Abstract Faustina Kowalska (1905–1938) is renowned for mystical experiences that have inspired the Divine Mercy devotion. Less appreciated is her legacy as a nun, including the unvarnished account of convent life she captured in her diary, her dreams of a new congregation, and the three distinct women's communities she helped inspire. This article details this legacy, and in the process it sheds light on the broader experience of women religious in the decades before Vatican II, a dynamic period in which women's communities were expanding rapidly and their roles in the Church and the world were being renegotiated.
Abstract Natalia Aszkenazy, appointed in October 1941 as attaché in the Soviet Union, took an unusual route to diplomatic service. She had never held a paying job and received no formal training. After coming to the United States as a twenty-five-year-old tourist just before the outbreak of World War II, she served as a volunteer for the Red Cross in New York and later as an honorary member of the Polish Embassy's press and public relations section under career diplomat Jan Drohojowski, whom she eventually married. Her contacts with Polish-American individuals and organizations were expected to facilitate the flow of relief to an estimated 1.5 million Polish refugees scattered throughout the Soviet Union. By the time she arrived in March 1942 at Kuibyshev, the relocated seat of government, a relief program was well underway. She worked first as Ambassador Stanisław Kot's secretary, then in the welfare section, and finally as press attaché before the Soviet Union severed diplomatic relations in April 1943. She returned to the United States to conduct a five-month lecture tour in early 1944. Her appointment made Poland the seventh nation to admit women into diplomatic service. And she helped pioneer the role of diplomat/propagandist, a relatively new element in the conduct of foreign relations that after the war came to be called public diplomacy.
Abstract This article examines the marginalization of the Polish concentration camp Bereza Kartuska (1934–1939) within Polish political and academic discourse. By incorporating previously unstudied oral testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive, along with two unpublished memoirs, the article offers a more accurate portrayal of the camp to argue that Bereza Kartuska should rightfully be classified as a “concentration camp,” a designation that has been contested in prior scholarship. This argument rests not only on records of the prisoners’ treatment, but on an examination of the glorification of Marshal Józef Piłsudski (under whose leadership the camp was founded) in both academic and political narratives, proposing that this cult of personality may have contributed to the continued mislabeling of Bereza Kartuska.
Abstract Given the general instability of societal norms in Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's dramatic output, the concept of crime may seem inadequate for capturing the excessive violence underwriting these works. However, the obsessiveness with which the playwright invokes the theme of criminality warrants a closer look at the “vocational” criminals that populate his plays. This essay examines these ambiguous figures, focusing on Witkiewicz's Szalona lokomotywa [The crazy locomotive, 1923, 1962], where “crime for crime's sake” receives the most extensive treatment. My study unfolds in three stages. First, I trace the criminal motif in the broader context of violence that characterizes Witkacy's dramas, highlighting crime's transgressive potential but also its association with existential defeat. Second, I examine the “committed” criminal as he emerges in later plays, suggesting that existing scholarly typologies have largely overlooked this figure's ambivalent complexity, especially when it comes to its role in the author's catastrophic historiosophy. To illustrate my point, the final section of the article demonstrates how the criminal plot of The Crazy Locomotive subverts and revises the basic tenets of Witkacy's familiar outlook on modernity.
