Can anyone recommend any good books/reading material on the Polish Urkas?

Adrjan

13 Apr 2014 / #1

I have a question to all the historians on here. Does anyone know any good articles or books about the Polish urkas or criminals and butchers of Ukrainians (like in kresy areas where both sides just killed one another) or others who somehow ended up in the Soviet gulags? There is a lot of work done on Polish intellectual and important people who somehow survived or escaped from the camps but not much on the undesirables of Polish society (the people that even Poland post war didn't want or imprisoned on a regular basis). Anyone know of any good works on the Polish urkas or grypse during the soviet era particularly during ww2 or just post war? It seems because they were generally uneducated there don't appear to be much first hand accounts or written works from them.

BTW, a quick google search doesn't reveal much except for this:
https://books.google.pl/books?id=jhkZIrGidWoC&pg=PA175&lpg=PA175&dq=poli+sh+urkas&source=bl&ots=s-i_vx-Qt8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=YuFKU7OgIcup8QHh94GAAQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=poli%20sh%20urkas&f=false

There is also a good book on a Pole who joined the urkas called Without Vodka: Adventures in wartime Russia from Topolski. But besides this I haven't found any actually pure Polish urea gangs or any Poles who were urkas before they even went into the Soviet gulag system.

Looker - | 1129

3 Apr 2015 / #2

According to the Polish wiki page about Urka, the Urkas group has been described by Gustaw Herling Grudzinski in the novel "A World Apart":

A World Apart: The Journal of a Gulag Survivor (Polish: Inny świat: zapiski sowieckie)[1] is a memoir written by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, combining various literary genres: novel, essay, psychological portrait, as well as sociological and political dissertation. It was first published in 1951 in London in the English translation by Andrzej Ciołkosz.[2] In the Polish language, the book was first published in London in 1953, then in Poland by the underground press in 1980, and officially in 1988.

/wiki/A_World_Apart_%28book%29