Probably the smartest foreign-language instruction manual ever written, it's accessible but definitely not for dummies.

One of the most beautiful films ever made, and arguably the best of Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's oeuvre. Made before his better-known French trilogy of Red, White and Blue, it stars Irene Jacob (who is also the heroine of Red) as both the delicate Polish Weronika and the stronger French Veronique -- or is she really just one girl?

Andrei Tarkovsky's exquisite Russian film adaptation of Lem's novel runs nearly three hours but is not a minute too long.

Martha Stewart, born Martha Kostyra, is a Polish American, and first learned to cook from her mother, also named Martha Kostyra.

Of the six million Jews whom Hitler murdered, many were Poles. But an additional three million Poles, mostly Catholics, were murdered as well. Let's not forget any of them.

154 nocturnes, polonaises, mazurkas, ballades, etudes, preludes and scherzos performed by the incomparable Artur Rubinstein on an 11-CD set of recordings made from the 1940s through the 1970s. The late Polish-American Rubinstein is still the greatest interpreter of Chopin's piano music.

Polish American sculptor sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, one of the carvers of Mount Rushmore, started making a monument to Crazy Horse in South Dakota in 1948, after Oglala Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear wrote to him that "my fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too," but died in 1982 before completing it.