Investigators also suspected, based on the similarity of the methods used to destroy the Jewish communities of Radzilów, Tykocin, Rutki, Zambrów, Jedwabne, Piatnica, and Wizna between July and September 1941 that Schaper's men were the perpetrators... The method used to kill the Jews of Jedwabne was exactly the same that had been employed by the Gestapo [Einsatsgrupen] to kill the Jews of Radzilow only three days earlier."

During the initial investigation of 1964, German investigator Opitz in Ludwigsburg, Germany, concluded that Hauptsturmfuerer Hermann Schaper's Einsatskommando conducted the mass execution of Jews in Jedwabne. Nonetheless, Schaper gave conflicting answers to his interrogators. First, he lied that in 1941 he had been a truck driver and he used false names. Later he claimed to have been an administrative officer, and another time a hunter of double agents, when the Gestapo was busy finding and killing communist commissars and Jews.

Court documents at Ludwigsburg archives show that the chief of the German civilian administration in the Nazi occupied Lomza district, Count van der Groeben testified that Schaper conducted mass executions of Jews in his district, which included the town of Jedwabne. That notwithstanding, legal proceedings against Schaper were terminated Sept. 2, 1965 despite positive identification of the defendant by Jewish survivors of the execution in Radzilow and Tykocin.

In 1974 Schaper's case was reopened and in 1976 a German court in Giesen, Hessen, pronounced the then 68 year old Schaper guilty, together with four other members of the kommando SS Zichenau-Schroettersburg, of executions of Poles and Jews. Schaper was sentenced to a six-year prison, but was soon released for medical reasons. (The facts of Schaper's dossier are quoted from article by Thomas Urban, reporter of the Suddeutsche Zeitung; Polish text in Rzeczpospolita, Sept 1-2, 2001.)

To make any legal sense now in 2002 the Polish Government should have demanded either the extradition or deposition under oath of Schaper by a German court and not an interview which has no legal meaning and can not give legally binding information. However, the Polish government's agency IPN gave the press a report that "Hauptsturmfuehrer Hermann Schaper confirmed known facts."

An Evil Empire and the "Politics of Apology and Contrition"

President Reagan was right: Soviet Union was "an evil empire," with its communist party that ruled, among other places in the Soviet sphere of influence, Poland with an iron fist for half a century. Now, with a shiny new name of "the Leftist Democratic Union (SLD)," new apologists for the old communist past are starting to act like new emperors, blaming the nation for the crimes of their communist predecessors of the former evil empire. Let me proclaim: these new emperors have no clothes!

You see, Mr. Miller, like the current president of Poland, Mr. Kwasniewski, has an ax to grind. They are both former high officials of the communist party. Yes, this was the party of the same communists whose NKVD security forces, the mainstay of the Soviet terror apparatus, staged the Kielce pogrom in 1946.

At that time Ostap Dluski, the head of the department of foreign affairs of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (PPR), wrote on September 25, 1946 a personal letter to Stanislaw Skrzeszewski, the Polish communist ambassador in Paris, ordering him to carefully plan, organize, and finance with state funds a defamation campaign for the purpose of generating in France a wide- spread condemnation of the "Polish perpetrators" of the Kielce pogrom.

On one hand the NKVD was staging pogroms in all satellite states in order to drive out of East-Central some 700,000 Jews. Those that would arrive to Palestine were to abolish the British mandate there and to foment Jewish-Arab wars in order to interfere with the flow of oil to the west. On the other hand the communist propaganda used the accusation of Polish anti-Semitism to "justify" the need for a protracted stay of the Red Army in Poland long after the war was over. Similarly, the present Polish president and the prime minister distribute internationally the propaganda of the responsibility of the Polish nation for the crime of Jedwabne to obscure communist crimes in Poland.

Mr. Miller and Mr. Kwasniewski are apologists for, the same communists who persecuted Jews in Poland in 1968 under the orders of Jiri Andropov then the head of the Soviet terror apparatus. They are the same communists who oppressed the Polish people for half a century. And they managed to extend their dominance even today.

So what is an ambitious post-communist to do about such an evil and embarrassing past? Why not blame these crimes not on the communist leaders who carried them out, but on the people subjugated by those leaders. That appears to be the strategy embodied by the "politics of apology and contrition," as practiced in Poland today. One of the latest manifestations of this was on January 10, 2002, when Mr. Miller spoke to the conference of presidents of major Jewish organizations in New York. He betrayed the Polish citizens whom he is supposed to represent by apologizing on the international scene in the name of the Polish nation for crimes committed by the communists and the Nazis.

Mr. Miller and Mr. Kwasniewski are trying to establish that the Polish people were the exterminators of Jews in Poland, while first the Nazis and then the Soviet-installed communist leadership stood around as innocent and helpless bystanders. It is a bizarre behavior for a president and a prime minister of Poland to insist and broadcast to the world that the Polish nation, when under the brutal subjugation of the Nazis, is responsible for the killing of a community of Jews in Jedwabne.

Mr. Kwasniewski, as the current president of Poland, issued his apology during the inquiry into the crime of Jedwabne by an agency of the Polish department of justice thereby violating the independence of the judiciary. For domestic consumption he worded his apology as his personal and in the name of those who want to apologize. However, people throughout the world understood that the president of Poland accepted the full responsibility of the Polish nation for the crime in Jedwabne with all the consequences of the international law.

In order to strengthen the international propaganda effect of the presidential apology the followers of the post-communist leadership now make public acts of contrition and confess publicly to their personal feeling of guilt and remorse and say that they feel permanently tainted by the allegedly Polish crime of Jedwabne, in spite of the fact that because of their age they could not have had any experience of the terror in wartime Poland. These acts of fake contrition contribute to disorientation in America, where people often believe that Poland fought on the side of Hitler; especially, after they participated in the obligatory Holocaust Studies, in which the role of the Jewish Ghetto Police and Administration serving Gestapo is omitted.

The Nazis, according J. T. Gross, unsuccessfully tried to save some of the Jewish victims in Jedwabne, but he insists, that the locals would not let them. Blaming the Polish people for both Nazi-and Soviet-era atrocities against Jews attempts to complete the picture of a hopelessly evil Polish populace - picture that is a familiar sight on American television and in the movies, in which Poles and Poland have had the worst image of all central European nationalities. This also is a picture that is grotesque in its wickedness, transparent in its self-serving post-communist motive, and it is a falsehood in contradiction to the facts that cannot stand against the historical test of time.

Unfortunately the dominant liberal and post-communist press in Poland frequently falsely reported and distorted many known facts. This widespread phenomenon resulted in an addition to the Polish vocabulary of a new word "przeklamanie" meaning "media lies."

In Jedwabne the local reaction to the current investigation of the crime is full of distrust. It is said that when the investigators dug up the first three skulls, they found in each of them a bullet hole. Apparently about at that point the investigators stopped the exhumation under the pretext that two Rabbis objected to further disturbance of the remains. Now it appears to many people in Jedwabne that bullet holes in these skulls were not what investigators were looking for. The decision to stop the exhumation and forensic studies disqualifies the entire investigation of this horrible crime. "The truth is, to be sure, sometimes hard to grasp, but it is never so illusive as when it is not wanted" (as remarked by Herman H. Dinsmore, All the News That Fits, Arlington House, 1969).

At the present time practically all the forensic evidence remains buried. Under these circumstances the only remedy is to complete the forensic exhumation of the two graves and the surrounding area in order to properly document the murders of Jedwabne as Dr. Moor-Jankowski explained in the preceding presentation.


story by Professor Ivo Pogonowski
Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski

Born Sept. 3, 1921
Lwów, Poland

in Dec 1939 left Warsaw. Dec 30, 1939 arrested by Ukrainians serving the Gestapo in Dukla, then transferred to Barwinek, Krosno, Jaslo, Tarnów, Oswiecim, arrived in Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen on Aug. 10, 1940.

April 19, 1945 started on the Death March of Brandenburg from Sachsenhausen; escaped gunfire of SS-guards and arrived to Schwerin and freedom on May 2, 1945.

September 1945 arrived in Brussels, Belgium; obtained admission as a regular student at the Catholic University: Institute Superieur de Commerce, St. Ignace in Antwerp.

in 1954 graduated in Civil Engineering at the top of his class. Was invited to join honorary societies: Tau Beta Pi (general engineering honorary society), Phi Kappa Phi (academic honorary society equivalent to Phi Beta Kappa), Pi Mu (mechanical engineering honorary society), and Chi Epsilon (civil engineering honorary society). Taught descriptive geometry at the University of Tennessee;

in 1955 graduated with M.S. degree in Industrial Engineering.

in 1955 started working for Shell Oil Company in New Orleans. After one year of managerial training was assigned to design of marine structures for drilling and production of petroleum.

in 1960 started working for Texaco Research and Development in Houston, Texas as a Project Engineer. Authored total of 50 American and foreign patents on marine structures for the petroleum industry;
wrote an article: The Rise and Fall of the Polish Commonwealth - A Quest for a Representative Government in Central and Eastern Europe in the 14th to 18th Centuries. Started to work on a Tabular History of Poland.

in 1972 moved to Blacksburg, Virginia. During the following years worked as Consulting Engineer for Texaco, also taught in Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University as Adjunct Professor in the College of Civil Engineering teaching courses on marine structures of the petroleum industry. Designed and supervised the construction of a hill top home for his family, also bought 500 acre ranch (near Thomas Jefferson National Forest) where he restored 200 years old mill house on a mountain stream.

in 1978 prepared Polish-English, English-Polish Dictionary with complete phonetics, published by Hippocrene Books Inc. The dictionary included a Tabular History of Poland, Polish Language, People, and Culture as well as Pogonowski's phonetic symbols for phonetic transcriptions in English and Polish at each dictionary entry; the phonetic explanations were illustrated with cross-sections of speech (organs used to pronounce the sounds unfamiliar to the users). It was the first dictionary with phonetic transcription at each Polish entry for use by English speakers

in 1981 prepared Practical Polish-English Dictionary with complete phonetics, published by Hippocrene Books Inc.

in 1983 prepared Concise Polish-English Dictionary with complete phonetics, published by Hippocrene Books Inc. Wrote an analysis of Michael Ch ci ski's Poland, Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism. Also selected crucial quotations from Norman Davies' God's Playground - A History of Poland on the subject of the Polish indigenous democratic process.

in 1985 prepared Polish-English Standard Dictionary with complete phonetics, published by Hippocrene Books Inc. Also prepared a revised and expanded edition of the Concise Polish-English Dictionary with complete phonetics, also published by Hippocrene Books Inc.

in 1987 prepared Poland: A Historical Atlas on Polish History and Prehistory including 200 maps and graphs as well as Chronology of Poland's Constitutional and Political Development, and the Evolution of Polish Identity - The Milestones. An introductory chapter was entitled Poland the Middle Ground. Aloysius A. Mazewski President of Polish-American Congress wrote an introduction. The Atlas was published by Hippocrene Books Inc. and later by Dorset Press of the Barnes and Noble Co. Inc. which sends some 30 million catalogues to American homes including color reproduction of book covers. Thus, many Americans were exposed to the cover of Pogonowski's Atlas showing the range of borders of Poland during the history - many found out for the firsttime that Poland was an important power in the past. Total of about 30,000 atlases were printed so far.

In 1988 the publication of Poland: A Historical Atlas resulted in a number of invitations extended by several Polonian organizations to Iwo Pogonowski to present Television Programs on Polish History. Pogonowski responded and produced over two year period 220 half-hour video programs in his studio at home (and at his own expense.) These programs formed a serial entitled: Poland, A History of One Thousand Years. Total of over 1000 broadcasts of these programs were transmitted by cable television in Chicago, Detroit-Hamtramck, Cleveland, and Blacksburg.

in 1990-1991 translated from the Russian the Catechism of a Revolutionary of 1869 in which crime has been treated as a normal part of the revolutionary program. Started preparation of the Killing the Best and the Brightest: A Chronology of the USSR-German Attempt to Behead the Polish Nation showing how the USSR became a prototype of modern totalitarian state, how this prototype was adapted in Germany by the Nazis.

in 1991 prepared Polish Phrasebook, Polish Conversations for Americans including picture code for gender and familiarity, published by Hippocrene Books Inc.

in 1991 prepared English Conversations for Poles with Concise Dictionary published by Hippocrene Books Inc. By then a total of over 100,000 Polish-English, English-Polish Dictionaries written by Pogonowski were sold in the United States and abroad.

in 1992 prepared a Dictionary of Polish, Latin, Hebrew, and Yiddish Terms used in Contacts between Poles and Jews. It was prepared for the history of Jews in Poland as well as 115 maps and graphs and 172 illustrations, paintings, drawings, and documents, etc. of Jewish life in Poland. This material was accompanied by proper annotations.

in 1993 prepared Jews in Poland, Rise of the Jews as a Nation from Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel, published by Hippocrene Books Inc. in 3000 copies. Foreword was written by Richard Pipes, professor of history at Harvard University, and Pogonowski's school mate in the Keczmar school in Warsaw. Part I included: a Synopsis of 1000 Year History of Jews in Poland; the 1264 Statute of Jewish Liberties in Poland in Latin and English translation; Jewish Autonomy in Poland 1264-1795; German Annihilation of the Jews. In appendixes are documents and illustrations. An Atlas is in the Part III. It is divided as follows: Early Jewish Settlements 966-1264; The Crucial 500 Years, 1264-1795; Competition (between Poles and Jews) Under Foreign Rule, 1795-1918; The Last Blossoming of Jewish Culture in Poland, 1918-1939; German Genocide of the Jews, 1940-1944; Jewish Escape from Europe 1945-1947 - The End of European (Polish) Phase of Jewish History (when most of world's Jewry lived in Europe). Pogonowski began to write a new book starting with the Chronology of the Martyrdom of Polish Intelligentsia during World War II and the Stalinist Terror; the book in preparation was entitled Killing the Best and the Brightest.

in 1995 prepared Dictionary of Polish Business, Legal and Associated Terms for use with the new edition of the Practical Polish-English, English-Polish Dictionary and later to be published as a separate book.

in 1996 Pogonowski's Poland: A Historical Atlas; was translated into Polish; some 130 of the original 200 maps printed in color; the Chronology of Poland was also translated into Polish. The Atlas was published by Wydawnictwo Suszczy ski I Baran in Kraków in 3000 copies; additional publications are expected. Prepared Polish-English, Eglish-Polish Compact Dictionary with complete phonetics, published by Hippocrene Books Inc.

in 1997 finished preparation of the Unabridged Polish-English Dictionary with complete phonetics including over 200,000 entries, in three volumes on total of 4000 pages; it is published by Hippocrene Books Inc; the Polish title is: Uniwesalny S ownik Polsko-Angielski. Besides years of work Pogonowski spent over $50,000 on computers, computer services, typing, and proof reading in order to make the 4000 page dictionary camera ready; assisted in the preparation of second edition of Jews in Poland, Rise of the Jews from Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel published in fall of 1997. Prepared computer programs for English-Polish Dictionary to serve as a companion to the Unabridged Polish-English Dictionary printed by the end of May 1997.

in 1998 Pogonowski organized preparation of CD ROM for the Unabridged Polish-English Dictionary, Practical English-Polish Dictionary, Polish Phrasebook for Tourists and Travelers to Poland, all published earlier by Iwo C. Pogonowski. The Phrasebook includes 280 minutes of bilingual audio read by actors. Started preparation for a new edition of Poland: A Historical Atlas. New Appendices are being prepared on such subjects as: Polish contribution to Allied's wartime intelligence: the breaking of the Enigma Codes, Pune Munde rocket production; Poland's contribution to the international law since 1415; Poland's early development of rocket technology such as Polish Rocketry Handbook published in 1650 in which Poles introduced for the first time into the world's literature concepts of multiple warheads, multistage rockets, new controls in rocket flight, etc. Poland's Chronology is being enlarged to reflect the mechanisms of subjugation of Polish people by the Soviet terror apparatus. Continued preparation of the Killing the Best and the Brightest: A Chronology of the USSR-German Attempt to Behead the Polish Nation, including the 1992 revelations from Soviet archives as well as the current research in Poland. Continued preparation of two-volume English Polish Dictionary, a companion to the Unabridged Polish-English Dictionary published in 1997. Reviewed Upiorna Dekada by J. T. Gross.

in 1999 Pogonowski continued writing Poland - An Illustrated History and preparing for it 21 maps and diagrams and 89 illustrations.

in 2000 Pogonowski prepared, in a camera ready form, Poland - An Illustrated History; it was published by Hippocrene Books Inc. NY 2000 and recommended by Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor under President Carter, as "An important contribution to the better understanding of Polish history, which demonstrates in a vivid fashion the historical vicissitudes of that major European nation."