My father was English, said Mrs. Cavendish, "but my mother was a Russian."
"My mother was Russian and my father English," said Mrs. Cavendish.
Over a millennium, Poland evolved from a huge and imposing, economically powerful kingdom to a partitioned nation that ceased to exist on world maps for over 120 years, and finally to a people and land at the center of the 20th century's greatest wars and most horrific human tragedies.