Free Republic

Two people in Poland say they have found a Nazi German train cloaked in mystery since it was rumoured to have gone missing near the end of World War Two while carrying away gems and guns ahead of advancing Soviet Red Army forces. Local authorities in Poland’s southwestern district of Walbrzych said they had been contacted by a law firm representing a Pole and a German who said they had located the train and were seeking 10 percent of the value of the findings. “Lawyers, the army, the police and the fire brigade are dealing with this,” Marika Tokarska, an...

Toshiba Corp. plans to build a liquid crystal display television plant in Poland to boost production of large screen LCD television sets for the European market, company sources said Sunday. Toshiba, which is now negotiating with the Polish government to conclude a deal for the plant construction, will invest about 5 billion yen to build the facility in the southwestern Polish city of Wroclaw to launch the production of 32-inch and larger LCD television sets at the plant in 2007, the source said.

A collection of letters written by popes and kings some 700 years ago will be returned to Poland's national archives after a man in Milwaukee found them among the belongings of his father, a World War II veteran. The letters, some of which were displayed at a news conference Thursday, are remarkably preserved, the gracefully flowing letters still legible on the vellum, or animal skin, on which they were written. The 17 letters date back as far as 1256 and primarily record real-estate transactions, said Wanda Zemler-Cizewski, the Marquette University theology professor who authenticated them in 2003. The documents were...

The shrill, thin whistle of the train; the rattling wooden boxcars filled with moaning, miserable people; the tracks leading from the West and ending in a single track entering into the horror of Birkenau are memories emblazoned into the collective memory of the civilized world. I was one of the lucky ones to have escaped all that, and now I was retracing a train voyage in the opposite direction: from Krakow through Silesia to Wroclaw (long known by its German name, Breslau), through what was East Germany, into Berlin and Potsdam, ending in Munich. The journey of a group of...

"You forgot about Poland!" Europe is seen as being the fast growing market for LCD TVs through at least the end of the decade. To help satisfy the thirst for LCD panels, 3M is building a new manufacturing facility in Poland to produce LCD optical film: 'We are building the plant in Wroclaw to be near our customers, such as L.G. Philips LCD, to better serve them and to better serve the largest LCD-TV market in the world,' said Andy Wong, division vice president, 3M Optical Systems Division. This investment is part of our ongoing commitment to meet the needs...

The marked differences in economic development of the individual Polish voivodships will not fade in the next four years, on the contrary, the gaps between the most and least rapidly developing regions are to widen. The Dolnoslaskie voivodship (Lower Silesia) has the best prospects for the future, thanks to foreign investments in the manufacturing sector. December 19, 2005 -- The marked differences in economic development of the individual Polish voivodships will not fade in the next four years, on the contrary, the gaps between the most and least rapidly developing regions are to widen. The Dolnoslaskie voivodship has the best...

Travels With Lonely Planet: Exploring the riches of Wroclaw Poland's Silesian state capital straddles 12 distinct islands and retains a medieval charm By Tom Parkinson Eastern Europe is opening up at a dizzying pace, and nowhere more so than Poland. Ever since the fall of communism in 1989, the country has been modernizing rapidly, and in 2004 it finally joined the European Union, cementing its crucial position at the corner of the continent. Around the same time, the budget-airline boom reached the major Polish cities, connecting them to London and a host of other European airports at laughably low prices....