Irene Tomaszewski

Irene Tomaszewski, or Irena Tomaszewska, is a Polish-Canadian writer and editor.

Born in a Soviet Union gulag to Polish parents in 1940. In 1942 Tomaszewski and her mother were evacuated from the Soviet Union. After six years in an East Africa refugee camp, the family were reunited in England in 1949, and subsequently they immigrated to Canada.

Irene Tomaszewski was a founding president of the Canadian Foundation for Polish Studies. She co-authored, with Tecia Werbowski, a book Codename Żegota: Rescuing Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942-1945: The Most Dangerous Conspiracy in Wartime Europe, published by Praeger in the US in 2010, a non-fiction account of a clandestine organization in occupied Poland during WWII. The subject of her book was a secret organization, created specifically to help Jews, operating from 1942 to 1945 under the umbrella of the Government Delegate's Office of the Home Army and the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. It was the only such organization in occupied Europe during World War II. Irene Tomaszewski was the screenwriter for a documentary film based on this book and titled Żegota: The Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942-45 made in 1999. In 2014, a French translation was made available as an e-book under the title " Nom de code : Żegota - À la rescousse des Juifs en Pologne occupée 1942-1945."

Tomaszewski is also the editor and translator of ' Inside a Gestapo Prison: The Letters of Krystyna Wituska, 1942-1944 published by Wayne State University Press in 2006. An earlier Canadian edition was published in 1997.

She is the editor of cosmopolitanreview.com, a quarterly internet magazine focused on Polish subjects.

Books

• "Codename Zegota: Rescuing Jews in Occupied Polan, 1942-1945: The Most Dangerous conspiracy in Occupied Poland (Praeger 2010) ISBN 978-0-313-38391-5
• "Inside A Gestapo Prison: The Letters of Krystyna Wituska, 1942-1944" (2006 Wayne State University Press) ISBN 0-8143-3294-3
• Żegota: The Rescue of Jews in Wartime Poland (1994) ISBN 1-896881-15-7
• I’m First a Human Being: The Prison Letters of Krystyna Wituska (1997) ISBN 1-55065-095-5

See also

• Żegota
• Holocaust in Poland
• Polish government in Exile
• Zofia Kossak-Szczucka
• Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz

External links

• Excerpts from the book Żegota by Irena Tomaszewska & Tecia Werbowski (Price-Patterson Ltd.). Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 1994
• Watch Żegota documentary video clips at www.projectinposterum.org