Beyond The Uprising

Cynthia Grant Bowman is a professor of law at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York. She met the subject of this biography, Maria Chudzinski, while teaching at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, where Maria worked in the international section of the law library. Maria was born in Poland before the German invasion and the Second World War and joined the underground resistance, or Home Army, as a teenager. She fought during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and was taken prisoner by the Germans when the city fell. In 1945 Maria moved to England, where she was a member of the Polish Air Force, ultimately settling in Chicago in 1952. She has been very active in the Polish-American community in Chicago since that time. Intrigued by Maria’s past, Professor Bowman asked her to tell her story. This book is the result.