Each addition to the stock of published sources and original biographical sketches helps build a solid foundation for scholarship. This is especially the case when the work is in the current lingua franca, English. Untold Stories of Polish Heroes from World War II, by Alexandra Ziółkowska-Boehm, is such a collection. Eight mini-biographies with a substantive foreword by the foremost historian of the American Polonia, James Pula, a brief preface, and a highly reflective addendum on writing “creative non-fiction” provide a valuable building block for twentieth-century Polish history.
The first biography only touches on events during World War II. Ziółkowska-Boehm traces the life of the Polish diplomat Tadeusz Brzeziński (1896–1991) and, very briefly, his son, Zbigniew Brzeziński (1928–2017), President Carter's national security adviser. A person who always knew “how to give of himself, how to make permanent the fruit of his actions” (p. 22), the elder Brzeziński served as...