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The last in 2021 ,,Łambinowice Museum Meeting” was organized in a hybrid manner. On Wednesday evening (December 1), Maggie Brookes, author of The Prisoner’s Wife, joined us from London, and both the audience gathered in the Museum as well those who watched the event on Facebook, could be in a live discussion with her.

Dr. Renata Kobylarz-Buła, deputy director of the CMJW, welcomed the event attendees via Microsoft Teams, and reminded them about of the idea behind this series of meetings. A conversation between Dr. Anna Wickiewicz, head of the Education and Exhibition Department of the CMJW, and Dr. Maggie Brookes, novelist and the main protagonist of the event, lasted for several dozen minutes. Filip Nowicki performed the important task of the  English (and Polish) interpreter.

The conversation started with a presentation the daily life of British prisoners-of-war in Lamsdorf during the Second World War. Perhaps one of them was Corporal Bill King – a main character of the novel, who, with help of his fellow prisoners, was supposed to hide his Czech wife, Izabella, in the Lamsdorf POW camp. The plot of the novel revolves around their fate in the camp and after the war. In preparing to write the novel, Maggie Brookes collected available historical sources, visited the places in Poland and the Czech Republic where the book is set, and consulted experts, including employees of the CMJW. The collected facts and the author's imagination resulted in a book which has already been translated into 5 languages and published in 10 countries. Maggie Brookes dedicated her novel to her father, Alfred Arthur Brookes, who was held in a German prisoner of war camp in Austria during World War II.

You are invited to watch the film from the meeting, which is available here, and learn many more facts about the novel. We also recommend reading The Prisoner's Wife. You can buy it, for example, from the Wydawnictwo Kobiece website.