Excerpt from After the War read by actress Laurel Lefkow.
After the War, a work in progress, is the story of Alexandra’s search for her mother’s identity. Maryna was fifteen when Germany occupied Poland in 1939. She was eighteen when she became a soldier with the Armia Krajowa, Poland’s volunteer Underground Army. At nineteen, she fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and at twenty, she was decorated with the Virtuti Militari, Poland’s highest medal of honor for courage. Marched out of Warsaw as a prisoner of war, she never returned to Poland. When she died in 1989, her hand was trained to a short wave radio, listening to reports of Lech Walesa and the rise of Solidarnosc. She had waited forty-four years for such an event.
Twenty years after her death, Alexandra began to search for her story. Traveling to archives and museums in Poland and across Europe, she interviewed the last remaining soldiers of the Armia Krajowa. Part detective story, part historical memoir, After the War weaves back and forth in time and over three continents to reveal a life shaped by a war that defined the 20th century and its aftermath.
Photos from Maryna’s life, spanning three continents and four decades.
