Waiting to be Heard: The Polish Christian Experience Under Nazi and Stalinist Oppression 1939-1955
Bogusia Wojciechowska is the daughter of two Poles who met in England in 1948. Her father, who had been in the Polish Army, did not want to go back to his home, near Lwow, as it was no longer a part of Poland. Some of his family had been deported to Siberia and had perished there. His own father, forcibly moved from the land inhabited by the family for generations, was living in Poland in poverty. Bogusia's mother, meanwhile, had lived in Warszawa until the end of the Uprising in 1944. Like so many of her family, she was taken to a concentration camp in Germany and, then, as a slave laborer to Austria. Some members of her family perished in German camps. Her determination to give recognition to the suffering of her parents' generation, a generation that has been marginalized in history for the sake of political expediency, led to this book. Waiting to be Heard is both a tribute and testament to that unheard generation. Bogusia has a BA in History and a MA in comparative Social History from the University of Warwick, England, and a PhD in Economic and Social History from the University of Kent at Canterbury, England.