Co-operation with the occupant is described by resorting to the concepts of: treason, collaboration and Quislingites in an attempt at adapting the precision of the conception to the complex nature of a given situation. However, societies living in an extreme situation are unable to preserve en bloc a negative attitude towards the occupant. This fact has been emphasised already in reports prepared in conspiracy conditions. Czeslaw Madajczyk estimated the number of voluntary collaborators of the occupation apparatus in the General Government at about 5%, while the number of persons ready to put up resistance totalled 25%. Demoralisation was characteristic for all social groups. Traditional authorities went through a crisis, and the continuum of Polish statehood gave rise to assorted doubts. Ambiguous attitudes were generated by the necessity of daily official contacts with the Germans. Contrary to the ethical and legal standards sanctioned by the Underground administration of justice, groups of contradicting such standards emerged in numerous environments . An assessment of their conduct necessitates, however, an individual analysis of motifs. Collaboration continues to remain an open question in Polish historiography. The author maintains that in certain circumstances it could have served the raison d'etat of a vanquished nation. The German occupation system left little place for collaborators, and thus, to a certain degree, for potential partners. It became a prevailing regularity that willing collaborators, or those forced by circumstances, were to be found in those spheres where the occupant permitted 'co-operation'.
This paper concerns one of the early works by Stanislaw Lem, 'The Dialogues', and attempts at its analysis and interpretation. The conceptual basis for 'The Dialogues' is cybernetics, a field of science which became very important in the 1950s and 1960s. The author tries to show how Lem used the terminology and methods of cybernetics to create a unique project of sociology and anthropology. Nevertheless, this project was not successful because of the insoluble contradictions between cybernetic and anthropological paradigms.
The theme of the paper is the presence of the motives of antiquity in R. M. Rilke''s and J. Iwaszkiewicz's poetry. A discussion on Rilke's competence in classical languages is followed by an analysis of his 'poetics of things', as this method played the most important role in the creating of the poems devoted to motives of antiquity. Most of the poems in question come from the volume 'New Poems', and their interpretation takes the most space in the body of the paper. The author concentrates also on the connections with antiquity as seen in 'Sonnets to Orpheus'. The final part of the article refers to the traces of antiquity in Iwaszkiewicz's 'Sicilian Sonnets'. The main aim of the paper is to indicate that Rilke's 'antiquity' and Iwaszkiewicz's 'antiquity' should not be regarded as a set of simple and direct reference to a reservoir of ancient culture, but are an effect of a complicated hermeneutic process, in which the respective authors reveal antiquity as necessary for their own creative reasons, and in doing so they follow numbers of intermediary levels of cultural memory.
The essay attempts to reconstruct the Western European optics as a necessary precondition for demystifying and removing the delusion and stereotypes about Central-Eastern Europe. Starting from the genesis of dominant stereotypes which represent other than West European cultures as 'barbaric', 'anti-democratic' and 'artificial', the author deals with some theories of nationalism which claim that the opposition between 'civil' and 'cultural' nationalisms is a proper instrument to define the modern construct of ethnicity in Europe.
The essay attempts to reconstruct the picture of the Roma people as drawn in the work of Andrzej Stasiuk, a well-known and extremely influential contemporary Polish writer. His books are one of the major sources of information about, among other things, the Romani population of Central-East Europe. Starting from the theory of critical discourse analysis, the author of the essay shows that Stasiuk's imagination of the Gypsy world is based on dangerous and dominant stereotypes which could be compared to racist and apartheid ideologies.
Purpose: Enterococcus faecium strains have been reported worldwide as etiologic factors of many nosocomial infections, which are difficult to manage because of the constantly increasing resistance of these microorganisms to antibiotics and the ability to form biofilm. The aim of this study was to analyze the ability to produce a biofilm in E. faecium strains, depending on the patient’s clinical material. Materials and methods: Sixty-six E. faecium strains were investigated. Identification and susceptibility testing were conducted by the VITEK2 system. The ability to form biofilm was assessed by phenotypic methods. The presence of selected virulence genes was established by PCR followed by gel electrophoresis and sequencing. Results: Among the tested E. faecium isolates, 72.7% were biofilm-positive (BIO+) and 27.3% biofilm-negative (BIO-). Strains were collected mostly from rectal swabs (30.4%) and blood (18.3%). BIO+ strains from infections constituted 31.8% (52.4% isolated from blood) and from colonization 40.9% (48.2% from rectal swabs). 91.7% of the Blood Group strains and 68.5% of the Other Group strains produced biofilm. Strains from the Colonization Group produced biofilm in a proportion similar to the Infection Group (about 75%). There were no statistically significant differences in virulence and resistance, except for vancomycin (more resistant BIO+ Other than the BIO+ Blood Group, and more resistant BIO+ Colonization than BIO+ Infection Group) and teicoplanin (more resistant BIO+ Colonization than the BIO+ Infection Group). Conclusion: The majority of E. faecium isolates carries high levels of resistance to many antimicrobials, is well equipped with virulence genes, and possesses the ability to form biofilm.
The increasing prevalence of acquired carbapenemases in Gram – negative bacteria is one of the biggest problems in the prevention and therapy of infectious diseases. NDM (New Delhi Metallo--Lactamase) is a recently discovered enzyme which has the ability to hydrolyze all -lactam antibiotics, except aztreonam. Making that scenario more worrisome is the fact that mobile fragments of DNA carrying blaNDM genes, also keeps a number of other genes encoding antibiotic resistance. NDM enzymes are currently present in different species of bacteria all over the world. NDM-producing bacteria are resistant to virtually all available antimicrobial agents except tigecycline, colistine and fosfomycine
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