Author: myPOLcast

POLcast is an English language podcast, a colourful audio magazine delivered directly to your smartphone, computer or tablet. POLcast is created for everybody interested in Poland. If you have a Polish customer, colleague, girlfriend or grandmother - you will hear something helping you to enrich these relations. Each episode brings you interesting interviews, historical facts, trivia and more.

We are very happy that in just 1.5 years since we started, we have received three awards for POLcast. It feels really great to see that our work is appreciated and considered valuable by our professional circles. The most recent award, which we had the honour of accepting at a beautiful gala, was the Canadian Ethnic Media Association’s award in its new category of Podcasting. Previously, Margaret P. Bonikowska received the CEMA Award for Journalistic Excellence in the category of PRINT for “Gazeta” at CEMA’s 25th anniversary gala in 2003. The Canadian Ethnic Media Association is comprised of professionals engaged in print,…

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This story is featured in Episode 48 People like and need legends and heroes.  All Canadians know the story of Grey Owl, a famous author, lecturer, and one of the “most effective advocates of the wilderness”, who claimed that he was a native Canadian. This proved not to be the case after his death. Poland has (or had?) its own “Indian”, an iconic writer, storyteller, media personality, a true environmentalist and a pioneer of this attitude towards nature in Poland. Sat Okh, Long Feather (c. 1920 – July 3, 2003), was supposedly born to a Polish woman and a native…

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This story is featured in Episode 48 At the annual Polish Festival in Toronto, among stands with Polish beer and pierogies, folk group shows and other such proverbially Polish attractions, I saw something really interesting – a few young guys with visibly used suitcases under the banner “Not just tourists” talking to passersby with lots of enthusiasm. I stopped to enquire and this is how I met Krishna Udaiwal and then Jeremy Landry, two passionate volunteers. So this is one of the two Polish connections – the Little Poland, where the festival was held, and this is why we are…

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This story is featured in Episode 48 Quo Vadis in Latin means “where are you going?” It is the title of a 1896 iconic historical novel by one of the most famous Polish writers Henryk Sienkiewicz, which contributed to his Nobel Prize for literature in 1905. Young Polish Canadians have adopted this phrase as the title of their conferences. There have been already 12 Quo Vadis conferences, the latest one in Burlington outside Toronto on October 13 and 14, 2017. It was a chance for a great group of Polish Canadian leaders from all over Canada to get together, network,…

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In this episode you will hear: Interviews: • Poppies on Canadian graves in Poland Nancy Campbell – a Canadian teacher (an great fan of Poland) who initiated an international collaboration between an elementary school in Poland and an organization out of Edmonton called No Stone Left Alone. She recently visited Krakow to attend an event – the result of this unique partnership between Poland and Canada • A child’s journey from the Arctic to the Equator – Part 2 Irene Tomaszewski – an Ottawa-based writer and editor, talks about the unbelievable story of thousands of Polish children (herself included) traveling from Siberia via Iran and…

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This story is featured in Episode 47 This is a continuation of the story we started in Episode 46. In order to answer the quesion: What do Poles have to do with Iran, India and Africa – when and how did they find themselves there?,  POLcast talked with a person who went through this experience – Irene Tomaszewski from Ottawa, whom POLcast listeners know from our previous conversation about Cosmopolitan Review (CR) online magazine in Episode 6. Irene Tomaszewski is a writer and editor of CR. She is the co-author, with Tecia Werbowski, of “Codename Żegota: The Most Dangerous Conspiracy in Occupied…

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This story is featured in Episode 47 Slawomir Grunberg is an Emmy-winning director, documentary producer and superb cinematographer, educated in Poland at the renowned Lodz Polish Film School, working in the US since 1981, author of dozens of award-winning films. One of his documentaries is “The Red Button”, a film about a man who saved the world. POLcast recorded the interview with Slawomir Grunberg on September 26, 2017. Exactly 34 years before, on this very day – September 26, 1983, in Serpukhov-15, a secret bunker in the Soviet Union, Stanislaw Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Union’s Air Defense Forces, was…

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In this episode you will hear: Interviews: • An eye-opening experience of the world of the blind Monika Dybiel – a blind guide from Warsaw’s “Invisible Exhibition” talks about this special place and the lives of people who are blind and visually impaired • A child’s journey from the Arctic to the Equator – Part 1 Irene Tomaszewski – an Ottawa-based writer and editor, talks about the unbelievable story of thousands of Polish children (herself included) traveling from Siberia via Iran and India to Africa during WWII. Part 1 focuses on the Iran and India chapter. •  “Creative” is the word Filip Terlecki – a…

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This story is featured in Episode 46 FILIP TERLECKI Filip Terlecki is the former Head of Research for the National Geographic Channel in Canada and his TV experience includes work for Alliance Atlantis, Canwest and Shaw Media on channels such as History Television, IFC and Mystery. He founded The Creators Bureau, a Toronto based multi-platform production company, which he runs with his wife Ursula. The Creators Bureau’s mission is to turn innovative ideas into compelling motion pictures. Fueled by creativity, imagination and playfulness the company produce high-quality original content for a multitude of platforms including mobile, online, social media and TV. They work with companies,…

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This story is featured in Episode 46 A lot of Poland’s history is virtually unknown to others. Still too few people know about the fate of over a million Poles deported in cattle trains to Soviet gulag where they were forced to do slave work in inhumane conditions and thousands of them perished. We talked about it in some of our POLcast interviews: Living in a family haunted by trauma (Episode 23) The untold story – Siberian experience (Episode 24) But what do Poles have to do with Iran, India and Africa – when and how did they find themselves…

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