Word: silesia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tile manufacturer, Schweiker grew up in the tiny southeastern Pennsylvania town of Worcester. His family is Pennsylvania Dutch and belongs to the small (2,600 members) Central Schwenkfelder Church, a Protestant sect with origins in Silesia. At 17, he enlisted in the Navy and served on the carrier Tarawa in World War II, then returned to Pennsylvania. After two years at Slippery Rock State College, he transferred to Penn State, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He joined his father's business, eventually becoming vice president for sales...
JUST AFTER the fall of France in 1940, the Germans seized composer Olivier Messaien and took him to a concentration camp in desolate Silesia. Confined in Stalag VIII, undernourished and brutalized, he created perhaps his greatest piece the Quartet for the End of Time. He wrote it for the few available musicians and with them performed it there in the barracks...
...died when Gierek was four, he worked in French and Belgian coal mines from the age of 13 until his early 30s. He returned to Poland after World War II, where he quickly became active in the party. In 1957 he was named first secretary of the party in Silesia, where he gained a reputation for protecting the interests of miners and other industrial laborers. When worker unrest threatened to wreck Communist rule in 1970, Gierek, who clearly spoke a common language with workers, was a logical choice to succeed Wladyslaw Gomulka and save the tottering party...
Secret Protocol. The problem of Poland's ethnic Germans dates from 1945, when Silesia, East Brandenburg, Pomerania and East Prussia, the former German provinces east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, were ceded to Poland at the Potsdam Conference. Some 9,575,000 Germans lived in the four provinces then; 7,330,000 have since left. In December, when West Germany recognized the Oder-Neisse boundary in the Bonn-Warsaw Treaty, a secret protocol paved the way for the remaining Germans to leave...
Like a chess player who tries to make three moves simultaneously, Gierek is attempting to assemble an administrative team, establish a basis of public trust and tackle the economy's problems-all at once. A trained engineer who made Silesia's coal miners the envy of Poland for their superior wages and modern equipment, Gierek is filling some important government posts with fellow Silesians. To establish contact with the people, he frequently visits factories and speaks on TV and radio. He has fired the country's trade union boss and the Szczecin party chief. Well aware that...