Читать книгу Nine Lives - Waldemar Lotnik - Страница 3

It is extremely pleasing to both of us that more than a dozen years after print publication on the sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, Nine Lives is still finding readers around the world. The book quickly established itself on university reading lists in the USA as a unique personal testimony to a tragic and little known Eastern Front sideshow. It continues as well to be recommended by word of mouth and bought by individuals. On the other hand, interest in both Poland and the Ukraine has been slight. The Polish-Ukrainian massacres appear to be a topic which remains difficult to discuss in both countries. There have been no translations of Nine Lives. For this electronic edition we have corrected a few minor errors and inconsistencies which somehow crept into the original book and we thank readers (in particular Richard Tyndorf from Canada) for pointing some of these out to us. Nothing else has been changed. A couple of additions could be made to the list of selected reading, however. The critical material in English on the conflict is still sparse but lately Timothy Snyder has made the subject his own, first in The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (2003), which has a chapter on the ethnic cleansings in the region, and more recently in the best-selling Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010). Snyder gives more context than we were able to but does not attempt to count the victims. What is clear from his account is that President Kravchuk’s figure of a total of half a million Polish dead, which is quoted in the ‘Postscript, 1989-92’ to the ‘Chronology of Polish History, 1918-1945’, is an exaggeration. The figure seems more likely to have been around one fifth of that – see Halik Kochanksi (The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second War (2012).

For the ease of the Anglophone reader, we have left off the diacritics from Polish names for people and places.

May 2013