Bøker av Peter Zablocki

The mysterious 1943 plane crash that killed Polish Prime Minister General Wladyslaw Sikorski shifted European alliances, strained Polish-Soviet relations, and led to Poland's marginalization and Soviet domination until 1990.The plane crash at the height of the Second World War which claimed the life of the Polish Prime Minister, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, ranks among the most enduring mysteries of the conflict. It was a death that shifted European alliances and loyalties, brought Stalin into the Anglo-American camp, and sealed Poland's fate for the remainder of the twentieth century.Poland and the Soviet Union's historically precarious relationship had taken an even darker turn in September 1939 when the Third Reich's Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union's Josef Stalin divided the nation and forced its government to relocate first to France and then to Britain in 1940.Sikorski's Polish government-in-exile established a military, political, and personal relationship with Winston Churchill's government, only to see it fractured by the United States' entrance into the war and the Western Allies' courtship of Stalin following Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union.The Allies overall support of Stalin's denials following the 1943 discovery of 20,000 bodies of Polish officers murdered and buried by the Soviets in Katyn Forest only made matters worse. Sikorski's open protests against describing the Soviet dictator as a benevolent 'Uncle Joe' made him publicly and privately 'difficult' to the new Anglo-American-Soviet coalition.As per reports of the British and Polish intelligence services, seemingly not doing enough to stand up to the Soviets had also strained Sikorski's relationship with different Polish government factions.Leaving from a layover stop at Gibraltar on 4 July 1943, having visited Polish Army units in Iran, Sikorski's RAF Liberator, AL523, crashed into the sea just sixteen seconds into its flight. while Stalin privately blamed Churchill, the Germans were more public in accusing the British. Others pointed to the Soviets or even the Poles.A British Court of Inquiry convened in 1943 presented an inconclusive report on the crash's cause or foul play and locked up most of its files until 2043. Lacking a respected leader, Poland fell out of favour with the Allies, who allowed Stalin to redraw the Polish borders and establish a pro-communist puppet state in Poland until 1990.Not only exploring what happened on that fateful day in 1943, but also the events leading up to it and those that followed, The Death of General Sikorski is more of a political thriller than a conspiracy book, telling an often complex, and enthralling story of a tragedy within a tragedy - that of a man and his nation.

A Fabulous Fable of the Supernatural Kind The saga of the Morristown ghost has been told around campfires and dinner tables in Morris County for generations. Local legend claimed British Loyalists secretly buried stolen Patriot treasure on Schooley Mountain as they fled the oncoming forces of George Washington during the Revolutionary War. Years later in 1788, a former school teacher from Connecticut, Ransford Rodgers, convinced local prominent Morristown families that a ghost was protecting the true location of the treasure and he alone could exercise it. Little did the victims know, Rodgers was perpetuating an elaborate hoax and eventually extorted large sums of money from the embarrassed local elite. The tale has been recounted in various sensational pamphlets and publications ever since, leaving behind a mystery of what is true or myth. Author Peter Zablocki separates fact from fiction in the story of the great Morristown ghost hoax.

A single bullet serves as the catalyst for each of the stories in this book. We may or may not know who fired each bullet. Nonetheless, we know each bullet's end point and, more crucially, the effects they had on America's trajectory: the wars, social movements, and political and economic paradigm shifts.

Denville in the 1950s was an idyllic place to live, yet a dark chapter in the era's history has remained uncovered. During the summer of 1953, a wealthy traveler with a secret rap sheet as a convicted sex offender arrived in town to continue his misdeeds. A group of thirteen local boys ranging in age from fourteen to twenty-two took it upon themselves to teach the man a lesson and drive him out of town. What resulted was his brutal death and the largest number of people ever indicted for murder in the nation at the time. The harrowing trial and its aftermath revealed a town forced to grapple with how to protect its youth and come to terms with the gruesome incident. Local historian Peter Zablocki covers the crime and a small town's path to redemption.