When World War II ended in 1945, Poland became the "country on roller skates," shoved 125 miles to the west by Joseph Stalin. Hundred of thousands of Germans were expelled from the new Polish land in the west, and hundreds of thousands of Poles were expelled from the eastern borderlands, now annexed to the Soviet Union.
Halik Kochanski's parents were among the dispossessed. Like many Poles, they made their way to England, where their daughter attended Oxford, earned a doctorate at King's College London, and became a professor and writer of British military history. As if paying her dues to the country in which she found herself, her first book was the deliciously titled "Sir Garnet Wolseley: Victorian Hero," a biography of the revered military leader. Only later did she turn to the nation from which she is in a second-generation exile.
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