Anna Swir lived from 1909 to 1984, a time period that saw a multitude of changes in the country of Poland. The dominant power in eastern Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Poland did not even exist as a separate country when Swir was born. From 1772 to 1918, the Polish territory was divided among Russia, Austria, and Prussia. However, at the end of World War I, the state of Poland was restored as a consequence of the dissolution of the Russian, Austrian, and German empires. Heavily dependent on agriculture, the Polish economy was reformed and modernized in the 1920s, but suffered from the Great Depression of the 1930s along with the rest of the world. A leader of the Polish workers' movement, Jozef Pilsudski, gained control of the government in 1926 and stayed in power until his death in 1935. The military regime that followed was ineffectual and...