This illustrated book captures the charm of its subject. Waclaw Tadeusz Dobrzynski was among the first diplomats assigned to the Irish State in 1929. He remained as Polish "minister plenipotentiary" for twenty-five years and died here in 1962. His career reflected the vicissitudes of Poland and the historical parallels between two oppressed European nations. It is reassuring to learn that during the war years Irish hospitality was extended to Poles, if not to Jews.
Furthermore, Dobrzyn ski wrote, "partition or no partition, wherever we would go throughout the Six Counties, we were invariably met with the same wonderful Irish hospitality". While neutrality was "the only rational course" for Dublin, his daughter - the author of this memoir - found Irish disbelief in Nazi atrocities hurtful: "Only when the first pictures were released from Belsen and Dachau much later, did they acknowledge their mistake."