Читать книгу The Exile Mission - Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann - Страница 15

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“Smoke over America, blood over Europe”

World War II and the Polish Diaspora

War in Poland and the Creation of the Wartime Diaspora

One day very early in the morning some stubborn knocking at the door woke us up. My husband, surprised, goes, opens the door and after a short conversation, comes back inside, holding a piece of paper in his hand. Looking straight at me he says: “This is my draft card to the army. Germans entered our lands without declaration; it is war. . . .” My hands began shaking, my heart began pounding. We stood for a moment in silence, staring at each other.¹

THE DAY WAS SEPTEMBER 1, 1939. Helena Podkopacz saw her husband for the last time. His military transport was bombed, and he was killed instantly. She was left alone in a small village in eastern Poland with two little children and an ailing mother, while German air raids on all major cities and military installations were destroying Polish ground forces. A counteroffensive on the river Bzura broke down by midmonth, and other points of defense in the country fell one after another when the Soviet army entered the Polish territories on September 17, cutting off escape routes and closing the trap on the surviving Polish forces. On September 28, Warsaw, although furiously defended by its civilian population, surrendered to the Germans, while the Polish garrison on the peninsula of Hel on the Baltic held out until October 2. The president of Poland and Polish government officials crossed the border to Romania, and, after a brief internment there, they continued on to France, where the government was reconstituted. The last Polish military unit in the field capitulated at Kock on October 5, although some guerrilla forces fought for many more months. Poland lost some sixty thousand men killed in action and another one hundred forty thousand wounded, in addition to high civilian casualties.² By the end of the campaign, Poland was divided into a German occupation zone in the west and a Soviet zone in the east.

The formal division of Poland between German and Soviet conquerors became a fact with the signing of a convention between them on September 28, 1939. The demarcation line that ran along the rivers Bug and San became the official frontier between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Each occupation zone received a different administration and became subject to the unrestrained terror of the invaders. The territories in the Soviet zone were divided into three areas. The northern area was granted to the Republic of Lithuania, eventually annexed by the USSR. The central area was granted directly to the Belorussian SSR. The southern part, containing the city of Lwów, was attached as “Western Ukraine” to the Ukrainian SSR. Fraudulent and openly coerced plebiscites organized by the NKVD (National Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the Soviet secret police) on all three territories resulted in the “official request” of the populations to admit the occupied lands to the Soviet Union, a request that was promptly granted.³ The Polish lands under German occupation were divided into two separate areas. The western and northern parts were annexed directly into the Third Reich. The remaining, larger area formed the General Government (Generalna Gubernia) headed by Hans Frank, governor-general. The Polish population of both areas was subject to lawless and cruel Nazi terror, which increased systematically from the late fall of 1939.

Beginning in November 1939, shortly after Hans Frank took office, the Nazis undertook a systematic extermination of the Polish nation’s leadership. The city of Warsaw’s president, Stefan Starzyński—distinguished in his defense of the city—and thousands of other Poles were promptly arrested. The Nazis put to death about thirty-five hundred political and municipal leaders in a mass execution in Palmiry Forest near Warsaw. One hundred eighty-three professors from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków were captured as a part of a special action (Sonderaktion). Some were later released, but many were transported directly to death camps in Germany or were delivered to the Gestapo (the German secret police), a fate that, in reality, also meant death. These first acts of terror were then followed by arrests of members of the Polish intelligentsia, the clergy, political activists, students, and anyone suspected of having leadership skills, whose names appeared on specially prepared lists used during spring 1940 and summer of 1941. The captives were then placed in German prisons and concentration camps, especially Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.⁴

Nazi authorities closed Polish universities, schools, museums, research institutes, theaters, archives, libraries, publishing houses, and presses. Poles were not allowed to own radios or to listen to Polish music. Food was rationed, and the work order included all citizens. In December 1939 Germans introduced the rule of collective responsibility that they later used with horrifying frequency; in revenge for the wounding of a German soldier, they executed 107 Poles in Wawer near Warsaw. In January of the following year, plans were laid for the building of a concentration camp in Auschwitz (Oświęcim), where some 1.5 million people were to perish by the time the war was over.⁵ The terror further intensified in 1941, when an arbitrary German law allowed for indiscriminate street executions, imprisonment and torture, and street hunts (łapanki). Rural pacifications decimated the Polish population in hundreds of villages. The largest systematic action was a 1942 campaign in the Zamość region, where hundreds of thousands of Polish peasants were forcibly evicted to make room for German and Ukrainian settlers, while their children were sent to the Reich for Germanization purposes.⁶

Approximately 2 million Jews who found themselves on the territory of the Generalna Gubernia (many resettled from the area incorporated into Reich) were officially identified by a yellow Star of David worn on the clothing. Their possessions and businesses were confiscated. At the beginning of 1940 the Germans created work camps for Jews that did not differ much from concentration camps. In the ghettos created in many Polish cities, Jewish citizens were isolated and terrorized. They lived in terrible conditions, dying of hunger, brutal work, and epidemic diseases. In the spring of 1942 the Nazis began the introduction of the “Final Solution”: the ghettos were liquidated, and their inhabitants murdered en masse in concentration camps. Facing the liquidation of the largest Warsaw ghetto in April 1943, the Jewish population struck back against their oppressors in a military uprising, which the Nazis suppressed with great brutality.⁷

The Polish nation responded to the Nazi terror with the formation of an extensive network of the resistance organizations. Already by the end of September 1939, the Służba Zwycięstwu Polski (Polish Victory Service)—the largest underground organization and the basis for the future Armia Krajowa (AK, Home Army)—had been established and had initiated its activities. Eventually, a large percentage of the Polish population directly participated in or supported what became the strongest resistance movement on the territory of occupied Europe. The Home Army, together with other guerrilla forces (Bataliony Chłopskie—Peasant Battalions; Gwardia Ludowa—People’s Guard; and Narodowe Siły Zbrojne—National Armed Forces), participated in a number of actions, including derailing trains and blowing up bridges to slow down German military transports, executing high Nazi officials, freeing Polish prisoners, and engaging local German units in direct battles. The resistance movement also contributed to uplifting the spirits of the oppressed population through the organization of underground schools, theaters, presses, and publications, the protection of Polish national art treasures, the dissemination of information on Allied victories, or the encouragement of small acts of sabotage and slowdowns in work for the German economy. Polish resistance fighters also passed information on German military movements to the Allies. Youth from the Związek Harcerstwa Polskiego (ZHP, Polish scouting), which during the occupation reorganized itself into the storm troops known as Szare Szeregi (Grey Ranks), worked within the Home Army.⁸

When the Soviet offensive approached Warsaw in July 1944, the leadership of the Home Army decided to call for an uprising in the capital. Fighting began on the streets of Warsaw on August 1, 1944, and lasted for sixty-three days of heroic struggle to wrest Warsaw from German hands. After initial successes on the Polish side, the Nazis gradually regained control of the city, killing both Polish soldiers and the civilian population, while the Soviet army waited on the other bank of the Vistula River. Deprived of help, short on munitions, food, water, and medicines, the Warsaw Uprising collapsed in the fall of 1944. In an act of revenge, the Germans evacuated the city and undertook its systematic destruction, razing it to the ground.⁹

The Nazi occupation caused tremendous population movements that resulted in masses of Poles remaining outside Polish borders, forming the bedrock of the Polish postwar diaspora. The first waves of Poles left Nazi-occupied Poland in September 1939, and each following year brought more forced population movements out of the country.¹⁰ In October 1939 the Polish government, after evacuating to France, reached an agreement with the French government to raise a Polish army there. By early summer of the next year, more than forty-four thousand Polish immigrants residing in France had enlisted, joined by about forty thousand officers and soldiers initially interned in Romania and Hungary as well as some eighteen hundred who escaped from occupied Poland.¹¹ In June 1940 Polish forces in France numbered more than eighty-four thousand men. Of that number, more than thirty thousand were brought over to Britain after the collapse of France in 1940, and these troops were reinforced by volunteers recruited from refugees and escapees from Poland.¹² The Polish army under British command (London became the new seat of the Polish government in exile) was reorganized in Scotland as the First Polish Corps. Polish soldiers participated in battles on several different fronts. In the Battle of Britain in 1940, Polish fighter pilots accounted for some 15 percent of enemy losses.¹³ The First Polish Armored Division, under the command of General Stanisław Maczek, fought during the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe and distinguished itself in battles on the territories of Belgium and France. After the capitulation of Germany, the division was stationed in the British zone of occupation in Haren, which was renamed Maczków in honor of the Polish commander.¹⁴

These military units in the West were not the only Polish soldiers outside of Poland after the end of the war. Combatants captured by the Germans in September 1939 had been interned in Oflagen (POW camps for officers) and Stalagen (POW camps for noncommissioned soldiers), and prisoners in the latter were forced to work in the German economy. The total number of Polish POWs taken in the initial invasion came close to four hundred twenty thousand. In the fall of 1944 some seventeen thousand insurgents of the Home Army who had fought in the Warsaw Uprising joined the imprisoned Polish soldiers.¹⁵ There was also a separate category of Polish citizens who had been forcibly conscripted into German military units. Most of them came from the areas that had been annexed directly to the Reich, and were considered “ethnically German.” In sum, between two hundred thousand and two hundred fifty thousand Poles served in German forces during the war.¹⁶

The largest category of migrants from Nazi-occupied Poland included people who worked for the German war machine as slave laborers. A few thousand accepted offers of work in the Reich, compelled by deteriorating living conditions in late 1939 and early 1940 and lured by German promises of a quick return to Poland. Some decided to join family members deported to or imprisoned in Germany. Wacław Jędrzejczak’s family, for example, made such a decision. After Wacław’s father had participated in the September campaign, he was imprisoned in a POW camp in Germany and then was forced to work for a German farmer. Despite receiving help from their extended family, Wacław’s mother and her two sons could barely support themselves. The reunification of the family in the Reich allowed them to survive the harsh economic reality of the war years.¹⁷ But low numbers of volunteers resulted in increased physical coercion, including penalties of prison and death camps for those who refused to comply. When even those methods did not bring about the expected results, the German authorities organized łapanki, the infamous manhunts in which they rounded up hostages in the streets and transported them to the Reich. The precise number of Polish citizens of various ethnic and religious backgrounds who remained in Germany as slave laborers is hard to estimate, but historians suggest that close to 3 million of them were at some point employed in the German war economy.¹⁸

Political prisoners and prisoners in concentration camps constituted another large group of people deported to Germany from Polish lands. Arrests and deportations were often elements of mass actions against the Polish population, including those in November 1939 and the mass deportations to concentration camps that took place in 1942 and 1943. Until the end of the war, both civilians and members of the Polish underground fell victim to this manifestation of Nazi terror. Victor Bik, for example, was arrested in January 1944, at the train station in Częstochowa while seeing off a friend. For the next three weeks he was brutally interrogated and tortured at Gestapo headquarters and then transported to the concentration camp in Gross-Rosen. “As soon as our transport arrived,” he remembered later, “even before the door of the boxcar opened, one could hear barking dogs and loud ‘barking’ commands of waiting SS guards, who marched us to the camp, about two miles from the railroad station.” What followed was his “induction to the existence in the concentration camp”:

About 250 of us were assembled to the big hall. . . . For the last time I heard my name before becoming just a number. This was call to shower room or should I say to another form of torture station. Stripped of everything, each of us underwent the assembly kind of processing, executed by the inmates under ever present supervision of SS guards. First step cutting hair . . . and of course, shaving of all private parts. No change of razor blade, who knows for how many victims. I received rather harsh treatment because I was perceived as “grosse bandite” on account of my blue and black back and buttocks from torture by Gestapo the day before. Next, actual shower consisting of a burst of very hot water followed by a burst of ice cold water and naked step outside and wait in the formation by five until column of one hundred was moved to the next barrack. It was winter: February 1944.¹⁹

In the fall of 1944, after the collapse of the Warsaw Uprising, about sixty-eight thousand Poles from Warsaw were placed in German death camps. Among them was Tadeusz Gubala, a soldier of the Home Army, who, by a lucky accident, was captured in a group of civilians. He was transported to Bergen-Belsen and made to work together with other prisoners on the railway in Lehrte during frequent bombing raids by the approaching Allies.²⁰ Two other young powstańcy (insurgents), Jerzy Bigosiński and Tadeusz G., surrendered along with thousands of other soldiers of the Home Army after the uprising and were imprisoned in POW camps in Fallingsbostel and Sandbostel, respectively. They were only fifteen and sixteen years old, and throughout the war they had actively served in the Szare Szeregi and the AK resistance.²¹

Including those Poles who served out sentences in German prisons, the total number of Polish citizens deported to concentration camps in Germany and Austria was greater than two hundred thousand. In the last months of the war, the retreating Germans imposed even more inhuman conditions and treatment on tens of thousands of Polish prisoners, who were either immediately killed or transported (often on foot or in overcrowded cattle cars) to the territory of Germany, with the intention to eliminate eyewitnesses of Nazi terror.²²

A special category of people forced to leave Poland as a result of the Nazi occupation were those whom the German authorities had decided to subject to the Germanization process. They included families from the ethnically mixed territories of Silesia, Pomerania, and Kashubia, who were transported to the Reich and resettled under special supervision, far from any Polish slave labor communities. Some seven thousand young Polish girls were selected for Germanization and placed in German homes between 1941 and 1942. Finally, the Germans deported about two hundred thousand Polish children to the Reich with the intention of Germanizing them.²³

The living and working conditions for the Polish population in Germany differed. Most Oflagen introduced harsh discipline and very limited food rations; the Oflag in Sandbostel became particularly famous for its lack of food and the near starvation of the prisoners. Polish officers had only very restricted religious privileges, but, in compliance with the 1929 Geneva convention, they were allowed to develop limited forms of culture and education, such as the publication of internal bulletins and the establishment of libraries, amateur drama groups, sports teams, or educational courses. The clandestine resistance movement led mainly by the Home Army penetrated many Oflagen, which resulted in the creation of small underground organizations.²⁴

Slave laborers faced much hardship and oppression. Most were hungry and mistreated on a daily basis, deprived of any rights or protection. They worked to exhaustion and experienced repeated physical punishment and abuse. Laborers could not marry, worship freely, establish schools, travel, or engage in any economic activity. Arbitrary German laws subjected them to public execution for many transgressions, including sexual relationships with Germans. The sharpest measure of cruelty was the separation of infants born to Polish women workers in order to Germanize them or to kill the weaker ones through lethal injection. The same fate also awaited seriously ill adult individuals. About one hundred forty thousand slave laborers from Polish lands and several thousand newborns perished in Germany during the war; many of those who survived remained either ill or crippled for the rest of their lives.²⁵

Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenburg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen were among the largest concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and held more than two hundred thousand persons born in Poland. The inhuman treatment and cruelty that Holocaust victims experienced in the concentration camps defy imagination. Systematic extermination of the prisoners was intertwined with their unscrupulous use in the German war economy, without any regard for human life. Despite those brutal conditions, some prisoners created small secret organizations within the camps, specializing in passing information and keeping up the spirits of their fellow prisoners. Others engaged in the so-called szkoła chodzona (walking school), when university professors and other teachers orally passed on their knowledge to students during walks.²⁶

Civilian refugees also fled Poland through various channels. The majority of those persons who were temporarily out of country at the outbreak of the war remained abroad. A large number of refugees followed the retreating Polish army and government officials to Romania and Hungary in September 1939. Some—a majority of them young men determined to join Polish military forces in the West—managed to leave occupied Poland through the so-called green border, that is, by illegally crossing into Romania and Hungary. Finally, a small number of civilians were able to leave the country at the very outset of the occupation, or even later, with false passports.²⁷

In order to survive, civilian refugees sought any available jobs. Young men usually joined the Polish army in the West; some Poles in France and Spain established very successful intelligence networks, working for the Allies; and others joined foreign resistance movements, for example, in France, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Albania. Others worked for different units of the Polish government in exile, for the press, or in schools. Professionals and artists tried to continue their occupations. For example, Irena Koprowska, a Polish physician, found temporary employment as a doctor in an insane asylum in France. Irena Lorentowicz, a painter, interior decorator, and stage designer who had been on a scholarship in Paris at the outbreak of the war, worked in Portugal, painting furniture for wealthy families. Others accepted any available jobs, used family resources salvaged from Poland, and called on friends and business connections in European countries.²⁸ Many of the Polish refugees in western Europe fled before the advancing German army and immigrated to Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay. For some, the South American countries became a permanent home; a large group of them, however, gradually arrived in the United States.

Wherever a Polish exile community took shape, the refugees strove to establish some kind of organization that included cultural and political institutions, a press, book publishing, and schools. In Hungary, Romania, France, Switzerland, and Great Britain, the refugees published newspapers and literary journals, created theater groups, revived political parties, and taught Polish children and youth in networks of elementary and high schools.²⁹ Exiled Polish intellectuals formed a university in Paris in December 1939; when France fell, they organized several higher learning institutions in Great Britain, including a medical academy at the University of Edinburgh, a Polish teachers’ college, a department of veterinary studies, a law school, a business school, a technical school, as well as a military school and an air force school. Polish soldiers and officers interned in neutral Switzerland at the beginning of the war enrolled in three Swiss universities and received more than 350 university diplomas and degrees between 1940 and 1945. The United States, Great Britain, and Switzerland became centers of research that gathered exiled scientists and intellectuals who desired to continue their scholarly work.³⁰

To sum up, as a result of forced population movements from the lands of Nazi-occupied Poland, about 4 million Polish citizens were outside Polish borders at the end of the war. Ninety percent of them were slave laborers.³¹

Poles in the Soviet occupation zone did not fare much better than their counterparts in the Generalna Gubernia. In the fall of 1939 the Soviets captured more than one hundred ninety thousand Polish soldiers and lower-ranking officers and held them in camps located in Soviet territory. The prisoners were hungry, inadequately clad, overworked, and tortured. After mid-1940, they were gradually freed from the camps and transferred as civilians to perform heavy labor for the Soviet economy. About fifteen thousand Polish officers were placed in three camps in Kozielsk, Starobielsk, and Ostaszków. Between April and June of 1940, the Soviet NKVD executed 14,552 of these officers, including 12 generals. The Germans discovered their mass graves in the Katyń Forest in 1943, but Soviet authorities denied any responsibility until 1990.³² About three hundred fifty thousand civilian Poles were incarcerated in Soviet prisons and penal camps, accused of activities against the Soviet Union. The death toll among these prisoners was extremely high; for example the death rate in some of the harshest prisons in Kolyma or Chukotka reached a full 90 percent.³³

Helena Podkopacz and her family lived in western Ukraine. In June 1940 they were crowded into cattle cars and transported to Siberia under inhuman conditions. They were part of one of the major deportation waves in February, April, and June 1940 that decimated the Polish population of the eastern territories of prewar Poland. Estimates differ among authors trying to appraise the total of the deported population. The most commonly accepted figures indicate that between 1939 and 1941 the Soviets deported about 1.7 million Polish citizens. About 60 percent of those were ethnic Poles, 20 percent Jews, 15 percent Ukrainians and Russians, and about 4 percent Belorussians. More than 66 percent of those deported were male. Close to three hundred eighty thousand were children, and one hundred eighty-four thousand were more than fifty years old.³⁴ Polish citizens, faced with brutal living and working conditions and inhuman treatment by Soviet camp officials, died of starvation, malnutrition, exposure, exhaustion, and epidemics. According to some conservative estimates, two out of every ten people deported lost their lives in Siberia.³⁵

Olga Tubielewicz’s husband, Jan, worked as a postmaster in Telechany in the Pinsk region. The Tubielewicz family avoided deportation until early summer 1941. In June 1941 the NKVD burst into their house at night, arrested and took away Jan, and ordered Olga to pack some bare necessities for herself, her two children, and mother-in-law. “I, my husband’s elderly mother, and my children all went to our bedroom, knelt in front of the picture of the Virgin Mary of Perpetual Help, cried, and prayed. . . . After they took my husband, I could not move or pack anything,” recalled Olga. They spent the night in cattle cars in the train station. The next morning’s news electrified everyone: war between Germany and the Soviet Union had just broken out. Olga and the other deportees heard German planes circling over the station, which was a natural target for bombing. “If we die,” she thought, “at least it will be in our own land.” Despite the danger, the transport made it through to Siberia and to a work camp in the Altai Mountains, where the family was forced to perform slave labor in the forest.³⁶

The outbreak of the German-Soviet war in June 1941 prevented the total annihilation of the deported Polish population. Entering the anti-Nazi coalition, on July 30, 1941, Stalin signed a Polish-Soviet treaty providing for the formation of the Polish Army in Russia and for the release of Polish citizens from labor camps, prisons, and exile.³⁷ After the news was announced to the deportees, large groups of Poles began to travel toward the south, where General Władysław Anders was forming the Polish army and setting up assembly centers. Chaos and destruction accompanied their odyssey: the Polish government in London was unable to provide any substantial aid, and Soviet officials did nothing to facilitate their movements. Hunger, violence, cold, heat, disease, and exhaustion resulted in a rising death toll as Poles arrived in the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union.³⁸ Conflicts about the organization and use of the Polish army as well as the tragic situation of the civilian population resulted in the decision to move all Poles out of the Soviet Union and into Iran. During two large-scale operations in March–April and August 1942, about one hundred fifteen thousand people—including forty thousand civilians, mainly women and children—were evacuated from the USSR.³⁹

The evacuees stopped first in several refugee camps in Iran, including Tehran, Ahwaz, Ashabad, Isfahan, and other places. The Polish population was in urgent need of food and clothing, but especially medical attention. Most were exhausted after the strenuous trip from Siberia and years of malnutrition and mistreatment. Red Cross hospitals quickly filled to capacity with Polish children suffering from serious diseases. The surviving children entered a system of kindergartens and schools established by devoted Polish teachers and educators, themselves refugees from Siberia. Close to two thousand children joined Polish scouting groups organized in Iran. Adult refugees had to deal with grief, look for lost family members, and plan for the future. Prewar political activists recruited new members to their parties. Scientists established the Towarzystwo Studiów Irańskich (Association of Iranian Studies) that sponsored research into the biology, geography, and geology of the Middle East, published the scholarly journal Studia Irańskie (Iranian Studies), and in cooperation with the University of Tehran organized a popular lecture series.⁴⁰

Great Britain accepted about six hundred fifty Polish orphan children and some of the teachers caring for them in a refugee camp in Balachadi, India. Despite the unstable military situation in 1942, more Poles were evacuated from the Soviet Union and arrived in refugee camps in Karachi. A year later, more than two thousand Polish orphans and mothers with children were placed in a camp in Malir. Valivade became home to about twenty-five hundred Polish refugees, some of them from camps in Iran.⁴¹

The largest number of Polish refugee camps serving the Siberian deportees was located in the eastern part of Africa: Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, South Africa, South and North Rhodesia. Between 1942 and mid-1944, East Africa hosted more than thirteen thousand Polish refugees, who, like their compatriots in India, formed schools, churches, hospitals, and cultural organizations. Stefan Remiarz, for example, was only three years old when the war broke out in 1939. His entire family was deported from the Wilno area to Siberia. After his father and older brothers joined the Anders Army, Stefan and his mother were placed in refugee camps in Tanganyika, where they remained until 1948. Stefan remembers fondly his African experience, despite primitive living conditions in small huts made of clay and straw, without running water, electricity, or windows. He received excellent care and education in a Polish school, where nuns working as teachers drilled the children in Polish grammar and literature.⁴² Several hundred more Polish children arrived in Pahiatua, New Zealand in 1944, where they enjoyed hospitality of the New Zealand government. There were also Polish children and women living in a large camp in Santa Rosa, Mexico, near León.

After experiencing life under Soviet communism firsthand, not many of these refugees returned to Poland after the war. Some of them remained in their countries of first resettlement; others were offered refuge in Great Britain and its dominions, Canada and Australia; and residents of the Santa Rosa camp as well as Polish orphans from India and Africa were directly admitted to the United States. Many other refugees eventually arrived in America, emigrating from other countries as the opportunity arose. Helena Podkopacz, for example, after the loss of one son to disease during the exodus from the Soviet Union and a dramatic search for another lost on the way, was sponsored by her sister and arrived in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1950. After a prolonged sojourn in India, Olga Tubielewicz’s son was brought to the United States by the Polish National Alliance and placed with a group of other boys in Polish schools in Orchard Lake, Michigan. Olga and her daughter Roma arrived in Minnesota in 1947, sponsored by a family member who had resided in the United States since before World War I. It took another four years for her to reunite with her husband, who, having survived Soviet captivity, had joined the Anders Army. Stefan Remiarz’s father decided to return to Poland, but his older brothers settled in Great Britain, and Stefan and his mother joined them there. After a few years, disappointed with poor economic opportunities, the family gradually immigrated to the United States.⁴³

The new Polish army was initially formed on the territory of the Soviet Union and consisted of deportees and prisoners freed under the Sikorski-Maiski agreement of 1941. Polish General Władysław Anders took command. After leaving the Soviet Union, the army was eventually incorporated into the British forces in the Middle East and later reorganized as the Second Polish Corps. It also included the Carpathian Brigade, which already had distinguished itself in battle at Tobruk and other places in North Africa.⁴⁴ The Second Corps participated in the Italian campaign, earning fame at the battles of Monte Cassino, Bologna, Ancona, Anzio, and the Gothic Line. After the defeat of Italy, the corps performed a year of occupation duties there, and in the late summer and early autumn of 1946, was brought to England in its entirety.⁴⁵

The composition and character of the Second Corps were notable for several reasons. A majority of its members was from the eastern territories of Poland that were annexed by the Soviet Union at the end of war. They had shared the experiences of the deportation period and felt a common hatred of Russia and communism. Heavy fighting in Italy further cemented the brotherhood of arms among the soldiers, who were fully devoted to their commanding officers and especially to General Anders. The Second Corps, “never in close touch with G.H.Q. in London, . . . evolved on its own, with its own schools, theater, newspapers and tradition.”⁴⁶ The vibrant cultural life of the Second Corps put its stamp on Polish refugee communities at every stage of their exile. While still stationed in the Middle East, a large group of Polish journalists within the Second Corps began the publication of several journals directed toward both civilian and military audiences, and toward children as well. These publishing activities resulted in the appearance of both new and reprinted Polish-language books that were especially welcomed by the mushrooming Polish schools and libraries. The Second Corps also sponsored an active film group and three theater groups that offered entertainment for troops and civilians alike.⁴⁷

During their Italian sojourn, the ranks of the Second Corps swelled with new volunteers. Tadeusz G. arrived from Sandbostel, an Oflag in which he and many other Warsaw Uprising soldiers had been imprisoned until the liberation of Germany. “I was young, ready for adventure and some sightseeing. DP Germany seemed stagnant, while the legendary Second Corps seemed to offer exciting opportunities,” he recalled.⁴⁸ Some of these opportunities were, for example, high-school-level education for the soldiers in the Polish gymnasiums in Alessano, Mottola, Rome, and Porto San Giorgio, or enrollment in Italian universities, sponsored and financed by the education department of the Second Corps. Another was work for the new Polish publishing house (Instytut Literacki, or “Casa Editrice Letters,” 1946–47), whose editorial staff, led by Jerzy Giedroyć, put out twenty-eight books and the first issues of Kultura (Culture), the most important émigré journal in the West, later published in Paris.⁴⁹ Resettled in Britain together with other Polish military units, the Second Corps became the backbone of the Polish community and Polish veteran organizations.⁵⁰ A substantial number of these veterans immigrated to the United States in the early 1950s, after the amendments to the Displaced Persons Act were passed. On the basis of that law, Zygmunt Tubielewicz left Great Britain and joined his family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1951.

The Second Corps also included units of the Pomocnicza Służba Kobiet (PSK or Pestki, Women’s Auxiliary Service), later the Pomocnicza Służba Wojskowa Kobiet (PSWK, Women’s Auxiliary Military Service). The first attempts at organizing women in the Polish military were made in France in the winter of 1940, but the fall of France and evacuation to Great Britain prevented full execution of the plan. The agreement with the Soviet government for the formation of a Polish army on the territory of the USSR did not provide specifically for women’s service; the Polish command, however, interpreted the phrase “Polish citizens” eligible for service as including women. One of the motivations behind the decision to organize women into military units in September 1941, was the need to protect the largest possible group of Polish deportees. Between 1941 and 1945, about sixty-seven hundred women served in different branches of the Polish military in the West, both in the Second Corps and in other Polish military formations in France and Great Britain. Polish women completed basic military training and were employed in transportation as truck drivers and transport plane pilots, in the signal corps, in administration and billeting, as well as in kitchens and provisioning. They also staffed canteens, common rooms, and moving libraries, and organized cultural events and leisure activities. Perhaps the largest area of military activity for Polish women was health care, in which they served as doctors, dentists, and nurses. In addition to those duties, Polish servicewomen took up responsibilities for the care of mothers and children as well as for large groups of orphaned children and youth. They ran kindergartens, schools, and day-care centers and organized scouting groups and sports teams.⁵¹ Women who served in the Home Army or other underground organizations and fought in the Warsaw Uprising also had combat experience and often were decorated officers of the Polish army.

Poland’s ordeal and sacrifice in World War II reveal enormous personal suffering and tragedy. The war was a calamity of extraordinary proportions, in which human lives were lost or changed forever. But just as wars bring out the worst in some people, they also highlight the best in others. In the face of disaster, the Polish people demonstrated exceptional resilience and strength. Prisoners, slave laborers, deportees, civilian refugees, resistance fighters, soldiers, women, men, and children responded to the trials of their exile with determination and resourcefulness. Even accidental and temporary Polish refugee communities all over the world strove not only to survive but also to continue the cultural and political life of the nation. One aim was to care for the younger generations and their education. As a standard, Polish refugees established kindergartens and schools and pooled resources to provide for their children and youth. A second common element was the establishment of a press and publishing institutions, which flourished in all refugee communities.⁵² The exiles also established political and cultural institutions, which, even if short lived, provided them with space to exchange ideas and to rebuild the disrupted connection to Polish culture and tradition; they also were symbols of hope in a time of loss and despair. Some Poles survived unimaginable tragedy in concentration camps or as slave laborers in Germany; others traveled the world as deportees, soldiers, or refugees in pursuit of safety. Their experiences during the war shaped their views and personalities and became absolutely central to the concept of the exile mission for the postwar Polish diaspora.

The U.S. Polish Exile Community during the War

The war years witnessed the creation of a new community of refugees and exiles from Poland in the United States. Statistics from the INS indicate that a total of 14,956 persons born in Poland arrived in the United States as quota immigrants between 1939 and 1945. Between June 30, 1945, and mid-1946 (when the influx of refugees admitted under the so-called Truman Directive began) a total of 4,806 immigrants born in Poland arrived in the United States.⁵³ They came largely through private channels, sponsored by friends and relatives or, in some cases, by American employers. No formal resettlement program had been organized. Initially, these immigrants remained largely invisible, as developments in occupied Poland attracted public attention. Soon, however, the refugees, who had been admitted mostly on temporary tourist visas, began creating small groups and social circles based on common experiences, intellectual affinity, as well as professional and political interests. They formed new organizations with political or cultural agendas and initiated new publications. For the most part, they remained relatively isolated from Polonia, regarding America as a temporary stop on their way back to a free Poland once the war ended. Kazimierz Wierzyński, one of the greatest Polish poets and essayists, described that state of isolation in the following way:

For the first five years I lived in the United States absent in this country. My thoughts were in Poland. I wrote things related to the war, I had lectures, I started “Tygodnik Polski” with my friends, and we began publishing books under the name “The Polish Library.” I circulated only among Poles and watched America through the window. When after the war it turned out that a return to Poland would be a return to a country deprived of its own will, I awoke in America as if within an unknown, overlooked reality.⁵⁴

Kazimierz Wierzyński belonged to the generation of Polish poets who gained fame in the interwar period. He was a member of the “Skamander” group connected with the popular literary monthly of the same name. The Skamandrites (Skamandryci) celebrated poetic freedom in the independent Polish state and consciously broke with the older tradition of nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, which had focused on national issues and demanded that Polish poets be spiritual leaders of a suffering nation striving for independence. Before the war, the Skamandryci published together in literary magazines, such as Skamander and Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News) and often met during poetry evenings in Warsaw’s salons and bohemian cafés (such as the legendary café Ziemiańska) to recite their newest poems and discuss literature. Among them were Julian Tuwim, Kazimierz Wierzyński, Jan Lechoń (Leszek Serafinowicz), Antoni Słonimski, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna, and Stanisław Baliński. In September 1939 almost all members of the group found themselves outside of Poland. Most of them came together in Paris, where the editor of Wiadomości Literackie, Mieczysław Grydzewski, reestablished his magazine until the fall of France in June 1940. On Christmas Eve, 1939, Wierzyński, Słonimski, Tuwim, Lechoń, Baliński, Grydzewski, and their families spent an evening together celebrating the holiday with a traditional Polish meal, their last meeting before the war dispersed them all over the world. After the German occupation of Paris, the poets succeeded in obtaining visas to Portugal. From there, Słonimski, Baliński, and Grydzewski sailed to London; Lechoń, Tuwim, and Wierzyński traveled to Brazil, and then in the spring of 1941, to the United States, where they soon met up with another Polish exile writer, Józef Wittlin.⁵⁵

In Paris, the Polish poets and writers had tried to define their mission as émigré artists. Similarities abounded between their situation and that of the Great Emigration to the West after the November Uprising of 1830; but in the first issue of Wiadomości Polskie (Polish News), poet and writer Ksawery Pruszyński distanced the new exiles from the nineteenth-century tradition:

That previous emigration was the emigration of the defeated. This new one is an emigration of fighters [emigracja walczących]. That old emigration lost its army, this one is just creating it. Finally, the former emigration was the emigration of mature persons, who were never to return to their country. This new emigration is an emigration of young and very young people, who are forming the army and who, with the army, will return to the homeland.⁵⁶

Pruszyński called on his fellow writers to respond to the tragedy of September 1939 and to provide artistic expression of Polish volunteers’ experiences in the military forces in the West. The literature of the new emigration, Pruszyński wrote, had to “enter the soldiers’ ranks . . . , learn the art of war, fight—when they fight, perish—when they are to perish. Had we remained in the country, we should have suffered with the country, but since we crossed the border with the army—we need to fight in the army.”⁵⁷

Polish exile literature during World War II accepted this challenge. As Kazimierz Wierzyński concluded in his literary review in 1943, the Polish pen was again in the service of the Polish cause.⁵⁸ Wherever the war led Polish soldiers and refugees, they produced new writing. A large group of poets and writers joined the Second Corps and followed its route from Siberia to Iran, the Middle East, Italy, and Great Britain. Polish poets and writers followed the legacy of the Great Emigration: they, too, became spiritual leaders of the nation in exile. They, together with other intellectuals, scientists, and politicians, laid the foundation for the formulation of the exile mission, constructing bridges to the nineteenth-century Polish Romantic tradition and making struggle for Poland the most important cause of all.⁵⁹ In the United States, it was these wartime refugees and later arrivals who formed the basis of the postwar Polish intellectual diaspora.⁶⁰

In New York, Tygodnik Polski (Polish Weekly) dominated the literary scene of the exile community since January 1943. It superseded Zenon Kosidowski’s Tygodniowy Przegląd Literacki Koła Pisarzy z Polski (Weekly Literary Review of the Polish Writers’ Circle), which had been published on a duplicating machine between 1941 and 1942. The very first issue of Tygodnik exemplified its orientation. Jan Lechoń’s front-page editorial was accompanied by a large drawing of Poland in its prewar borders, identifying the journal with the London government’s political position on the issue. A short story by Kazimierz Wierzyński recalled the bravery of Haller’s Army and intertwined the tradition of military sacrifice in World War I and the events of September 1939. A poem by Lechoń focused on the exile’s longing for his country, and another by Józef Wittlin related the experiences of Polish Jews under the Nazi regime. Ewa Curie, daughter of Nobel Prize winner Maria Skłodowska-Curie, described her encounters with the Polish army created in the Soviet Union. Anatol Muhlstein and Stanisław Strzetelski presented essays on international politics and the Polish question. Finally, the last page featured a review of the newly published book by Arkady Fiedler, Squadron 303, about Polish pilots’ contribution to the victory in the Battle of Britain. The issue closed with a score of announcements of lectures organized by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.⁶¹

Almost all refugee intellectuals in the United States and many from the larger Polish war diaspora authored articles for Tygodnik, making it—next to Grydzewski’s Wiadomości Literackie in London—the best wartime publication by Polish intellectuals in exile. Among those who contributed their work was a sizable group of women. Irena Piotrowska, Felicja Lilpop-Krancowa, and Maria Werten published on art and architecture, reviewing exhibitions and books on those topics. Irena Lorentowicz and Maria Modzelewska wrote about art and theater. Wanda Landowska, a renowned Polish harpsichord player whose concerts in the United States received rave reviews, contributed material on music. Marta Wańkowicz-Erdman wrote essays and reports from her journalistic travels. Beata Obertyńska, a soldier of the Anders Army, and Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, who sent her poetry from exile in Algiers, and the Polish-American poet Wiktoria Janda reflected women’s contribution to poetry. Tygodnik Polski featured articles on women, for example, female deportees to Siberia and Pestki,⁶² and advertised Rój, a publishing house headed by Hanna Kister in the New York City.⁶³ For a few months in the winter of 1944, Tygodnik Polski experimented with a separate section for women under the editorship of Pani Wanda (Ms. Wanda). The page discussed the same topics that one could find in any other women’s journal: recipes, beauty and fashion advice, sewing patterns, and savings in the domestic budget. Soon, however, Pani Wanda had to answer a letter from a female reader, who asked about the significance of such trivial concerns in times of war and suffering. After a run of just over two months, the women’s section quietly disappeared from Tygodnik’s pages.⁶⁴

Exiles to the United States were among the founders of many cultural institutions: the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, the Polish American Historical Association, and the Józef Piłsudski Institute for Research in the Modern History of Poland. These cultural organizations were designed to support and facilitate the further development of Polish culture and scholarship in exile and to represent them to the larger American society.

The Józef Piłsudski Institute was established in July 1943. Its founders included new arrivals who before the war had been closely connected to the Polish government: Ignacy Matuszewski, former minister of the treasury; Wacław Jędrzejewicz, former vice-minister of education; and Henryk Floyar-Rajchman, former minister of industry and trade. Frank Januszewski of Dziennik Polski (Polish Daily) in Detroit, and Maksymilian F. Węgrzynek of Nowy Świat (New World) in New York, represented the Polish-American press. The goals of the institute included the collection, preservation, and study of documents dealing with the history of Poland since 1863. Gradually, the institute created an extensive library, archives, and a small museum for the display of historical artifacts. The institute also carried out editorial and publishing work; organized lectures, exhibits, and occasional conferences; and sponsored research projects and scholarships. Even though it failed in its attempt to create a large international membership among Polish diaspora, the institute was able to attract a devoted group of supporters. They included recent exiles from the prewar Piłsudski circles and some sympathetic intellectuals and artists, such as Jan Lechoń, Kazimierz Wierzyński, and painter Zdzisław Czermański. Other active members during the war were employees of the Polish consulate and embassy, activists of the Komitet Obrony Narodowej (KON)—or Committee of National Defense, a Polish-American organization dating back to World War I—as well as a group of supporters connected to Detroit’s Dziennik Polski. Refugees of the DP wave further strengthened the institute. In time the institute became a viable center for the study of Polish history, which attracted both Polish scholars and intellectuals and members from the older Polonia.⁶⁵

The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA; in Polish the Polski Instytut Naukowy w Ameryce, or PIN) was established in New York in 1942. Polish scholars and members of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (Polska Akademia Umiejętności, PAU) who found themselves outside of Poland at the outbreak of World War II were determined to continue scholarly activities disrupted by the war. They considered it their moral obligation, because the Nazis were systematically destroying Polish learning and scholarship in the homeland. Their new organization, PIASA, aimed at providing appropriate conditions for the presentation of Polish scholarship to larger American society. Among the first members and officers were such world-renowned scholars as historians Oskar Halecki, Jan Kucharzewski, and Rafał Taubenschlag, anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, historian of Slavic literatures Wacław Lednicki, and chemist Wojciech Swiętosławski. Between 1942 and 1945 the Polish government in exile supported PIASA with a financial subsidy, enabling it to organize numerous lectures and conferences and to publish books and scientific works. From 1946 through 1951 the Polish American Congress granted PIASA a modest annual subsidy, but after that period PIASA had to look for other sources of support, mainly private gifts and volunteer work. Despite these dire financial straits, in 1953 PIASA organized the Mickiewicz Centennial, celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death. The results of PIASA’s work were regularly published and publicized through the Bulletin of PIASA, replaced in 1955 by the Polish Review.

One of the most active PIASA committees focused on researching Polish immigration. It was soon transformed into a separate scholarly organization, the Polish American Historical Association (PAHA), with its own research agenda and separate publication, Polish American Studies. Both PIASA and PAHA attracted many Polish, Polish-American, and American intellectuals; and from the moment of their creation they have belonged to the most active cultural organizations within the Polish community in the United States.⁶⁶

The story of Polish actors who were a part of the first wave of war refugees represents another example of an attempt to recreate the Polish artistic community in the United States. One of the most significant initiatives of the war years was the establishment in New York of Polski Teatr Narodowy (Polish National Theater) with the support of Koło Artystów Sceny Polskiej (Polish Actors’ Circle). Their performances evoked much enthusiasm, especially among the most recent arrivals from Poland. The repertoire featured classic Polish historical dramas and comedies, occasional programs (for example, for New Year’s Eve), and some new plays by Polish exile authors. By contrast, the company’s artistic tours to some of Old Polonia’s smaller centers did not meet with a great deal of success. Blamed for the failure was the supposedly high intellectual level of the repertoire, which did not appeal to a Polonian audience accustomed to lighter entertainment. Additionally, frequent references to wartime experiences in Poland were hard for the viewers to identify with, and high ticket prices and a lack of energetic management and marketing further hurt the ambitious theater company.⁶⁷

In the fall of 1942 the Polish Actors’ Circle announced the establishment of Polski Teatr Artystów (Polish Artists’ Theater), subsidized by the Polish government in exile in London. The majority of actors who had participated in the Polish National Theater now transferred to the new company. Its nature was, however, very different. From the beginning it was designed as an artistic enterprise which would cater mostly to the tastes of recent Polish refugees who planned to return to Poland as soon as possible. The theater, despite some success, never achieved its objective of becoming a permanent center for the Polish performing arts in New York. When the governmental subsidies ended in 1945, the company ceased to exist. Most of the actors followed different career paths, including radio programs and individual tours to smaller communities in the country, or else returned to Poland.⁶⁸

The existence of the theater during the war became an extremely important factor in the Polish exiles’ life. It enabled the survival of a group of people whose careers could not have been transferred easily into a foreign environment. For example, it gave employment to a host of Polish actresses such as Jadwiga Smosarska (one of the most popular and promising film actresses in Poland), Janina Wilczówna, Zofia Nakoneczna, Lunia Nestorówna, Karin Tiche, Stanisława Nowicka, and Maria Modzelewska, an accomplished actress of the Warsaw stage.⁶⁹ But more significantly, it symbolized the efforts of the Polish people to go on despite war, exile, and terrible news from occupied Poland. In an article for Tygodnik Polski, director and playwright Antoni Cwojdziński described preparations for the performance of “Pastorałka” (Pastorale), a Christmas play based on traditional Polish folk motifs, as involving the good will and ingenuity of the entire company. The rehearsals took place in a private apartment after the regular workday, and even actors suffering from flu participated. A singer practiced in the bathroom, the only space free from interference and noise from the street. The stage designer created decorations by hand and often carried them herself to and from the car. The actors often played in small, unheated halls, to which they had to travel long distances. Still, an atmosphere of enthusiasm and ardor accompanied their work.⁷⁰

This labor of love brought its own rewards. Irena Lorentowicz, who was the set designer and prepared all the costumes, noticed that “often laughter, loud calling, warnings for the characters on the stage, exclamations, and the sincere tears of the audience” came in instant response to the acting.⁷¹ After the premier of each new play, professional reviews appeared in Tygodnik Polski, written by Jan Lechoń or Józef Wittlin. In one of them, an excited Lechoń wrote: “Anyone who has lived in Warsaw and remembers the atmosphere of premiers in the Warsaw theaters could not fail to feel at the performance of the Polish Artists’ Theater . . . the rush of memories of those days and those halls.”⁷² During one program, “Echoes of the Polish Land,” when the actors on the stage sang, “We were happy and we did not know it,” several recent refugees, overwhelmed by their emotions, got up and left.⁷³

The wartime exile community did not meet only during PIASA lectures or theater performances; they also created a close-knit community that was determined to recreate Polish prewar social circles in an American environment. The largest number of exiles settled in New York, and their social life centered on several key locations. One of them was the consulate of the Polish government in exile, until 1945 recognized by the United States as Poland’s legal authority. There, according to Lorentowicz, “we searched each other out[;] everybody was getting pieces of news from the homeland and sharing them with others.”⁷⁴ Another place for social gatherings was the Ognisko (Campfire) restaurant located next to the consulate. As one exiled writer, Aleksander Janta, commented, every day Ognisko drew a sizable crowd of Poles, as if it was a popular place in Warsaw. “Here you could find all the gossip,” he wrote, “Here was the stock exchange for all political and social sensations and insinuations, here you could meet those that count and those that have just arrived, here you could learn everything about everybody.”⁷⁵ The menu included strictly Polish cuisine, and the wait staff was composed of former diplomats, actors, and actresses, who had no chances for other employment in America.⁷⁶ Hotels run by Poles in the Adirondacks and in Sea Cliff on Long Island served as other gathering places for the Polish elite of wartime New York.⁷⁷

A particular brand of elitism, social self-sufficiency, and the belief that their sojourn in America soon would come to an end resulted in refugees having only limited contact with American Polonia. Gradually, refugees and Polish Americans came to know each other on several different levels. Concerns for the welfare of the refugees, Polonia’s humanitarian actions, and wartime political goals became the strongest catalysts for a closer relationship.

American Polonia and Polish Refugees during the War

As soon as the first news of the German attack on Poland reached the United States on September 1, 1939, Polish Americans manifested their support for the people of Poland. In a strong display of solidarity, Polonia organizations called for a united action on behalf of Poland. The Polish language press published a declaration, which proclaimed:

At this historic moment the Polish American Council calls all in whose veins Polish blood flows to mobilize their moral forces, to free all their spiritual powers, to focus their thoughts and will in one direction—the victory of Poland. All of Polonia in the United States, whose sons shed blood in the battle to regain independence, stands by the Homeland in this decisive struggle. We call all countrymen to unite their hearts and minds. We call all of Polonia to a great deed.⁷⁸

Both the rhetoric and the spirit of the declaration signified a full return to the ideals of the exile mission in its familiar formulation from the turn of the century and the World War I years, when American Polonia claimed the cause of a free Poland as its most important objective. The call to unite and to sacrifice in the struggle for Poland revived the patriotism of Polish Americans and focused their attention on the cause of the homeland.

The response to the call was immediate, and the unification of efforts instantaneous. Rada Polonii Amerykańskiej (Polish American Council), a Polish-American charitable organization, underwent a quick reorganization in order to provide the homeland with humanitarian aid in the most effective way.⁷⁹ The multitude of existing Polish-American organizations and parishes as well as the special relief committees that instantly sprang up in Polonia, comprised its ranks. At an extraordinary meeting on October 19, 1939, the Polish American Council, headed by Francis X. Świetlik, dean of the law school at Marquette University and censor of the Polish National Alliance, united all Polonia’s relief efforts under its auspices.⁸⁰

Numerous demonstrations, public meetings, and solemn masses manifested American Polonia’s moral support for the Polish nation. At the conventions of several major fraternals in the fall of 1939, eloquent declarations of support and flaming manifestos entwined with spontaneous collections of donations and the formation of permanent administrative structures to coordinate humanitarian and political work. An important part of this undertaking focused on drawing the attention of the media and politicians to Poland’s plight and gaining the support of the American public and the government. For example, Polonia mobilized its members through a letter-writing campaign to support Franklin Roosevelt’s measures to assist the Allies, despite the official pronouncement of neutrality by the United States.⁸¹

Some initiatives spontaneously adopted at the outset of the war ended in failure. Collections for the Fundusz Obrony Narodowej (FON, or National Defense Fund) for Poland had to stop immediately after the American government announced its neutrality. Information centers, intended to disseminate news about the situation in Poland, turned out to be short lived for lack of organizational and financial support. Finally, efforts to recruit Polish Americans for a specially created military force patterned after Haller’s Army of World War I failed to receive enough support. Reflecting internal transformations within Polonia in the 1930s, the response to the idea of a new Polish-American legion in 1939 was weak.⁸²

The neutrality pronouncement by the United States dictated the main focus of Polonia’s activities, which for years to come would concentrate on humanitarian aid. As Teofil A. Starzyński, president of the Polish Falcons (Sokół) fraternal, stated in September 1939, Polonia fully understood and accepted its position, but did not rule out the possibility of change in the future. “Poland does not need our blood yet,” his declaration read, “but when she calls for it, we will offer it willingly. Today we need rather financial aid and help in propagating the Polish question in the American public opinion. Such aid we must provide.”⁸³ Rada, the American Red Cross, and countless local relief committees received an outpouring of donations from individuals, parishes, and organizations. In mid-October 1939 the PNA leadership gave the American Red Cross a check for $150,000 for relief work in Poland. The PNA and many other organizations announced a five-cent monthly tax on each member for the exclusive purpose of aid to Poland. The Polish Women’s Alliance, gathered at its national convention in September 1939, proclaimed that “the entire Polish Women’s Alliance in America and all its parts . . . turned into one, huge Relief Committee” and vowed to focus all its efforts on the work for Poland.⁸⁴ In Chicago a group of Polish second-generation women, mostly recipients of stipends from the Kosciuszko Foundation, created Legion Młodych Polek (Legion of Young Polish Women) under the leadership of pianist Adelina Preyss. They systematically volunteered in the American Red Cross and carried out fund-raising activities. Within two weeks from the inception of the legion, its membership had grown to one hundred women.⁸⁵

Most of the funds collected by the Polish-American community were at the disposal of Rada, which based its organization on a network of thirty-six regional districts. By the spring of 1940, its leaders announced that the organization had collected more than $500,000; by the end of the year, Rada was gathering approximately $60,000 per month.⁸⁶ In the financial report prepared for the 1942 convention, Rada made accessible a detailed account of all the donations received between May 1, 1941, and September 30, 1942. Day after day, name after name, Rada documented the financial effort of the Polish population, whose individual donations ranged from one dollar to several thousand.⁸⁷ All in all, between November 1, 1939, and September 30, 1942, Rada collected some $1,600,000.⁸⁸

Cooperating closely with the American Red Cross and the New York-based Committee for Polish Relief, headed by former U.S. president Herbert Hoover, Rada worked to overcome difficulties of access to occupied Poland. Although it was impossible to deliver any assistance to the Soviet zone of occupation or to the Polish population deported to Siberia, some goods were shipped to the German-occupied areas of Poland until the spring of 1940. Rada also provided humanitarian aid to Polish civilian refugees in Romania, Hungary, Lithuania, France, Switzerland, and Britain, as well as to Polish soldiers and officers in German POW camps. After the outbreak of war between Germany and the Soviet Union, followed by Soviet entry into the Allied camp, Rada was able finally to reach Polish deportees in Russia. Assistance also was extended to the Anders Army and to refugees scattered in the Middle East, Africa, and India.⁸⁹

After Pearl Harbor, Rada Polonii Amerykańskiej coordinated its activities with the national war effort. As Polish War Relief, Rada became a chartered member of the National War Fund, which after 1943 consolidated all fund drives.⁹⁰ Despite difficulties, Rada managed to send Polish POWs in Germany approximately twelve thousand food packages a month.⁹¹ When the Allied invasion of Normandy disrupted delivery of the humanitarian aid in Europe, Rada focused on Polish refugees in different parts of the world, including Egypt, Kenya, Rhodesia, Uganda, Tanganyika, Palestine, and Mexico. Rada continued its activities after the war, becoming American Relief for Poland in 1946. According to Świetlik’s detailed report presented at Rada’s convention in Buffalo in December 1948, between October 1939 and October 1948, Rada had distributed the staggering total of $20 million in humanitarian aid.⁹²

Throughout the war, Rada systematically informed Polonia of the plight of Polish refugees. Its publicity efforts were a continuation of a larger propaganda action coordinated by Community and War Chests and designed to educate and appeal to Americans in general. In his report to Rada’s 1942 national convention, Świetlik reviewed Rada’s accomplishments in publicity for the Polish cause. “We do not use this word,” he said, “and do not talk much about propaganda, but the fact is that . . . we have done a lot to aid propaganda on behalf of Poland.”⁹³ Dissemination of information on the Polish population outside of Poland remained a large part of that publicity campaign.⁹⁴ In the brochure The Facts about the Polish War Relief, published in English early in 1945, Rada presented its aims and program for the future and summarized its wartime activities and achievements. The brochure recapped the story of Polish refugees in different parts of the world as well as that of prisoners in German POW and concentration camps. Graphic pictures illustrated the suffering, death, hunger, and terrible living conditions. Some photographs showed temporary communities built by the exiles: a church erected by them in Valivade, India; a women’s workshop in an African camp; and Polish medical students working at the Paderewski Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland.⁹⁵ Another publication, entitled Poland’s Children, focused on the fate of the “war’s little victims” both in Poland and in exile; according to the brochure’s authors, “the children—the most helpless victims of the war— have always been the object of [the Polish War Relief’s] special attention.”⁹⁶ Expressive drawings depicting the suffering of Poles by the recognized Polish artist W. T. Benda decorated the covers of both brochures. Their postersize enlargements hung on the walls of Rada’s offices and its New York warehouse, reminders of the war’s victims.⁹⁷

One of the most successful actions carried out by Rada in cooperation with the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) involved the establishment, maintenance, and eventual dissolution of the Santa Rosa settlement in Mexico. The Santa Rosa Polish refugee camp had its origins in negotiations among the American, Polish, and Mexican governments in 1942 and 1943. As a result of an agreement between the Polish government in exile and Mexico, nearly fifteen hundred Polish civilian refugees from India (mostly women and children) found a new home in the camp near León, Mexico. The U.S. Navy offered to transport the refugees free of charge. The American ambassador to Mexico was assigned as an advisor to the Polish camp and the U.S. government demonstrated a vivid interest in the fate of these Poles who had survived the hell of Soviet deportations to Siberia. Rada became involved immediately, appropriating funds for the purchase of food and goods for the refugees who passed through American territory on their way to Mexico. Although the maintenance and administration of the camp were the responsibility of the Polish government, several American humanitarian organizations offered their financial and administrative support. Rada took upon itself the funding of education and health care programs within the camp, the State Department’s Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations covered the administrative costs, and the NCWC pledged financial support for the cultural, recreational, and rehabilitation activities of the camp. Rada appointed a permanent delegate to the camp to monitor and report on the needs of the refugee population. Rada’s special commissions visited the camp, and substantial donations in money and in kind followed.⁹⁸

The old, run-down hacienda in Santa Rosa soon was transformed into a flourishing and lively Polish colony.⁹⁹ In the summer of 1945, however, the Polish government in exile lost its recognition in Western countries, and the refugees turned their eyes toward the United States as a possible place of immigration. Negotiations on the camp’s dissolution involved the American government and dragged on for many months filled with uneasiness and frustration.¹⁰⁰ PNA/PAC president Charles Rozmarek succeeded in obtaining the American government’s permission to bring twenty-five orphaned boys to the United States. They arrived in the spring of 1946 and were placed in the facilities of the PNA college in Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania. Due to the efforts of Rada and Świetlik, Roman Catholic orphanages supported by Polonia in Chicago, New York, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Buffalo accepted a group of 231 orphaned children. The NCWC also aided in that effort.¹⁰¹

The resettlement of Polish refugee children, sponsored by Polonia and led by Rada, also included thirty-one boys from Polish refugee settlements in India who entered the Polish Seminary in Orchard Lake in 1945. Two years later another group of eighteen candidates for the priesthood arrived at St. Francis College in Cedar Lake, Indiana. Another group of fifty Polish orphans came from India to America in early 1947, as a result of the efforts of the special committee to aid Polish orphans organized in Chicago.¹⁰²

Many wartime refugees had a chance personally to experience the generosity of American Polonia, especially during the initial phase of their sojourn. The refugee wave consisted not only of intellectuals and artists; other exiles left Poland abruptly, were caught by the outbreak of the war in foreign countries without many resources at their disposal, or managed to immigrate to the United States after experiencing deportations or incarceration. Numerous professionals faced limited employment opportunities, even if they could find any legal or illegal work. There was, for example, a large group of professional women unable to support themselves in exile. Some of them were elderly women or widows; some were women with sick children or dependent elderly parents; others were the wives or mothers of Polish soldiers and officers serving in the armed forces in the West, imprisoned in POW camps in Germany, or murdered in Katyń. For them, war meant not only loss of or separation from family members, but also disabilities, illnesses, and exhaustion resulting from their experiences in the Soviet labor camps or in Germany.¹⁰³

The refugees established the Polish War Refugee Association in the United States (Zrzeszenie Uchodźców Wojennych z Polski w Stanach Zjednoczonych), based in New York, and the Circle of Polish Refugees in the Chicago area. The association, headed initially by Stefan Zagórski, and then by Władysław Korczak, turned to Rada for help. Rada allocated some financial resources for the refugees, and in March 1941 it formed a special Executive Committee for Aid to War Refugees from Poland in the United States, headed by Walter Bayer, to coordinate the aid distribution. At the end of August 1940, the lists prepared by the association in cooperation with the Polish consulate general in Chicago included about 250 persons living in the New York and Chicago areas.¹⁰⁴ A year later, a similar roster for New York contained names of 577 Polish Christian refugees. The Polish War Refugee Association’s lists of persons receiving financial aid for 1944 through 1946, however, included both Polish and Jewish names, for example, Lazar Markeles, an unemployed rabbi, and Chil Trunk, a Jewish writer.¹⁰⁵

The Polish government was concerned about the care of the refugees. Both Consul General Karol Ripa and Ambassador Jan Ciechanowski negotiated with Rada on behalf of the exiles. In the summer of 1941 Ciechanowski himself turned to Censor Świetlik, asking him to support an increase in aid to the refugees in New York. Responding to this request, Świetlik quoted the opinion of the Executive Committee for Aid, declaring that a thousand dollars a month was a sufficient sum for the time being. Świetlik reminded him that the type of support the refugees could expect in the United States would differ from what they might have gotten used to at other stages of their journey, when they were able to lean on the Polish government. “In the United States the refugees will have to depend on their own resourcefulness to a larger extent,” he cautioned. “All refugees in Chicago, with the exception of a few individuals really unable to work, found themselves jobs and settled down nicely. . . . We are under the impression that the refugees from the New York area are showing less willingness to rely on themselves,” he added.¹⁰⁶

Beginning in September 1940, Rada allocated $150 per month for Chicago-area refugees, and $500 for those in New York.¹⁰⁷ Between the beginning of 1941 and the end of 1945, Rada subsidized the Polish War Refugee Association in New York with roughly a thousand dollars a month and covered some additional outstanding sums for medical emergencies and treatment. Rada’s report for its second national convention in 1942 indicated that more than $21,000 were spent from the organization’s funds to aid Polish refugees in America. Rada’s report of 1948 showed that the help provided by the Committee for Refugees in New York exceeded $68,000.¹⁰⁸ In the years 1942 through 1945, the refugees could also count on some financial support from the Ministry of Welfare of the Polish government in exile. In July 1945, when the United States and other Western countries withdrew their recognition of the London government, the subsidies stopped. In December of the same year, Rada terminated its obligations toward the Polish War Refugee Association. Throughout 1946, the association’s leaders wrote eloquent pleas to Rada, hoping for the resumption of payments. In the spring of 1947 the association’s own funds ran out as more and more refugees landed on American shores; in the summer of 1945 alone, about two thousand persons had registered with the New York association.¹⁰⁹ The association dissolved, transferring its responsibilities to the newly created Polish Immigration Committee of New York.

In addition to humanitarian action, politics was another area of contact and cooperation between the refugees and Polonia. Franklin Delano Roosevelt won an overwhelming majority of Polish-American votes in 1940.¹¹⁰ Convinced of the benefits of Polonia’s loyalty, the president made friendly gestures toward the representatives of the London-based Polish government in exile.¹¹¹ But the support for Roosevelt and the Democratic Party that Polonia demonstrated in the first years of the war was tested when, in June 1941, Hitler’s army invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin became an instant ally and the American government rushed in with material assistance for the Soviets. For the Poles who vividly remembered “the stab in the back” from the Soviet army that had invaded and annexed territories of eastern Poland during the 1939 war with Germany, accepting the Soviet Union as an ally of Great Britain and the United States was difficult indeed. In the summer of 1941 Polish prime minister Władysław Sikorski signed an agreement with Soviet ambassador Ivan Maiski, which allowed deported and imprisoned Poles in the Soviet Union to leave the country. Stalin, however, did not give any guarantees of a return to the prewar Polish borders. Sikorski’s moderate position and his restoration of Polish-Soviet relations prompted a serious rift within the Polish government in exile, resulting in staunch opposition to any further dealings with the Soviets. The situation changed again when the United States entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The constraints of neutrality had come to an end, and Polish Americans could fully demonstrate their support for the war effort. The number of Polish Americans in the American military totaled nine hundred thousand.¹¹² Those who did not actively serve contributed to the war economy and purchased government bonds in record numbers.¹¹³

The political unity of the first years of the war, however, seemed to be breaking up. On the left side of Polonia’s political spectrum, a relatively small but significant group of pro-Soviet Polish socialists based in Detroit became involved in the creation of the American Slav Congress, established in April 1942 under the leadership of Leo Krzycki, a vice-president of the CIO’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Krzycki was considered to have a following among left-wing Poles, centered in the Polish Labor Party and the nine thousand members of the Polish section of the International Workers Order. The CIO opted for American-Soviet friendship, support for the Red Army, and the opening of a second front. In 1943 another pro-Soviet group, the Kosciuszko League, composed solely of Polish Americans, was formed by a maverick Roman Catholic priest, Stanisław Orlemański. The most eminent spokesperson for the pro-Soviet element, Oskar Lange, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, worked closely with both of the above organizations.¹¹⁴

The right side of the political spectrum was occupied by the National Committee of Americans of Polish Descent (Komitet Narodowy Amerykanów Polskiego Pochodzenia, KNAPP), formed in New York in 1942. The leadership of KNAPP included representatives of the Polish-American press, editors and publishers Maksymilian F. Węgrzynek and Frank Januszewski.¹¹⁵ They were aided by a vocal group of new arrivals from the prewar Polish government’s Piłsudski faction (called Piłsudskiites, or Piłsudczycy, supportive of the prewar regime, or Sanacja), which included such distinctive figures as General Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszewski, ambassador of Poland in Rome and member of governmental circles in interwar Poland, Wacław Jędrzejewicz, Henryk Floyar-Rajchman, and Ignacy Matuszewski. They believed that American Polonia had not only a moral obligation to Poland but also the political means to have an impact on United States foreign policy. Shocked by the presumed lack of involvement and inaction of Rada, they formed a political lobby to promote the anti-Soviet position and to denounce Sikorski and his moderate policies. Although KNAPP’s membership never surpassed two or three thousand, its impact on the increasing politicization of American Polonia at that time and on the creation of the Polish American Congress in 1944 was considerable.¹¹⁶

The Chicago headquarters of the major Polish-American organizations and Francis X. Świetlik, the president of the Polish American Council, represented a more centrist position, which included support for Sikorski and his policies and for Roosevelt as well. The turning point in the wartime relationship between American Polonia and Roosevelt’s Democratic administration came in the spring of 1943. At that time, the Germans announced the discovery of mass graves of some fifteen thousand Poles in the Katyń Forest, near Smolensk. The Germans blamed the Soviets for the mass murder; the Soviets announced that the Germans had committed the crime after entering the Soviet territories in 1941. When the Sikorski government confronted Stalin and demanded a Red Cross–led investigation, the Soviets unilaterally broke diplomatic relations with the Polish government in exile. Shortly thereafter, Sikorski died in an unexplained plane crash over Gibraltar and was replaced as prime minister by Stanisław Mikołajczyk.

Historians have argued that “the impact of the Polish-Soviet split on domestic politics in the United States was considerable. Those moderate elements in the Polish community who had refrained from public and divisive attacks on the Soviet Union in response to unity pleas by the Roosevelt administration now found themselves bitterly agreeing with the KNAPP militants.”¹¹⁷ On the other hand, the pro-Soviet Poles vigorously attacked KNAPP and its supporters on the pages of Detroit’s Głos Ludowy (People’s Voice), the only pro-Soviet Polish daily in the country. The concern of the administration over the KNAPP-inspired anti-Soviet campaign was reflected in its initiation of the circulation of a pamphlet attacking KNAPP signed by more than thirty moderate and leftist Poles.¹¹⁸

Throughout 1943 American Polonia observed with gravity how the American public as well as the government generally accepted the Soviet side of the Katyń story and showed signs of deliberately undermining the demands of the Polish government in exile.¹¹⁹ The U.S. War Department refused to launch any investigation into the Katyń massacre, despite the appeals of nine Polish-American congressmen led by John Lesinski of Michigan, Thaddeus Wasilewski of Wisconsin, and Joseph Mruk of New York. During the Big Three meeting in Tehran in 1943, the fate of Poland’s eastern border was decided without consultation with the Poles. Approached by Polish Americans inquiring about the results of the meeting, Roosevelt, who was determined to keep the agreements secret, offered vague and inconclusive answers.¹²⁰ Shortly afterward, the White House allowed two controversial figures connected with the American Slav Congress, Professor Oskar Lange and the Reverend Stanisław Orlemański, to travel to Moscow on a direct invitation from Stalin. In response to widespread criticism from major Polish-American newspapers, the White House announced that the two had journeyed as private citizens and had no right to speak for the United States.¹²¹

Political issues concerning postwar arrangements in Europe continued to occupy public attention. The Polish-American community expressed vivid interest in assuring the existence of a sovereign and independent Polish state. Charles Rozmarek, the president of the PNA since 1939 and a rising star in Chicago Polonia, together with KNAPP leaders and some other activists from the Polish press and clergy realized that Polonia needed to establish a political presence that could exert greater pressure on Washington. As a result, the Polish American Congress (PAC) was founded in May 1944 at a meeting of some twenty-five hundred representatives of Polonia gathered in Buffalo, New York. The PAC, as a large federation of fraternal, church, and professional organizations, immediately evoked enormous enthusiasm among American Polonia. Soon the PAC claimed 6 million members and followers, and was supported by nearly all Polish-American organizations.¹²²

The PAC accepted the leadership of American Polonia in a difficult moment. Roosevelt, conscious of the significance of the Polish vote in the upcoming presidential elections, agreed to meet with Mikołajczyk in the summer 1944, but demanded that the premier have no contact with Polish Americans. On August 1, 1944 an uprising broke out in Warsaw, led by the Polish Home Army, which fought against overwhelming German forces as the Red Army watched from the right bank of Vistula River. Despite the repeated pleas for help that the PAC directed to the American government, no decisive action was taken as the Germans suppressed the uprising, killing and deporting the population of Warsaw and turning the city into a sea of ruins.

The Republican Party failed to capitalize on the growing dissatisfaction of Polish Americans with Roosevelt’s policies toward Poland. In October 1944 Roosevelt went to Chicago and met Rozmarek, convincing him of his good intentions regarding the Polish question. Rozmarek, the most influential political leader of Polonia at that time, was swayed by FDR’s eloquence and announced his support for Roosevelt. On Election Day the Polish-American community gave Roosevelt 90 percent of their votes.¹²³

International events in 1945 continued to follow an adverse course for Poland. In February 1945 Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Yalta to formalize the agreements arrived at in Tehran and to conclude the settlement of the postwar world. The Allies affirmed that the boundary between Poland and the Soviet Union would run along the so-called Curzon Line, which meant a loss of 178,220 square kilometers in the east, including the cities of Wilno and Lwów. Although Poland was to be compensated by the award of German lands in the west (101,200 square kilometers), Poland became the only country in the victorious Allied camp that came out of the war with a territorial loss.¹²⁴ It was also agreed that the Lublin government installed by the Soviets would be reorganized to include a broader representation of Polish society and democratic leaders from abroad. This Provisional Government of National Unity (Tymczasowy Rząd Jedności Narodowej, TRJN) was to be recognized by the Western powers and to have the responsibility to hold “free and unfettered elections.”¹²⁵ The reaction of the PAC, Rozmarek, and the group of Polish-American congressmen was an immediate and vehement criticism of the Yalta agreement and Roosevelt’s politics as well. Leo Krzycki, however, as president of the American Polish Labor Council (APLC) and claiming to represent six hundred thousand trade union members of Polish background, supported Roosevelt and Yalta and called on the president to reject the divisive claims of other Polish-American leaders. The APLC manifesto was signed by representatives of the auto, steel, electrical, clothing, transportation, and smelter workers unions.¹²⁶

Both political factions of Polonia were represented at the San Francisco United Nations conference in April 1945, but their presence was symbolic. At the beginning of July 1945, the United States and Great Britain withdrew recognition from the London government and recognized the Provisional Government of National Unity formed in Warsaw on June 28, 1945. Despite hopes that Truman would adopt a tougher stance on the Polish question, the Big Three, meeting in Potsdam in July 1945, only confirmed the previous agreements. The PAC bulletin of August–September declared: “It was not Russia but America that broke Poland.”¹²⁷ In the growing climate of the Cold War, the Yalta agreement—often referred to as the “betrayal at Yalta”—became a rallying point for the PAC and Rozmarek. Coming closer to the position taken by KNAPP, the PAC called for the repudiation of the Yalta agreement, recognition of the London government, and Allied supervision of elections in Poland. In the Cold War atmosphere and as the Left gradually lost its significance, the PAC became the voice of the majority of American Polonia, gaining in stature and support, and representing Polonia before the American government and society.

The loss of recognition was a serious blow to the Polish government in exile in London, but its leaders were determined to carry on and, recalling the nineteenth century tradition, revived the concept of the “state in exile.” The state in exile, or Mała Polska (Little Poland) in exile, assumed a certain institutional completeness, with governmental, political, military, and social structures as intact as possible. For instance, its leaders discouraged naturalization, which was

considered to be an act of disloyalty to the exiled Government. If an officer of the Polish Army became a British subject, for example, his name was removed from the officers’ list of the future Polish Army and added to the list of the deceased. Any Pole who felt that the nature of his job justified his becoming a British subject was expected to apply for permission to the London Polish Government. They saw the preservation of the Polish character of the community, of its sense of its own Polishness, as a major task, involving the encouragement of separate Polish political, cultural, social and even quasi-military organizations.¹²⁸

After the Polish armed forces in the West had been disbanded, many still continued to believe that, in the case of imminent war between the West and Russia, Poles would take an active part in the struggle for Poland’s independence. They “considered themselves to be ‘on long leave’ rather than fully demobilized,” a view reinforced by General Anders.¹²⁹ The state in exile concept assumed that Polish diaspora had the right to consider itself a true nation in exile, being an intrinsic part of the Polish nation in Poland, and its main goal was “the duty of struggle for independence.” According to Adam Pragier, minister of information and a respected politician, the nation in exile included soldiers of the Polish armed forces, the war emigration (emigracja wojenna), and the old emigration, or Polonia. He further assumed that leadership over this structure belonged to the Polish political circles in London.¹³⁰

Although the political goals of Poland’s independence and a shared anticommunism brought the exiles and American Polonia closer together, neither cooperation nor day-to-day coexistence proved easy. For example, the goals of KNAPP included full mobilization of the Americans of Polish descent on behalf of Poland and their activism in support of the war effort and a just peace after the war’s end. According to KNAPP’s historian and cofounder, Wacław Jędrzejewicz, the organization became the arena of both confrontation and negotiation between the divergent leadership styles and methods adopted by the exiles and Polish Americans. Jędrzejewicz thought that the main reason for this not-always-harmonious relationship was the newcomers’ lack of familiarity with American conditions in which the organization had to function. “One could not always utilize similar methods of work from Poland and transfer them to American soil,” he wrote. At the same time, he emphasized that the differences “never related to political matters, but rather to tactical and organizational problems.”¹³¹ The tensions did not prove serious enough to threaten the activities of KNAPP. The Piłsudskiites who took upon themselves the ideological side of these activities, acknowledged the influence and resources of their Polish-American collaborators, Maksymilian Węgrzynek and Frank Januszewski. They were careful to stress the American character and methods accepted by the organization. The first manifesto of KNAPP, published in October 1942, denounced any affiliation with Polish or American political parties, underlined the organization’s ideological independence, and called for the general participation of all Polish Americans. KNAPP never became the mass apolitical organization envisioned by its founders. More than ten years after KNAPP’s inception, Jędrzejewicz saw three main reasons for this failure, all of them directly or indirectly connected to the group’s relationship with Polonia. First and foremost, he claimed, the inadequate political proficiency of American Polonia prompted numerous emotional but uncoordinated manifestations, which carried no political significance during the war. Second, the charitable actions of Rada were perceived by many as sufficiently fulfilling Polonia’s duties towards the old country. The third reason was based on the assumption that the Polish government in exile and not American Polonia should be responsible for Polish politics. In this situation, KNAPP attracted mainly older activists with roots in independence actions on behalf of Poland during World War I.¹³²

In the cultural realm, many Polish Americans supported the activities of the Piłsudski Institute and PIASA through financial contributions and voluntary work. Neither organization, however, ever developed a mass Polonian membership, and, at least throughout the 1940s and 1950s, they remained largely the domain of Polish exiles and later generations of educated Polish Americans. The complicated nature of the relationship between Polonia and the exiles also can be observed in the example of Tygodnik Polski and its editor, Jan Lechoń. In its first issue, published on January 10, 1943, Tygodnik proclaimed friendly relations with American Polonia to be one of its primary goals. The editorial read: “The one-year-old acquaintance of writers from Poland with their compatriots from America, both through private contacts as well as books and articles, has proved—despite some pessimists’ croaking—that a writer from Poland and a Polish American can understand each other perfectly, that can learn from each other, and that they both desire this understanding and knowledge.”¹³³

The same goal of building bridges between the exiles and American Polonia was frequently repeated in subsequent issues of Tygodnik. Letters from the readers’ section featured correspondence from Polish-American subscribers—frequently Polish-American priests—including one from Rev. S. A. Iciek, who expressed his genuine excitement over the work of so many recognized Polish intellectuals and artists and pleaded with them: “Stay with us also after the war! Keep up the weakening immigrant spirit.”¹³⁴ Soon, a handful of authors ventured into Polonian communities, presenting reports from visits with miners in Pennsylvania, trips to Polish Chicago, or occasional interviews with Polonia activists.¹³⁵ Beginning in April 1944, Tygodnik included a page with short notes about events in the Polish-American community and paid more attention to the exploits of the Polish-American soldiers fighting with the American army in Europe. In an unprecedented move, the entire expanded issue of Tygodnik of May 28, 1944, celebrated the creation of the Polish American Congress in Buffalo, New York, and was devoted to American Polonia, its history, organizations, and achievements.¹³⁶ In 1946 and 1947, for reasons that included a rather thinly veiled desire to attract financial backing, Tygodnik made a conscious effort to reach out to Polonia. At that time Polonia activist Francis Wazeter began publishing excerpts from his radio show, Talks with Polonia, and distinguished Polish-American figures and business people were featured in the column Profiles (Sylwetki).¹³⁷

In 1946 Lechoń wrote an extensive report on his trip to Chicago and on the author’s evening of poetry organized for the Chicago audience. First, he expressed his anxiety that no one was going to attend the meeting: “For certainly everyone is tired and overworked, and not many would bother to occupy one free Sunday afternoon with my lecture.” But, he added, his work for Tygodnik brought out numerous examples of vivid interest among American Polonia for intellectual pleasures, good books, and good poetry. When the lecture began, the spacious hall of the Polish Museum of America was filled with people. Many Polonia activists, including the busy Charles Rozmarek, were in the audience. “His presence is also a special declaration that Mr. Rozmarek properly esteems the present significance of culture and art for national life; it is a declaration and a call for others,” commented Lechoń.¹³⁸ Tygodnik, however, struggled financially, and its editors had to look for support from other sources, both in America and abroad. Rozmarek and the PAC did not show any interest in supporting an enterprise that they considered elitist and that had no clear appeal to the broader masses of American Polonia. By the end of 1946, in private correspondence to Aleksander Janta, an angry and disillusioned Lechoń would write of Rozmarek as a symbol of “the ocean of indifference” drowning the more ambitious initiatives.¹³⁹ Despite these efforts to extend the publication of Tygodnik, the weekly had to be discontinued for lack of funds. The last issue of Tygodnik closed with the poignant quotation from Joachim Lelewel, a nineteenth-century Polish politician, historian, philosopher, and representative of the Great Emigration. Lelewel’s words expressed a pure, Romantic version of the exile mission and sounded like a testament that the new exiles had a duty to fulfill:

Exile is an indescribable affliction; one needs to experience it to learn the magnitude of its misery. There is no language that could fully depict it. It contains, however, something that lifts a person up, calling forth his strength and courage. In misfortune, a captive is made to give himself up to his fate, bound by impotence and slavery. An exile is free and able to rely on his free will and to resist misfortune. It is up to him to reject and defeat his fate, which afflicts him with so many adversities. . . . Moreover, an exile in his fragile freedom has the responsibility of action, stemming from his being a Pole and a human being. He took this responsibility on himself of his own accord, went into exile of his own free will, and has the means and can meet his duty.¹⁴⁰

Lechoń survived in New York a few years longer, with financial support and care from both his Polish friends and some wealthy Polish-American sponsors. In 1956 he committed suicide by jumping from a New York skyscraper.¹⁴¹

Lack of knowledge about each other was, perhaps, one of the greatest obstacles in the development of closer personal relationships between exiles and Polish Americans. Kazimierz Wierzyński dedicated a moving essay, “The Walnut Tree Called Dewajtis,” to Long Island Polonia, made up of generations of successful farmers.¹⁴² Unlike Lechoń, Wierzyński did not look to Polonia only for its resources; he approached this community with genuine and warm interest. He noted the accomplishments of the Polish immigrants, their struggle for survival, and their attachment to Polish culture. He and his wife made personal friends among the old immigrants, as they did among Americans of non-Polish backgrounds. Irena Lorentowicz, on the other hand, noticeably struggled with her feeling toward Polish Americans. At first patronizing and aloof, at other times moved and enthusiastic, Lorentowicz displayed much curiosity about the lives of Polish Americans and claimed to have formed lasting friendships.¹⁴³

The wartime group of Polish exiles included an exceptionally high percentage of inteligencja and intellectuals—the social, political, and artistic elite of prewar Poland—who felt entitled to political and cultural leadership. As they struggled to establish contacts with Polonia, they also tried to define their own role within the Polish diaspora and to adhere to the ideals of the exile mission. They considered the continuation of the Polish nation in exile their responsibility and understood that this historical role of the inteligencja was made more urgent by the extermination policies of the Third Reich. Perhaps their longest-lasting accomplishments were the cultural institutions they initiated to preserve and develop the intellectual heritage of the homeland. KNAPP, the most representative political body of the early wave, failed to attract a mass following and gradually disappeared from the political scene. However, its impact on the creation and the early policies of the Polish American Congress make it an important legacy from the exiles. Speaking with the voice of the most illustrious writers and poets, the exiles expressed the suffering and spirit of the fighting homeland, while they themselves adopted the exile mission tested during Poland’s nineteenth-century struggle for independence.

This historical obligation became even firmer, as the guilt of absence overwhelmed the refugees. Władysław Gieysztor poignantly wrote about the long, meaningless, lonely, and gray days of an exile, filled with worry and anxiety: “We seem to be alive—but really I often do not know whether present life is reality or fiction. Poland and our people in Poland are so far. . . . Far away are reality and painful concern for the beloved people and land—far at the end of the world!” After nights of troubling nightmares, Gieysztor still encouraged an equally depressed friend to be strong and full of faith, since Poles in Poland suffered so much more:

The threat of death looms over them day and night—and we are safe here. We have food—they starve. Their hardship is greater than ours. This is all true. But they fight, they are together, at home; they see Polish sun, listen to Polish skylarks sing. Polish storks return to them, not to us each spring! They take their strength from the aromas of the Polish land!

They do not know what the madness of hopeless longing can do to the Polish soul. What the blindness to foreign beauty, foreign sun means. They do not know how deep is the torment of the gray refugee days, days outside of life.¹⁴⁴

Irena Lorentowicz revealed the agony of listening to the news about the Warsaw Uprising and the city’s lonely struggle in 1944: “We lived through it with despair and fear from afar, we ‘happy,’ we ‘free.’ . . . Nights of waiting, nights of hope. We hear the echoes, safe behind the ocean, undeserving, unharmed, fed full, worthless refugees.”¹⁴⁵ Feelings of guilt accompanied the realization of their gradual loss of legitimacy to speak for fighting Poland. For example, Jerzy Paczkowski, himself a poet of the Skamander generation who had fought in the Polish resistance movement organized in France, in 1942 wrote a bitter response to a poignant war poem in which Kazimierz Wierzyński called for sacrifice in the struggle. Paczkowski accused Wierzyński of fighting the enemy with rhymes, when others fought with grenades; of chiseling his poetry during walks in a safe New York park while others were left behind to do “the dirty work.”¹⁴⁶

The exiles tried to reestablish this legitimacy after the war had ended, but the homeland found itself in the chains of a communistic regime. While the ranks of the Polish postwar diaspora were swelling with veterans and refugees from Siberia and the DP camps, Tygodnik Polski revisited the concept of the exile mission, defined around the exile community as a “free voice” of the Polish nation. The author of the 1946 editorial “Emigration Speaks for the Country” (most likely Lechoń himself) admitted that even though the current emigration probably would never equal the genius of the nineteenth-century Great Emigration, their goals made it a close successor. While living in freedom, the author wrote, the exiles needed to devote themselves to the homeland and “to our brethren, imprisoned and silenced.” United in the struggle for Poland, Polish exiles could “not only help our countrymen immediately, but also speed up the moment of freedom, without hope of which our life would not be worth living even a day longer.”¹⁴⁷ Numerous other references to the Great Emigration and to political exiles of the past directly called for the conscious “continuation of the national mission” and placed post–World War II exiles as heirs of the Polish Romantic tradition.¹⁴⁸

After the end of the war, the exiles faced the task of redefining their place in American Polonia and in the larger American society. They had to give up their self-inflicted isolation based on the assumption of a speedy return to Poland. Their institutions, cut off from government funds, struggled for financial survival or totally disappeared. Some exiles did eventually return to Poland: poet Julian Tuwim from the United States in 1946, Antoni Słonimski from London in 1946, and Władysław Broniewski from Germany in 1945. Irena Lorentowicz returned in 1960. Some died in exile: anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski in 1942, and KNAPP activists Ignacy Matuszewski and Henryk Floyar-Rajchman in 1946 and 1951, respectively. A handful committed suicide: Wieniawa-Długoszewski in 1942, and Lechoń in 1956. Others blended into the new, broader wave of political refugees arriving on American shores after the war.