An analysis of one of the manuscript volumes held in the Jagiellonian Library has revealed the existence of a previously unknown letter dating from the late fourteenth century. The document concerns the controversial conduct of a clergyman from the parish of Korczew in the region of Sieradz. The local parish priest, Stanisław, was allegedly responsible for a terrible crime for which he never faced adequate punishment. Outraged, the heirs from Rzechta decided to write a letter – most likely addressed to Bodzanta of Kosowice, the then Archbishop of Gniezno – in an effort to bring the matter to a definitive resolution. The article presents an edition of the newly discovered source as well as the historical context surrounding the events it describes.

The work presents a document regulating fire protection (fire prevention and fire suppression) in the 17th century. It is the first presentation to contemporary readers. It discusses provisions concerning fire prevention, organization of fire extinguishing, equipping the city with fire tools, fire water supply and the actions of the city council after a fire.

Russian and Soviet presence in the Danube Delta can be considered from many angles. This article focuses on two of them. The first concerns physical access to the river, which allows for the status of a riverside state and thus makes it possible to directly influence the fate, if not of the entire river, then of one’s own section. The second relates to Russia’s position in the river commissions operating on the Danube since 1856 when the river was recognised as an international waterway. Russia’s physical and formal legal presence in the Danube Delta lasted, with minor interruptions, for more than two hundred years. During this period, Russia played an active role in shaping the political map of the region, contributing to the creation of new states and the delineation of their borders while trying to promote its raison d’etre in the region. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the ongoing Russo‑Ukrainian war have called the Russian presence in the Danube Delta into question. The aim of this article is to identify the key stages of Russian expansion along the Lower Danube.

This article examines the activities of Walenty Fojkis (1895–1950) in the first term of the Silesian Parliament. Drawing on an analysis of parliamentary transcripts, archival documents, and supplementary press research, it identifies the main areas of Fojkis’s parliamentary engagement and situates him within the broader political landscape of the assembly. The article also attempts to reconstruct his views on various aspects of public life. It is part of a series presenting the entirety of Fojkis’s public activity during the interwar period.

The subject of the paper is the religious Islamic revival in Soviet Kazakhstan at the end of World War II and just after the war, understood as the limited return of religious practices to the public space marked by an effort to officially register religious communities. Two types of such revival could be observed in Kazakhstan: one on the wave of patriotic intensification of the “Great Patriotic War” the impetus for the other was the tragedy of deportation and the need to adapt to new conditions. The first type was characterized by adaptation with the Soviet system and the in-termingling of religious elements to Soviet war mythology. The second type, on the other hand, meant long years of functioning in a religious underground unrecognized by official Soviet Islamic structures.

The aim of the article was to present various aid and political activities of Polish di‑ plomacy for the Warsaw insurgents in the first month of fighting against the German occupier, in August 1944, based on telegrams of the Polish Legation in Bern, Switzerland. The topic was de‑ veloped based on encrypted telegrams, including secret ones exchanged between the Polish Lega‑ tion in Bern, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in London and other foreign missions. Polish diplomats provided all possible assistance to the Warsaw insurgents in the first month of their fight against the German occupier, as well as to the entire society in Warsaw, in various ways. If it were not for the combined forces of Polish diplomacy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the government and its agencies, there might have been more victims among the participants and witnesses of the Warsaw Uprising.

In April 1944, Soviet forces occupied Bukovina. Partisans were sent to areas designated by the Soviet Military Command to carry out diversionary activities. As a result, the inhabitants of Bukovina experienced hunger, destruction of crops, and forced labor in the construction of trenches for the Soviet army. Soviet civil authorities were restored in every community. Newly appointed guards relayed all orders to the inhabitants and took part in requisitions, arrests, and deportations. One of the first actions of the new administration was to conduct a census, which was necessary to introduce a tax system. Taxes were then set at between 50 and 500 rubles per resident, depending on their wealth. In addition, the local population was subject to taxes in kind (grain, livestock, wool, and dairy products). The Soviets saw the annexation of northern Bukovina as the unification of the great Ukrainian nation into a single Soviet state undergoing continuous socialist development.

The Jewish minority in the Bialystok province, which numbered 200,000 before the outbreak of World War II, had shrunk to about a thousand people living in hiding as a result of the genocide by 1944. The defeat of the Germans by the Red Army meant real liberation for them, and they readily accepted the new political reality. The memoirs of survivors reveal the experience of coming out of hiding, confronting the effects of the war, searching for family and trying to return to normalcy. This involved experiencing conflicting emotions – joy and despair, disappointment and hope, but in 1944 Jews as a collective showed faith in the possibility of rebuilding their lives on the spot. Soon, however, bitterness and fear began to dominate, prompting migration to other parts of Poland and abroad.

This article is devoted to the participation of the French Land Army, more precisely the 1st French Army “Rhine and Danube” and the 2nd Armored Division, in the German cam-paign in the spring of 1945. It outlines the reasons and actions that led to this participation, as well as the course of the fighting itself, which contributed to giving France an occupation zone in Germany and Austria.

During World War II, various groups of the Czechoslovak foreign or home resistance created their own plans and visions for the post‑war period. While for the Czechoslovak democratic exile in the West, as well as for the democratic resistance in Slovakia, the priority was the restoration of a democratic Czechoslovakia, for the Czech and Slovak communists it was mainly the reconstruction of a Czechoslovak statehood that would be as closely linked as possible to the Soviet Union and in which the communists would have a strong governmental position. On the other hand, however, there was also a significant contradiction between the Czech exile and the domestic Slovak resistance in reference to the question of the post‑war position of Slovakia in a restored Czechoslovakia. On this issue, the Slovak democrats were closer to the Czech communists who, unlike Beneš and his entourage, were willing to give them the desired federation. This, in addition to the idea of the restoration of a democratic Czechoslovakia, also formed the basis for the resistance cooperation between Slovak communists and democrats. After the war, however, shortly after the front had crossed into the newly liberated territory of Slovakia, a new post‑war reality based on the presence of Soviet military and intelligence agencies addressed the previous plans of the resistance. They were forcing the communists close to them, which resulted in the dominance of the communists in the liberated territory. However, this was relatively ably seconded by the Slovak democrats, especially when the Soviet authorities left the territory with the advancing front.

After the split between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, Czechoslovak communist authorities under Soviet pressure started persecutions against alleged Yugoslavian agents, resulting in multiple arrests and fabricated political trials. Some of them ended with death sentences. The witch hunt was interrupted in 1955 after the normalization of relations between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

An archival and bibliographic enquiry reveals numerous similarities and interesting dif-ferences in the public activities of Edward Ochab and Aleksander Zawadzki. One of the similarities is, of course, the ‘exile’ after the Second World War of both these activists originating from the milieu of Polish communists in the USSR precisely to Katowice. The motif of Zawadzki’s and Ochab’s stay in the Silesian Voivodeship, which lasted until 1948, plays the role of a kind of buckle binding the issues analysed in the problem‑chronological order. The text first describes the main events in the lives of these two experienced communists. Then the role they played in the period of the so‑called ‘Polska Lubelska’ is analysed.

The article explores the cultural life of the city during a period of shifting political re-alities in the Polish People’s Republic (PRL). Art and culture were intended to serve as tools of propaganda, expressing new values and conforming to ideological demands. This influence extended to the aesthetics of artistic expression as well as the themes of theatrical and literary events. The political thaw brought a partial relaxation of ideological control, allowing for greater diversity in cultural activities. In Dąbrowa Górnicza, this shift enabled initiatives that were more open to contemporary artistic trends, fostering creative freedom and enriching the local cultural landscape.

The reviewed work by the Slovak author concerns the dialectal languages of the Polish-Czech‑Slovak border region of Upper Kysuce, more commonly known in Poland as the Čadca Land. The work is the result of multi‑year field research, which, according to the author, confirms the earlier findings of Slovak dialectologists that those dialects have historical Polish sources, but cur-rently belong to the Slovak language. Polish dialectologists do not agree with this interpretation, and one may wonder whether their lack of reaction to the discussed work is coincidental. Therefore, this publication may also be of interest to historians, because it fits into the long‑standing Polish‑Slovak, often emotional, discourse on the history and present of the borderland. The author of the review conducts his considerations from this angle.