Padowicz, Julian

PERSONAL: Married. Education: Graduated from Colgate University.

ADDRESSES: Home— Stamford, CT.

CAREER: Writer, documentary filmmaker, and producer of audio tapes.

AWARDS, HONORS: Golden Eagle Award, Committee on International Non-Theatrical Events, for educational film The People Shop.

WRITINGS

Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939 (memoir), Academy Chicago Publishers (Chicago, IL), 2006.

Author of numerous audiobooks, including Runaway Horses, Chickens, and Other Upset People (young adult novel);Jesse (young adult novel);Gordon (novel);Seeing the Franklin Roosevelt Home with Julian Padowicz; 100 Minutes to Better Photography; 60 Minutes towards Computer Literacy; Cat Lovers Only; Soliciting the Major Gift; Stalking the Corporate Dollar; and Public Relations in Support of Development.

SIDELIGHTS: Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939 is Julian Padowicz’s story of how he and his mother—and some of their relatives—escaped from Nazi persecution after the fall of Poland in 1939. The small party of refugees fled to Soviet-controlled Ukraine, and then Padowicz and his mother trekked over the Carpathian Mountains to reach Hungary. “Julian Padowicz’s perilous escape from Warsaw is an exciting adventure, made all the more engrossing because he conveys so much about his feelings and impressions of this time in his life,” wrote Patricia F. D’Ascoli in the Jewish Ledger.“The young Julian, who seems at times wise beyond his years, has a wonderfully wry outlook on the varied circumstances in which he finds himself during the course of his journey.”

The moving force behind Julian’s flight is his mother, a wealthy woman who lost her second husband during the war. “Beautiful and manipulative,” explained a Publishers Weekly contributor, Basia Padowicz Weisbrem’s “self-absorption and lack of concern for consequences alienate[d] her in-laws.” She and Julian were finally abandoned by their guide in the Carpathians and were forced to find their own way through the wilderness into free Hungary. She “did whatever she had to—from telling lies to flirting with Soviet officers,” concluded a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “to get provisions for her family.” In the final analysis it is Basia Weisbrem, declared the Kirkus Reviews writer, who “emerges as the real hero of this tale.”

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES

BOOKS

Padowicz, Julian, Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939, Academy Chicago Publishers (Chicago, IL), 2006.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 15, 2006, George Cohen, review of Mother and Me, p. 24.

Jewish Ledger, August 30, 2006, Patricia F. D’Ascoli, “An Engaging Memoir from a Stamford Author.”

Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2006, review of Mother and Me, p. 622.

Publishers Weekly, May 15, 2006, review of Mother and Me, p. 60.