Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski


Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski was a Polish-born polymath and inventor with 50 patents to his credit. He was a civil and industrial engineer by profession, educated in Poland, Belgium, and the United States. He was also a writer on Polish and European history, author of historical atlases, and a lexicographer.

Life

Pogonowski was born in Lwów, Poland. After the invasion of Poland in World War II, in December 1939 Pogonowski, aged 18, left Warsaw with the intent of joining the Polish Armed Forces in the West. He was arrested in Dukla by the German authorities on suspicion of aiming to join the resistance. He was moved between prisons and camps for five years thereafter. Interned at the Krosno, Jasło, and Tarnów prisons among others, he was sent with 500 prisoners to Auschwitz, and from there, several months later, to Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen. He survived the camps and was liberated on 2 May 1945. Pogonowski summarized his horrific experiences at the German concentration camps in a three-page article popularized in Richard C. Lukas' Out of the Inferno. In 1954 he graduated in Civil Engineering at the Catholic University: Institute Superieur de Commerce in Antwerp. He moved to the United States and in the following years worked as project engineer in the oil industry.

Historian and lexicographer

Pogonowski published an illustrated history of Poland, historical atlases and a work on Polish heraldry.
Pogonowski's Jews in Poland was praised by M.K. Dziewanowski, who called the book a "pioneering attempt 'encompass' Jews within the Polish discourse, a rarity in American scholarship and in the discourse about Jews." He was criticized by Piotr Wrobel and Joanna Michlic, who believes him to represent the ethnonationalist trend in historiography.
Pogonowski compiled several Polish-English, English-Polish dictionaries which have appeared since 1981, including his Unabridged Polish-English Dictionary and the Polish-English, English-Polish Standard Dictionary.
His journalistic work includes broadcasts for the Polish far-right Radio Maryja and columns for its sister publication, Nasz Dziennik. He has also written columns in the Polish-American biweekly, Gwiazda Polarna.

Publications

Dictionaries