Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski

Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski (born 3 September 1921 in Lwów, Poland) is a Polish–, Belgian– and American–educated inventor and civil and industrial engineer with 50 patents to his credit. He is also a writer on Polish and European history, author of historical atlases, and lexicographer.

Dictionaries that Pogonowski has compiled include the 1990 Polish-English, English-Polish Standard Dictionary, reprinted in 1993, 1994 and 1997.

Early life

Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski was born on 3 September 1921 in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) to Jerzy Pogonowski, Ph.D., J.D., and Wanda Żygulska-Pogonowska, a painter and sculptor. His family bears the hereditary Polish Ogończyk coat-of-arms.

After the outbreak of World War II, in December 1939, aged 18, Pogonowski left Warsaw, Poland, with the intent of joining the Polish Armed Forces in the West. He was arrested at Dukla by Ukrainians in the service of the German Gestapo, and sent successively to German concentration camps at Barwinek, Krosno, Jasło, Tarnów, Auschwitz (Oświęcim) and, in 1940, Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen.

On 19 April 1945 he was sent on the Brandenburg Death March from Sachsenhausen. Evading the gunfire of SS guards, he arrived at Schwerin and freedom on 2 May 1945.

Pogonowski summarizes his horrific experiences at German concentration camps in a three-page article in Richard C. Lukas' Out of the Inferno, pp. 139–42.

In September 1945 Pogonowski arrived in Brussels, Belgium. He matriculated at the Catholic University: Institute Superieur de Commerce, St. Ignace, in Antwerp.

In summer 1946 he arrived in Venezuela, where he worked at the engineering office of Texas Petroleum Corporation.

In fall 1950 Pogonowski started civil engineering studies at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee. In 1953-55 he taught descriptive geometry there.

In 1954 he graduated in civil engineering at the top of his class and was inducted into the honorary societies: Tau Beta Pi (general engineering), Phi Kappa Phi (academic society equivalent to Phi Beta Kappa), Pi Mu (mechanical engineering), and Chi Epsilon (civil engineering ). In 1955 he graduated with an M.S. degree in industrial engineering.

In 1955 he began working for Shell Oil Company in New Orleans. After a year of managerial training, he was assigned to design marine structures for drilling and production of petroleum.

In 1960 he accepted a position at Texaco Research and Development in Houston, Texas, as a project engineer.

Pogonowski has authored 50 American and foreign patents on marine structures for the petroleum industry.

Historian

Pogonowski has published an illustrated history of Poland (2000), historical atlases of Poland, and a Polish heraldry (2002) which was reviewed in The Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 54, no. 1 (September 2010), by Professor Tny H. Lin of the University of California, Berkeley, who concluded that "this book makes a strong case for anyone that has doubts about Poland's significance in Europe."

Since the mid-1980s Pogonowski has made historical studies of Polish Jewry uniquely from a Polish perspective, a rarity in American scholarship which — as noted by University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee history Professor M.K. Dziewanowski — "has never been attempted" before.

Over time, Pogonowski has become critical of Jews who follow the Talmudic teaching that the Ten Commandments are not to be applied to Gentiles, as explained by the late Professor Israel Shahak of Jerusalem. Pogonowski has also taken issue with such bizarre statements as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s that “Jews rule America, and Americans know it.” Pogonowski has criticized the treatment of Palestinians by the Israelis, as well as those Jews who hold the Talmud-inspired belief that they are destined to rule the world, with the assistance of U.S. foreign policy.

He has published an article on "The Rise and Fall of the Polish Commonwealth: A Quest for a Representative Government in Central and Eastern Europe in the 14th to 18th Centuries."

He has begun work on a Tabular History of Poland.

Journalist

Pogonowski's work in journalism includes broadcasts for the Polish Radio Maryja and columns for its sister publication, Nasz Dziennik (Our Daily). In addition, he publishes columns in the Polish-American biweekly, Gwiazda Polarna.

Lexicographer

Pogonowski has compiled several Polish-English, English-Polish dictionaries which have appeared since 1981. In this field, his crowning achievement has been the Unabridged Polish-English Dictionary, 3 volumes, New York, Hippocrene Books, 1997 (about 100,000 entries). His Polish-English, English-Polish Standard Dictionary was published in 1985 and has since been reprinted in 1993, 1994 and 1997. Over 150,000 copies of Pogonowski's dictionaries have been sold in the U.S. and in Europe.

Publications

Dictionaries

• Practical Polish-English Dictionary, Hippocrene Books, 1981.
• Polish-English, English-Polish Standard Dictionary, Hippocrene Books, 1985 .
• Compact Polish-English Dictionary, Hippocrene Books, 1985.
• Polish Phrasebook and Dictionary: Complete Phonetics for English Speakers, 103 pp., 1991.
• Unabridged Polish-English Dictionary, 3 volumes, New York, Hippocrene Books, 1997 .

History

• Poland: A Historical Atlas, revised edition, New York, Hippocrene Books, 1989.
• The Jews in Poland: A Documentary History; the Rise of [the] Jews as a Nation from Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel, New York, Hippocrene Books, 1993.
• Świat po amerykańsku, Fundacja 'Nasza Przyszłość', 2004.
• Heraldyka – Heraldry, CD-ROM, published by Juliusz Ostrowski, 2002.
• Poland: An Illustrated History, Hippocrene Books, 2000 (recommended by Norman Davies and Zbigniew Brzeziński).
• Jews in Poland: A Documentary History, New York, Hippocrene Books, 1998.
• Historyczny Atlas Polski (A Historical Atlas of Poland), Wydawnictwo Baran i Suszczyński, 1995.
• Poland: A Historical Atlas, New York, Hippocrene Books, 1987.
• Hegemonia – On US Foreign Policy, Poznań, WERS, 2008.
• The First Democracy in Modern Europe: Million Free Citizens in Poland during the Renaissance, 2010 (E-Book).

See also

• List of lexicographers
• List of Poles

External links

• Richard C. Lukas, Out of the Inferno, pp. 139–42. University Press of Kentucky, ISBN 0813116929
• Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski's website.