David Cesarani
The Privileged Prisoner
Those Who Trespass Against Us: One Woman’s War Against the Nazis
By Countess Karolina Lanckoronska (Translated by Noel Clark)
Pimlico 341pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Countess Karolina Lanckoronska was a doughty woman whose aristocratic demeanour, intelligence and linguistic skills made her a valuable asset of the Polish resistance against both Soviet and German occupations. Between 1942 and 1945 she was in and out of Nazi prisons and concentration camps, an experience she recorded soon after her liberation. But there were no takers for her modestly termed ‘report’. It was the wrong subject at the wrong time, a casualty of post-war politics. Initially she was turned down by English publishers for being ‘too anti-Russian’. A few years later her memoir was rejected for being ‘too anti-German’.
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