Ignacy Jan Paderewski ca.1936
(public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

The Extraordinary Ignacy Jan Paderewski is Born – 160 Years Ago

Ignacy Jan Paderewski was born on November 6, 1860 in the village of Kurylowka in Russian-ruled Podolia. A recognized child prodigy at the piano at age three, in 1872 he was sent by his father, a participant in the 1863 Polish insurrection against Russia, to study at the Warsaw Conservatory. While he did not impress his instructors due to his lack of serious formal training (one suggested he might switch to the saxophone!), he persisted in pursuing serious training under the tutelage of several outstanding teachers.

In 1888 Paderewski made his debut in Paris. His was a smashing success. Tall, lithe and charismatic – his head topped off with a lion-like mane of golden-red hair – Paderewski thrilled his audience and those that came after in England. In 1890 he made the first of his thirty tours of the United States. It was here that he won lasting acclaim as a true musical super star, earning millions of dollars along the way. In America he performed everywhere on the Steinway piano he made famous. In Springfield, Missouri a future U.S. president, Harry Truman had the unforgettable experience of meeting him at age 12. In West Allis, Wisconsin Liberace’s mom invited him to dinner where he praised her young son’s talent. In 1913 he purchased property in the California town of Paso Robles near Santa Barbara. There he pioneered the creation of its renowned wine industry.

Paderewski’s tours took him all over the world – even to Australia. But he was not content with performing. He tried his hand at becoming a serious composer and even wrote an opera. However while his compositions are no longer much performed, he did create one piece that is known everywhere – his Minuet in G.

Outside Paso Robles, Paderewski also purchased mansions near Tarnow in Poland and in Switzerland. Tragically, his first wife died in childbirth and left a son who suffered serious birth defects and passed away at age 20. His devoted second wife, Helena, was past childbearing years.

Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Woodrow Wilson: Painting by Artur Szyk (credit: National Museum in Warsaw, Poland, via Europana)

From the 1890s Paderewski began giving away his money to various causes, starting with scholarships for young music students. He championed the paintings of Jan Styka, creator of the enormous panoramic victory of Kosciuszko at Raclawice (now displayed in Wroclaw, Poland), as well as that of Christ’s crucifixion – at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles. In 1910 he funded a great monument in Krakow, then in the section of Poland under Austro-Hungarian imperial rule. The monument recalled the 500th Anniversary of the victory of King Wladyslaw Jagiello’s forces over the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald. At the dedication, Paderewski spoke with great eloquence to an audience of some 50,000. The event reaffirmed the Poles’ desire for independence, lost since 1795. How could anyone foresee that independence would indeed be achieved and just eight years later? And that Paderewski would play a key role in its realization!

In August 1914 World War I broke out. Paderewski, appointed to represent the Polish national committee formed in France, was soon in the United States as its spokesman for Poland. Here he used his fame to reach out to Americans and to America’s large Polish community, preaching the cause of independence and humanitarian aid for his homeland’s inhabitants. Indeed the War had already turned partitioned Poland into a vast killing ground in the conflict between the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary fighting against imperial Russia.

Paderewski reached out to the public by playing shortened concerts everywhere in the U.S. and following them up with his eloquent, non-partisan appeals for Poland. Fluent in English and possessing a showman’s flare for the dramatic, he even won audiences with the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, and made him a convert for the Polish cause. Indeed on at least three separate occasions Wilson would go on to address the American public on behalf of the Poland’s people – in 1915 in supporting humanitarian relief for its inhabitants and in 1917 and 1918 in backing the restoration of an independent Polish state.

Working closely with the organizations of the American Polish community, Paderewski called for the creation of a Polish army in America on behalf of Polish independence at the convention in Pittsburgh of the Polish Falcons Alliance in April 1917. Amazingly, The U.S. government would approve his appeal for what he called a “Kosciuszko Army”. Over 38,000 Polish Americans would volunteer and nearly 21,000 men would serve in it as part of a 100,000 man force seeing action in France and later in Poland. In August 1918, his appeal to the delegates at the great congress of the Polish emigration in Detroit resulted in a resolution calling for a $200 million fund drive for Poland.

Following the War’s end on November 11, 1918, Paderewski traveled to Europe. There he played a critical role in regaining lands for the new Polish state that had been ruled by the German empire. In January 1919 he accepted appointment to the office of Prime Minister of Poland and also took over the responsibilities of Minister for Foreign Affairs. In these capacities he represented Poland at the postwar Paris peace conference. After resigning in December 1919 Paderewski left Poland and returned only a few times over the next few years until 1924. A critic of Jozef Pilsudski and an opponent of his 1926 coup, Paderewski turned his attentions back to concertizing. However, in 1936 he joined with democratic Poles like General Wladyslaw Sikorski and Peasant Party leader Wincenty Witos in organizing a national coalition aimed at returning Poland to true democracy.

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Paderewski, now 80 years old, made his way out of Switzerland to London. There he was appointed to serve as Chair-man of the Polish Exile Government’s National Council. On June 29, 1941, he died in the United States while on a mission here on behalf of the London government.

A universally admired figure, Paderewski was buried at the Arlington National Cemetery, a unique honor. However his wish was for his remains to be reinterred in Poland once his homeland regained its freedom. In 1991 this wish was fulfilled when his casket was reinterred in the Cathedral of St John in Warsaw.

Paderewski’s heart is in the United States, in the wall of the great Basilica of the American Czestochowa in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. His is so like the fate of the immortal pianist/composer Frydryk Chopin, whose remains are in Paris’ Pere Lachaise Cemetery and whose heart is in The Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw.

More than anyone until the time of Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa, it was Paderewski who was the great apostle of a free Poland to America and the world. .

Prof. Emeritus Donald Pienkos
Source: Adam Zamoyski: Paderewski (1982).

Do Something Polish to Celebrate

POLISH HERITAGE MONTH

compiled by Irena Frączek

October is Polish Heritage Month, a month in which Americans of Polish descent (about 10 million strong) are especially proud of their roots, Polish achievements and over 400 years of their presence in the lands of the contemporary United States.

Some fun, interesting and useful things to do in October 2020 are listed below
this short account of how come October became the Polish Heritage Month.

The story goes back to the first celebration of Polish Heritage that took place in Philadelphia in August 1981. The event was organized by Michael Blichasz, the President of the Polish American Cultural Center in Philadelphia, with assistance of Polish American Congress, Eastern Pennsylvania District (since 1986, also the national Polish American Congress).

Amid the event’s rising popularity, growing national interest and succeful lobbying, U.S. Representative Robert Borski (D-PA-03) sponsored House Joint Resolution 577 designating the month of August as “Polish American Heritage Month.” The resolution became public law after President Ronald Reagan signed it on August 7, 1984.

Just ten days later, he issued Proclamation 5229 in observance of this occasion and paying tribute to four great sons of the Polish nation: Tadeusz Kościuszko, Kazimierz Pułaski, Pope John Paul II and Lech Wałęsa.

President Reagan continued to issue similar proclamations every year through the end of his presidency but in 1986, the Polish American Heritage Month was moved to October. This was done partly to help schools organize related celebrations during the school year, and in part to coincide with the arrival of the first Polish settlers in Jamestown, Virginia on October 1, 1608 (twelve years before the Pilgrims reached the Massachusetts). October is also the time to commemorate the deaths of Polish heroes of the American Revolutionary War: Kazimierz Pułaski (October 11, 1779) and Tadeusz Kościuszko (October 15, 1817).

The memory of Pulaski is celebrated at other times as well (for example March in Illinois & Wisconsin, July in Buffalo, NY), October 11 is the federal observance of the General Pulaski Memorial Day. It was established in 1929 by the joint resolution of Congress and since then, every US President has issued a proclamation on this occasion (1930 was the exception). Read the “Recalling Pulaski” story below to learn more about this Polish American hero.

The Amazing Story of Solidarity Begins
– 40 Years Ago
Remarks by Prof. Emeritus Donald Pienkos

August 28, 2020: From the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej),
“This is where ‘Solidarity’ was born” exhibit officially opens in Warsaw’s Piłsudski square – but displayed in 53 locations all over Poland since July.

August 29, 2020: Niagara Falls lit white and red to celebrate the birth of Solidarity on August 31, 1980
(captured from the Clifton Hill Live Cam feed)

On August 14, 1980 the Solidarity trade union – Solidarność – was conceived in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland. Founded by working men and women, it quickly mushroomed into a nationwide non-violent movement of nearly 10 million members committed to workers rights, freedom, and social justice in the midst of a great and continued economic crisis.

Solidarity’s amazing story is rooted in the Polish people’s frustration with the failed policies of the communist regime imposed on their country by Soviet Russia after World War II and in their response to the visit to his beloved homeland by Pope John Paul II in June 1979. There he told the millions who saw and heard him, “Be not afraid.” Be true to yourselves and your time honored values.

Nonetheless following his departure to the Vatican, Poland’s downward economic spiral only worsened. In response, the regime ordered steep increases in food prices in July 1980 – a move that led to workers’ sit down strikes across the country. Faced with their legitimate demands for wage increases to cushion the price hikes, demands in response to a crisis they had nothing to do with causing, the regime caved in everywhere.

At the Gdansk Shipyards, where 15,000 men and women were employed, workers went beyond wage demands to protest the firing of a respected co-worker, Anna Walentynowicz – just months before she was to retire. Another indiviual, Lech Walesa, a former worker blacklisted for his independent labor union organizing activities, joined them and was immediately made a leader of its strike com-mittee. Two days later the committee won its wage demands and Walentynowicz and Walesa were reinstated. At this point, the committee received appeals to give its support to strikers in other Baltic seacoast enterprises. An interfactory strike committee headed by Walesa was set up, with new demands calling for the creation of an independent union and a union newspaper free of government censorship. Solidarnosc was born.

The Communist party sent a high ranking government emissary to Gdansk to meet with the Strike committee. But he found himself facing not only a determined shipyards committee but one bolstered by advisors from Warsaw who had courageously backed workers’ rights in the past. On August 31, 1980, after days of tense talks, during which 640,000 workers had gone on strike around the country, an agreement was at last reached. All of Solidarity’s demands were accepted – including its right to be an independent, self-governing, labor union.

This unimagined agreement sparked Solidarity’s amazing expansion into a massive national force that grew in just a few weeks to nearly ten million members. By then a new Party leadership that included Defense Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski was also in place. But months of frustrating tension-filled delays followed, with anti-Solidarity party and government leaders backed by the Soviet Union doing all they could to oppose the Union. And as Poland’s economic conditions worsened, they fixed the blame on Solidarity. Moreover, behind the scenes, General Jaruzelski had put together a martial law plan to suppress the movement.

On December 12, 1981, after 16 months of crisis, Jaruzelski imposed martial law, claiming he acted to prevent a civil war. His perfectly executed plan resulted in the jailing of 9,700 Solidarity leaders and the union’s suppression. In response, the United States imposed severe economic sanctions on Poland and began covertly supporting those Solidarity activists who had escaped arrest. This effort, along with those of John Paul II, helped keep the Solidarity cause alive. For its part, Jaruzelski’s military-dominated regime failed to destroy the Solidarity idea, to build support for its rule, and to revive Poland’s distressed economy. At last, faced with renewed worker unrest, the General, with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s blessings, began “Roundtable talks” with Solidarity representatives to try to find a way out of the crisis which by then had gone on for more than a decade. These talks opened in Warsaw on February 6, 1989.

The iconic “High Noon” (W samo południe) poster urging people to vote in 1989 election (created by Tomasz Sarnecki)

The Roundtable, while controversial to this day, brought Solidarity’s restoration on April 5, 1989 and a special election to the Polish parliament on June 4. This election, while only partly free, saw Solidarity win an incredibly overwhelming victory. Of the 261 freely elected candidates, not a single one was won by a regime nominee. Moreover, even communist party nominees running unopposed lost when over half of the voters crossed their names off the ballots! The Party’s humiliation was so complete that it was obliged, with Gorbachev’s approval, to reluctantly accept a Solidarity-led government.

Headed by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, this new government was approved in September 1989. In December, the Parliament ended the “People’s Poland” system and proclaimed a new, democratic Polish Republic. In January 1990, the Polish communist party dissolved. By then Soviet rule over Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Romania was over and the infamous Berlin Wall had fallen. What began in Gdansk in August 1980 would culminate with the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself in 1991 and the end of the Cold War.

From the panel discussion “Poland 1979-1989: Living through Poland’s Extraordinary Decade: Memories from Members of Our Community” held by the Polish American Congess Wisconsin Division on April 22, 1980 comes the above slide show presented by Derek Zarzeczny.

Polish Americans backed Solidarity. Indeed, the Polish American Congress, American Polonia’s civic action voice, had called its demands “fully justified” – only days after its creation. In December 1981, PAC leaders were in the White House to join with President Reagan in condemning martial law. In 1985, the PAC led the protest in New York City objecting to Jaruzelski when he headed a delegation to the United Nations to mark its 40th anniversary. In September 1989 PAC and Polish American community leaders were in Poland to give their support to Prime Minister Mazowiecki’s new Solidarity government. In October 1989 the PAC and Polonia welcomed Lech Walesa to Chicago just days after his stirring speech to the U.S. Congress. And in the years after American Polonia both strongly backed U.S. aid to Poland and Poland’s entry into the NATO Alliance.

Solidarity, an inspired and inspiring non-violent movement of “ordinary” people who were anything but ordinary, helped usher in a new post Cold War world – a world we have been blessed with for more than thirty years.*

*The contributions of countless Solidarity acticists can be found in works like those of Andrzej Paczkowski: Revolution and Counterrevolution in Poland, 1980-1989 (2015) and Antoni Dudek: The Road to Independence: Solidarnosc (2000).

The Battle of Warsaw is Won
100 Years Ago
Remarks by Prof. Emeritus Donald Pienkos

Fought August 13-20, 1920 between the armies of the newly restored Poland and revolutionary Bolshevik Russia, this great battle is also known as “the Miracle of the Wisla” or Vistula, Poland’s main river. Pitting two armies totaling over 250,000 combatants, the battle resulted in the Bolsheviks’ total defeat. As to its signify-cance, Britain’s ambassador to Germany, in Warsaw at the time, would call it “the 18th most decisive battle in world history.” Why was this Battle fought? Why was it so important?

On November 11, 1918, the very day the First World War ended with an armistice or truce in the trenches dividing Germany and France, General Jozef Pilsudski proclaimed Poland’s national rebirth in Warsaw. This came after 123 years of occupation by the empires of Russia, Austria and Germany. But proclaiming independence was one thing, making independence a reality and successfully defining its borders were very different matters. Indeed it would take the Poles more than two years of difficult negotiations along with plenty of fighting to accomplish these gargantuan tasks. For his part Pilsudski believed that for Poland to survive it needed to include the lands to the east that had been part of the old Polish Commonwealth going back to 1772. It was in that year that Russia, German Prussia and Austria had seized a third of the country in what became known as the first partition of Poland, the first giant step in the country’s destruction in 1795.

However, these eastern lands were inhabited mainly by non-Polish peoples – Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Lithuanians – with ethnic Poles comprising just 35 percent of the population. Still, Pilsudski believed these nationalities could be persuaded to be part of a new, federalized Polish state and in that way be liberated from the oppression they had endured under Russia – whether it was the Russia of the tsars or that of their new Bolshevik revolutionary successors led by Vladimir Lenin who had seized control of the empire in 1917. Indeed by 1919 Poland had become embroiled in a worsening border conflict with the new and radical regime in Moscow.”

By Spring 1920 Pilsudski had given up the idea of a restored multi-ethnic Commonwealth. Instead he made an agreement with the head of the latest Ukrainian national government in Kiev headed by Symon Petlura that aimed at guaranteeing Ukrainian independence from Soviet Russia. But in response an infuriated Lenin then ordered the mobilizing of a new and massive Bolshevik army to regain control of the Ukraine. Furthermore, he created a committee of Polish Bolsheviks under Felix Dzerzhinsky, who had organized the ruthless CHEKA special police force to secure the revolution in Russia. Dzerzhinsky’s group’s mission was to follow the “Red Army” in its invasion of Poland, unseat Pilsudski, and establish a puppet state subservient to Lenin.

As quickly as the Polish army had moved into Kiev in May 1920, just as quickly was it driven westward back into ethnic Poland. By the end of July the massive Red Army commanded by the 27 year old Mikhail Tukhachevsky was approaching Warsaw itself. Incredibly this war had exploded into a conflict that pitted over a million Bolshevik troops against about 750,000 Poles in a true fight to the death. In this war infantry, cavalry, tanks, armored locomotives, even airplanes would all see action.

By July Poland was in a panic, its forces in seeming disarray. Pilsudski, the great hero in May was now condemned by his critics in Warsaw as the gravedigger of independence. Poland found itself abandoned by its supposed allies, France and Britain. But Pilsudski kept his head. He appointed Wincenty Witos, the popular leader of the Peasant party to be Prime Minister and called on him to rally the country’s vast peasantry to the nation’s defense. In response countless thousands of peasant farmers joined patriotic urban workers in the fight for Poland’s survival.

As the Bolshevik army neared Warsaw, Pilsudski got a lucky break when Polish crytographers got hold of Tukhachevsky’s plans. Pilsudski himself devised the strategy to defeat the massive invasion. Essentially his plan was to lure the Bolsheviks to attack the defenders of Warsaw from the east. As the battle commenced he then ordered most of his troops to wheel around from the south in a massive sweeping action against the invaders’ left flank. The plan worked. The Reds were totally surprised and thrown into panic. Of its 130,000 man army, over 20,000 were killed, 65,000 were captured, and another 35,000 were forced to flee into East Prussia where they were disarmed. In the Battle, the Poles lost about 4,500 men.

1920-2020
THE BATTLE OF WARSAW
Centennial of the Victory
exhibit only in Polish

Just two weeks later the remaining Red army forces under Cavalry Commander Semyon Budyonny and Josef Stalin were also crushed. By October Lenin was forced to call an end to the fighting. The Bolsheviks were forced to wake up from their dream of a victory over the corpse of the Polish ‘landlord state’ propelling the revolution into war-wrecked Germany itself. In March 1921 Poland and Russia reached a border settlement at Riga in Latvia. In it Poland gained some Ukrainian and Belorussian lands to the east. But most of the Ukraine and Belorussia was lost to the Soviet regime. Their peoples, including the Polish minority that chose to remain outside of Poland, would go on to suffer in horrific fashion in the years to come.

Josef Stalin was one Bolshevik who never forgot the debacle of 1920. As Lenin’s successor, in 1937 he ordered the execution of Tukhachevsky, a leader he hated. In August 1939 he and Adolf Hitler conspired to divide Poland between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany as part of a pact that led to World War II just days later. In April 1940 he got more revenge in signing the death warrants for 24,000 captured Polish military officers and civic leaders in perpetrating an incredible (and long denied) war crime known as the Katyn Forest Massacre.

The battle of Warsaw was indeed a miracle in that victory saved the new Polish republic in 1920. Lenin’s dream of making victory over Poland the stepping stone to a violent European-wide revolution was also shattered.”

With victory, Pilsudski’s stature rose dramatically. However his political enemies remained unreconciled to him. In 1926 he did lead a coup against the government and established a regime of national moral reform (“Sanacja”). It would survive his death in 1935, only to be destroyed by the Nazi-Soviet invasions of 1939.

The monumental victory at Warsaw in August 1920 was thus not the “end of the story”. But it did allow the citizens of a reborn Poland to experience two critical decades of independence.

*Sources for the battle of Warsaw can be found in Richard Overy: A History of War in 100 Battles (Oxford University Press, 2014); pp. 75-79; and Adam Zamoyski: The Polish Way: One Thousand Years of Polish history and Culture (1985), pp. 335-339; M.K. Dziewanowski: Poland in the Twentieth Century (1977), pp. 80-84; and Wikipedia.