Best Von Borowicz Podcasts (2026)

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Marek Kohn, "The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey Through Cities at the Heart of Europe" (Yale UP, 2023) 59:34

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2M ago59:34

59:34

Historic quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfurt, had to be rebuilt almost completely. They are now centers of peace and civility that attract millions of tourists, but the stories they tell about places, peoples, and nations are selective. They ar…

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Elizabeth R. Hyman, "The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising" (Harper, 2025) 40:58

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The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one of the most storied events of the Holocaust, yet previous accounts of have almost entirely focused on its male participants. In The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising (Harper, 2025), Holocaust historian Elizabeth Hyman introduces five young, cour…

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Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley, "Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution" (Stanford UP, 2025) 39:53

4M ago39:53

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In Poland between 2015 and 2023, Jarosław Kaczyński and his Law and Justice Party (PiS) attempted a novel experiment. Could a governing party sustain a coalition committed religiously inspired social conservatism, old-school left-wing welfarism, and antipathy to Moscow and Brussels while also unravelling democratic institutions? It was, write Stanl…

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Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, "Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48" (Cambridge UP, 2014) 1:25:22

5M ago1:25:22

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Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48 (Cambridge UP, 2014) tells a story of Polish and Slovak Holocaust survivors returning to homes that no longer existed in the aftermath of the Second World War. It focuses on their daily efforts to rebuild their lives in the radically changed political and social landscape of post-war…

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Edward Luce, "Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet" (Simon and Schuster, 2025) 43:25

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Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union’s demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe’s bloodlands—Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at his homeland’s razing by Nazi Germany and the Red Army into a lifelong quest for liberty. Born the year that Joseph Stalin consolidated power, and dying…

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Darius Von Guttner-Sporzynski, "The Jagiellon Dynasty, 1386-1596: Politics, Culture, Diplomacy" (Brepols, 2024) 46:45

6M ago46:45

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The volume offers a re-examination of the rise of the Jagiellon dynasty in medieval and early modern Central Europe. Originating in Lithuania and extending its dominion to Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, the Jagiellon dynasty has left an enduring legacy in European history. This collection of studies presents the Jagiellons as rulers with dynamic and…

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Jan Borowicz, "Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders" (Routledge, 2024) 1:12:10

8M ago1:12:10

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Today I interviewed Jan Borowicz about Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders (Routledge, 2024). "The assumptions of my book rely on a simple thesis: indifference to violence is impossible and that the primal scene for Polish culture is the experience of Nazism. In Poland we have still a humanitarian …

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Alex Storozynski, "Spies In My Blood: A Polish Family’s Secret Fight Against Nazis & Communists" (Polestar-Media, 2025) 49:12

8M ago49:12

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Spies In My Blood: A Polish Family’s Secret Fight Against Nazis & Communists (Polestar-Media, 2025) is the true story of two brothers raised in New York by WWII exiles and their journey to Poland. Each takes a different path to infiltrate the Communist secret police on a mission to uncover the truth about their family of soldiers, spies, and assass…

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Charlie English, "The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War" (Random House, 2025) 45:32

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For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds, and intell…

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Catching the China-Europe Express: Logistics, Local Agency & Eurasian Geopolitics in the Polish Borderlands 56:34

8M ago56:34

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In this episode, we focus on the often-overlooked geographies of Eurasian connectivity with Dr. Wojciech Kębłowski, whose research brings attention to the Polish border towns of Małaszewicze and Narevka, key yet rarely discussed nodes in global infrastructure networks. As Eurasia undergoes a dramatic reconfiguration—with initiatives like China’s Be…

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David G. Williamson, "Poland Betrayed: The Nazi-Soviet Invasions of 1939" (Pen & Sword, 2011) 27:17

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After staging a mock attack at Gleiwitz, Germany unleashed its blitzkrieg on Poland on September 1, 1939. Two week later, Soviet forces streamed into the beleaguered country from the east. By early October, Poland had fallen. In a vivid narrative that follows the invading armies from the battle at Westerplatte to the siege of Warsaw, David Williams…

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Peter Whitewood, "The Soviet-Polish War and its Legacy: Lenin’s Defeat and the Rise of Stalinism" (Bloomsbury, 2023) 1:11:00

10M ago1:11:00

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This detailed study traces the history of the Soviet-Polish War (1919-20), the first major international clash between the forces of communism and anti-communism, and the impact this had on Soviet Russia in the years that followed. It reflects upon how the Bolsheviks fought not only to defend the fledgling Soviet state, but also to bring the revolu…

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Sabrina P. Ramet and Lavinia Stan, "East Central Europe Since 1989" (Routledge, 2025) 1:29:32

10M ago1:29:32

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East Central Europe Since 1989 (Routledge, 2025) examines politics, economics, media, religious institutions, transitional justice, gender inequality, and literature, highlighting the overt functions, latent functions, and side effects associated with each sphere. Communism in East Central Europe had cracks from the beginning, as uprisings in East …

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Canada and Eastern Europe, 1945–1991: Meeting in the Middle 32:01

11M ago32:01

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In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Andrea Chandler to talk about her new book with CEU Press, Canada and Eastern Europe, 1945–1991: Meeting in the Middle. In the podcast we talked about why the relations between Canada and the countries of the Eastern bloc have so far been underreseached, about the large Central and East…

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Ewa Stańczyk, "Cartoons and Antisemitism: Visual Politics of Interwar Poland" (U Press of Mississippi, 2024) 57:02

12M ago57:02

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Antisemitic caricatures had existed in Polish society since at least the mid-nineteenth century. But never had the devastating impacts of this imagery been fully realized or so blatantly apparent than on the eve of the Second World War. In Cartoons and Antisemitism: Visual Politics of Interwar Poland (U Press of Mississippi, 2024), scholar Ewa Stań…

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Joanna Mizielińska, "Queer Kinship on the Edge?: Families of Choice in Poland" (Routledge, 2024) 48:05

1y ago48:05

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Queer Kinship on the Edge? Families of Choice in Poland (Routledge, 2024) explores ways in which queer families from Central and Eastern Europe complicate the mainstream picture of queer kinship and families researched in the Anglo-American contexts. The book presents findings from under-represented localities as a starting point to query some of t…

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Zygmunt Bauman, "Theory and Society" (Polity, 2024) 1:02:20

1y ago1:02:20

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The publication of Theory and Society in 2024 bought to conclusion a three volume collection of The Selected Writings of Zygmunt Bauman. Preceded by Culture and Art in 2021 and Politics and History in 2023 (all published by Polity Press) these volumes presented essays which either had never been published before, were being made available in Englis…

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Jacob Flaws, "Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp" (U Nebraska Press, 2024) 58:11

1y ago58:11

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Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp (U Nebraska Press, 2024) utilizes testimonies, oral histories, and recollections from Jewish, German, and Polish witnesses to create a holistic representation of the Treblinka death camp during its operation. This narrative rejects the historical misconception that Treblinka was an isolated Nazi extermina…

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Cristina Vatulescu, "Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges" (Stanford UP, 2024) 45:01

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The opening of classified documents from the Soviet era has been dubbed the "archival revolution" due to its unprecedented scale, drama, and impact. With a storyteller's sensibility, in Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges (Stanford University Press, 2024), Cristina Vatulescu identifies and takes on the main ch…

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Krzysztof Bielawski, "The Destruction of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland" (Academic Studies Press, 2024) 1:00:35

1y ago1:00:35

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The Destruction of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland (Academic Studies Press, 2024) in Poland offers a comprehensive examination of the history of Jewish cemeteries in Poland, shedding light on an overlooked aspect of Holocaust history. Beginning with the settlement of Jewish communities in Poland, the book covers the establishment and subsequent destruc…

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Janusz Korczak, "How to Love a Child and Other Selected Works" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018) 1:25:50

1y ago1:25:50

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How to Love a Child and Other Selected Works (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018) is the first comprehensive collection of Korczak's works translated into English. It contains his most important pedagogical writings, journal articles, as well as private texts. Volume 2 starts with extensive excerpts from two pedagogical treatises written for young readers. …

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Rachel O'Sullivan, "Nazi Germany, Annexed Poland and Colonial Rule: Resettlement, Germanization and Population Policies in Comparative Perspective" (Bloomsbury, 2023) 1:01:05

1y ago1:01:05

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Nazi Germany, Annexed Poland and Colonial Rule: Resettlement, Germanization and Population Policies in Comparative Perspective (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines Nazi Germany's expansion, population management and establishment of a racially stratified society within the Reichsgaue (Reich Districts) of Wartheland and Danzig-West Prussia in annexed Poland …

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Nick Lloyd, "The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918" (Norton, 2024) 53:22

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Writing in the 1920s, Winston Churchill argued that the First World War on the Eastern Front was "incomparably the greatest war in history. In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes." It was, he concluded, "the most frightf…

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Waitman Wade Beorn, "Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv" (U Nebraska Press, 2024) 1:26:36

1+ y ago1:26:36

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Waitman Wade Beorn's book Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) tells for the first time the history of the Janowska camp in Lviv, Ukraine. Located in a city with the third-largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe, Janowska remains one of the least-known sites of the Holocaust, despite bei…

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David M. Driesen, "The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power" (Stanford UP, 2021) 55:18

1+ y ago55:18

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At the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked whether we have a republic or a monarchy. He replied “A Republic…if you can keep it.” In The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power (Stanford UP, 2021), David M. Driesen argues that Donald Trump's presidency challenged Americans to con…

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Jack Palmer, "Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023) 1:18:58

1+ y ago1:18:58

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Jack Palmer’s Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) invites us to reconsider a figure who sociology thought it knew well. Presenting Bauman as occupying an ‘exilic’ position as ‘in, but not of, the West’ Palmer presents a number of paths through Bauman’s sociology which speak to conte…

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What is Going on with Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe? 40:17

1+ y ago40:17

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After being the posterchild of democratization, today Central and Eastern Europe is often seen as the region of democratic backsliding. In this episode, Milada Vachudova and Tim Haughton talk with host Licia Cianetti about how ethno-populist and illiberal politicians have been reshaping the region’s politics, how people have gone to the streets to …

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Adam Zamoyski, "Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess" (William Collins, 2024) 54:33

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Princess Izabela Czartoryska was a towering figure of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century European cultural and intellectual life. Married at sixteen to a distinguished older aristocrat, she amassed learning, influence, and a role in both Polish and European statecraft through encounters with figures ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to …

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Janine P. Holc, "The Weavers of Trautenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust" (Brandeis UP, 2023) 53:47

1+ y ago53:47

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Beginning in late 1940, over three thousand Jewish girls and young women were forced from their family homes in Sosnowiec, Poland, and its surrounding towns to worksites in Germany. Believing that they were helping their families to survive, these young people were thrust into a world where they labored at textile work for twelve hours a day, lived…

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Ewa K. Bacon, "Saving Lives in Auschwitz: The Prisoners’ Hospital in Buna-Monowitz" (Purdue UP, 2017) 1:22:04

1+ y ago1:22:04

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Today I talked to Ewa Bacon about her book Saving Lives in Auschwitz: The Prisoners’ Hospital in Buna-Monowitz (Purdue UP, 2017). In a 1941 Nazi roundup of educated Poles, Stefan Budziaszek--newly graduated from medical school in Krakow--was incarcerated in the Krakow Montelupich Prison and transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Februar…

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William W. Hagen, "Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2018) 1:34:57

1+ y ago1:34:57

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Widespread anti-Jewish pogroms accompanied the rebirth of Polish statehood out of World War I and Polish-Soviet War. In Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920 (Cambridge UP, 2018), William W. Hagen offers the pogroms' first scholarly account, revealing how they served as brutal stagings by ordinary people of scenarios dramatizing popular anti-Je…

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Glenn Dynner, "The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2024) 1:13:50

1+ y ago1:13:50

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In The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2024), Glenn Dynner tells the story of an unexpected Hasidic revival in Poland between the two World Wars. In the aftermath of World War I, the Jewish mystical movement appeared to be in shambles. Hasidic leaders had dispersed, Hasidic courts lay in r…

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Judy Batalion, "The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos" (William Morrow, 2021) 44:19

1+ y ago44:19

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Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland--some still in their teens--helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. With courage, guile, and nerves of steel, these "ghetto girls" paid off Gestapo guards, hid …

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Jan Grabowski, "On Duty: The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust" (Yad Vashem, 2024) 1:06:13

1+ y ago1:06:13

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"The Polish Police, commonly called the Blue or uniformed police in order to avoid using the term “Polish,” has played a most lamentable role in the extermination of the Jews of Poland. The uniformed police has been an enthusiastic executor of all German directives regarding the Jews." -Emanuel Ringelblum, Warsaw, 1943. Shortly after the occupation…

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Adi Mahalel, "The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism" (SUNY Press, 2023) 1:10:00

1+ y ago1:10:00

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In The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism (SUNY Press, 2023), Adi Mahalel presents Yiddish and Hebrew writer I. L. Peretz (1852–1915) in a new radical light we've never seen him in before. Conceived in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the 2011/12 Occupy Wall Street movement and social protests in Israel/Palestine, an…

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Agnieszka Pasieka and Paweł Rodak, "Rethinking Modern Polish Identities: Transnational Encounters" (U Rochester Press, 2023) 59:56

1+ y ago59:56

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Anti-Semitic or philo-Semitic? Backward or modern? Locally rooted or diasporic? “Polishness” is too often flattened to an oversimplified list of either-or propositions. But a critical look at the multiple, contradictory versions of “Polishness” circulating in the modern era helps us to make sense not only of Poland’s past and present, but of a whol…

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"The US Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume IV" (Indiana UP, 2022) 1:29:24

1+ y ago1:29:24

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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume IV (Indiana UP, 2022) examines an under-researched segment of the larger Nazi incarceration system: camps and other detention facilities under the direct control of the German military, the Wehrmacht. These include prisoner of war (POW) camps (including…

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Jessica C. Robbins, "Aging Nationally in Contemporary Poland: Memory, Kinship, and Personhood" (Rutgers UP, 2020) 1:16:04

2y ago1:16:04

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How embedded are the dignity and personhood of the elderly in the collective memory of their nation? In Aging Nationally in Contemporary Poland: Memory, Kinship, and Personhood (Rutgers University Press, 2021) anthropologist Jessica C. Robbins-Panko dissects the Polish version of this story, in which the meanings and ideals both of “active aging” p…

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Maria Snegovaya, "When Left Moves Right: The Decline of the Left and the Rise of the Populist Right in Postcommunist Europe" (Oxford UP, 2024) 1:03:45

2y ago1:03:45

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In her new book, When Left Moves Right: The Decline of the Left and the Rise of the Populist Right in Postcommunist Europe (Oxford University Press, 2024), Maria Snegovaya argues that, contrary to the view that emphasizes the sociocultural aspects (xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, etc.) of the rise of the populist right, especially in postcomm…

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Why Should We Preserve Memory of the Holocaust? 44:35

2y ago44:35

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Wojtek Soczewica has led the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation since 2019, near the site of the killing fields. The Foundation aims at the preservation of the remains of the concentration and extermination camp and of all the personal items that belonged to victims and survivors. Today they serve as material witnesses of the tragic history safeguarding…

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Alexej Lochmatow, "Public Knowledge in Cold War Poland: Scholarly Battles and the Clash of Virtues, 1945–1956" (Routledge, 2023) 1:04:15

2y ago1:04:15

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In the years after World War II, Polish scholars and scientists faced a complex and deeply personal political reality, the result of a long and violent history of war and occupation combined with pressure from Stalinist Soviet Union. In Public Knowledge in Cold War Poland: Scholarly Battles and the Clash of Virtues, 1945–1956 (Routledge, 2024), Ale…

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Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa, "The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust" (Simon & Schuster, 2024) 1:14:00

2y ago1:14:00

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World War II and the Holocaust have been the subject of many remarkable stories of resistance and rescue, but The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles during the Holocaust (Simon & Schuster, 2024) is unique. It tells the previously unknown story of “Countess Janina Suchodolska,” a courageous Jewish woman who rescued…

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Sarah A. Cramsey, "Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the Ethnic Revolution in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936-1946" (Indiana UP, 2023) 55:40

2y ago55:40

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In Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the Ethnic Revolution in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936-1946 (Indiana UP, 2023), Sarah Cramsey explores how the Jewish citizens rooted in interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia became the ideal citizenry for a post–World War II Jewish state in the Middle East. She asks, how did new interpretations of Jew…

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Roman Dziarski, "How We Outwitted and Survived the Nazis: The True Story of the Holocaust Rescuers, Zofia Sterner and Her Family" (Academic Studies, 2024) 1:19:34

2y ago1:19:34

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In World War II's Poland, thirty year old Zofia Sterner and her husband Wacek refuse to be classified as Jews destined for extermination. Instead, they evade the Nazis and the Soviets in several dramatic escapes and selflessly rescue many Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto and a labor camp, later becoming active participants in the Warsaw Uprising where t…

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Serhiy Bilenky, "Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine Between Empire and Nation, 1772-1914" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023) 51:16

2y ago51:16

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When the powers of Europe were at their prime, present-day Ukraine was divided between the Austrian and Russian empires, each imposing different political, social, and cultural models on its subjects. This inevitably led to great diversity in the lives of its inhabitants, shaping modern Ukraine into the multiethnic country it is today. Making innov…

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Lenny A. Ureña Valerio, "Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920" (Ohio UP, 2019 49:44

2y ago49:44

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In Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019), Lenny Ureña Valerio offers a transnational approach to Polish-German relations and nineteenth-century colonial subjectivities. She investigates key cultural dynamics in the history of med…

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Magda Stroińska, "My Life in Propaganda: A Memoir about Language and Totalitarian Regimes" (Durvile, 2023) 1:04:55

2y ago1:04:55

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My Life in Propaganda: A Memoir about Language and Totalitarian Regimes (Durvile, 2023) is Magda Stroińska’s personal account of growing up with communist propaganda in Eastern Europe. She looks at the influence of her family history that contradicted what she was taught at school; the cognitive and emotional effects of compulsory school readings; …

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Is Poland Back on Track? The Challenges for the New Government 46:58

2y ago46:58

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In this episode of International Horizons, RBI's Director John Torpey interviews Grzegorz Ekiert, Chair of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, a propós of the recent election in Poland that installed a centrist government led by former prime minister and president of the European Council Donald Tusk. Ekiert starts by discussing t…

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The Idea of "Central Europe" from Naumann to Kundera 44:05

2y ago44:05

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Central Europe has long been infamous as a region beset by war, a place where empires clashed and world wars began. In The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe (Basic Books, 2023) Martyn Rady offers the definitive history of the region, demonstrating that Central Europe has always been more than merely the fault line between West and Ea…