Karolina Lanckorońska

 PREFACE

The publication of Karolina Lanckorońska’s memoir of struggle and survival in Poland during World War II is an event of great interest. Poland, during the Second World War, was the site of two catastrophes: the Holocaust and the war of occupation and conquest against the country as a whole. While the human dimension of the Holocaust has been made indelibly vivid through a body of powerful personal testimony, the other aspects of the Polish war are known to American readers, at best, as remote history. Lanckorońska’s narrative, written mostly during the war years, gives us rare insight into some of that history’s complexities, while introducing us to a fascinating story and an extraordinary personality.

Lanckorońska’s personality may initially seem distant from us in its social formation and almost stern code of behavior and honor, but it grows both more familiar and more deeply impressive as she moves through her dramatic and unexpected journey. Countess Lanckorońska was an aristocrat with a cosmopolitan background and strong proclivities for the scholarly life. Through the vicissitudes of Polish history, her ancestors settled in Austria at the end of the eighteenth century. During her formative years, her family was involved in the highest echelons of Austrian life, while keeping the Polish side of their identity intact. The young Countess Lanckorońska seemed to choose Poland as her homeland out of an affinity for that country’s people, culture, and sensibility.

The outbreak of the war found Lanckorońska in Lvov, where she held the post of professor in Renaissance Italian art—the first woman in Poland to achieve this rank in her field.

Her decision to become engaged in the resistance movement, which arose in opposition to the Soviet and Nazi invasions, seemed to follow unhesitantingly from her convictions and affiliations. Her descriptions of working in the underground, with its dangers and its ethos of solidarity, make for some of the most fascinating sections of the book. Her activities in Soviet-occupied Lvov were mostly humanitarian, but her network of contacts was wide. As the danger of discovery became apparent, she had to flee, ironically enough, into the Nazi-occupied Polish territories where she walked a dangerous line between legal and illegal activities, organizing relief efforts for prisoners of the Nazi regime throughout occupied Poland. Her native German helped her in dealing with Nazi officials, whom she confronted with shrewd perceptiveness and uncompromising honesty. In one case, this exasperating combination led one of her Nazi interlocutors, Hans Kruger, to confess to—or boast of—the murder of twenty-three professors from the University of Lvov. (Lanckorońska later tried to make the knowledge of this terrible war-crime public, but was ignored by the German authorities). During the war, she was to some extent protected by her highly placed international connections, but eventually her refusal to disavow her loyalty to Poland led to her imprisonment in Nazi jails and incarceration in the concentration camp of Ravensbrück.

Lanckorońska’s account of these events is unmarred by any excess, self-pity, or sentimentality; but she was driven by some powerful motives. Her youthful ambition was to be a nurse; and the instinct to help, heal, and serve clearly remained potent at the time of her most severe ordeals. In Ravensbrück, she refused the “privileged” treatment of a special solitary cell, choosing instead to share the fate of her fellow inmates, whom she tried to succor in all available ways. Her preferred duty was working in the sick bay and with the so-called “rabbits” who were the subjects of odious medical experiments. But she also gave informal lectures on art and European history to women who, even on the eve of death, seemed to be hungry for the nourishment of mind and spirit.

Indeed, this is where Lanckorońska’s memoir meets with such Holocaust testimonies as Primo Levi’s account of his time in Auschwitz. Like Levi, she was sustained in her bleak setting by memories of art and by literature. Like him, she took all of the world’s culture as her province. Unlike Levi, however, she had actual access to books, and  the readings she requested ranged from Shakespeare to Herodotus and, astonishingly, Mein Kampf (know your enemy!). Her breadth of perspective gave her deep and sometimes poignant insight into the behavior of Ravensbrück’s victims. For instance, when she noticed that women condemned to execution frequently asked to have their hair done, she recalled Herodotus, who described how the Spartans at Thermopylae combed their hair with great care before a foredoomed battle.

In other respects, Lanckorońska’s resilience was also derived from a set of attachments and beliefs which may seem to us old fashioned but allowed her to behave with a selflessness and courage that amounted to a form of heroism. She was a patriot in the true sense of the word, but her love of her homeland was untainted by nationalism, if that suggests a belligerent or insular attitude. She was also a believing Catholic, whose devotion was compatible with genuinely enlightened views and encompassing sympathies. She abhorred discriminatory provincialism, claims to racial superiority, and the ethnic stereotyping that went on even in the desperate world of Ravensbrück. Rather, she judged people by their capacity for self-discipline, generosity, and selflessness, and by how much or little they complained—in other words, by the qualities of their character.

Her own character was underwritten by values that were so internalized as to be part of herself, and that withstood the test of every adversity. After the war, Lanckorońska decided to live in exile, as it became evident that Poland would come under the Soviet sphere. She went on to live to the great age of 104 and established important institutions for the study of Polish culture and art. She clearly felt that the Poland she had fought and hoped for had been, in the end, bitterly betrayed. Her moving and illuminating chronicle is evidence that, during Poland’s greatest trials, she never betrayed what she saw as its best ideals—or indeed, herself.

—Eva Hoffman

INTRODUCTIONDoes one deserve special credit for devoting all one’s strength to doing what one does for love of it? I think not.1Karolina Lanckorońska (1898-2002).

The last representative of the clan Lanckoroński of Brzezie considered that the family history, dating back to the fourteenth century, imposed duties upon her rather than privileges. During the time of Poland’s noble Commonwealth,2 the Lanckorońskis played an active role in political life. They were appointed Deputies and Senators in the Polish Parliament (Sejm) and held various offices and functions such as Bishop, Provincial Governor, Chancellor or Mayor, not to speak of General or Chief of Staff.3 Karolina Lanckorońska was born in the nineteenth century (1898) and lived for the whole of the twentieth century, not only witnessing but participating in many historic events. The main theme of her life throughout was service to Poland and Polish culture.

In the nineteenth century, Vienna, capital of the Habsburgs, became the principal seat of the Lanckoroński family. When Antoni (1760-1830), a deputy in the Four Year Sejm and loyal supporter of the Constitution of the Third of May, moved to Vienna after the Third Partition of the Polish Republic, he was there accorded the office of Austrian Chamberlain and appointed Speaker of the State Sejm. His  son Kazimierz (1802-74) took his seat in the Upper House, and his grandson Karol – father of Karolina and distinguished recipient of the Order of the Golden Fleece – was appointed Chief Steward at the court of the Emperor Franz Josef I. Throughout the nineteenth century the Lanckorońskis became slowly embedded in the governmental fabric of the multiethnic monarchy.

The life of the last of them, Karol Lanckoroński (1848-1933), renowned collector and amateur art historian, encompassed the rise and fall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. A greatly respected owner of extensive properties in Galicia, the Kingdom of Poland and Styria, he was highly regarded for his academic pursuits as well as a passion for collecting, with a vigour worthy of the Renaissance era. His collection of paintings in the Lanckoroński Palace comprised one of the richest private art collections in Vienna.4 Through his marriages, twice to Austrians and for the third time to a Prussian, Małgorzata Lichnowsky5 (sister of Karol Maximilian Lichnowsky, German ambassador in London from 1912 to 1914), to all appearances Lanckoroński was ‘completely at home in the life of the Court and of the highly exclusive Austrian aristocracy’.6 Poland’s place under the rule of the Habsburgs he saw as part of a three-nation federation, but the world of his political illusions vanished with the death of the Emperor and the subsequent collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Though closely bound up with German and Austrian culture, he nevertheless achieved an enormous amount for Polish culture and learning. His work in this field was acknowledged by the government of independent Poland with the award of the Great Ribbon of the Order of Polonia Restituta. When, after his death, his beloved daughter Karla (Karolina) was tidying the room, she found lying open on his bedside table a copy of Poland’s national epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz.

Lanckoroński avoided trying to influence the inclinations or choices of his children in matters national or political. Antoni, Karla and Adelajda, who were reared and educated in Vienna, felt their closest affinity with the culture and history of the old, pre-partition Poland and the new Poland now struggling for independence. At the time of the First World War, when the Chief Steward of the Habsburg court was experiencing the death of the Emperor in 1916, his eighteen-year-old daughter Karolina, with youthful enthusiasm, was collecting photographs of the Polish Legion, leaflets and Eagle badges, while supporting the central figure, ‘Brigadier’ Piłsudski. She also spent some time nursing sick and wounded Polish soldiers in a convalescent home (Faniteum) built by her father. She read with deep emotion Forest Echoes and Faithful River, novels by Stefan Żeromski. At the same time, dearest to her heart was the poetry of Juliusz Słowacki, of which she memorised lengthy extracts.

By the end of the war, the secondary-school student was showing distinctly academic leanings. As a voluntary attendant, she began to follow the university lectures in Vienna by the well-known art historian Max Dvořák. In 1920, having graduated from the private secondary school ‘Zu den Schotten’, she enrolled at Vienna University as an art-history student. Her choice of subject was as self-evident as her childhood contact with art had been unforced. The family collection of paintings in the Vienna palace, supplemented by visits to various European museums, had a considerable influence on her lively imagination.

Equally, in the family’s summer residence at Rozdół in Galicia, where she used to spend the holidays, Karolina saw not only portraits of her ancestors, but examples of Polish art. The walls of the Rozdół palace, indeed, were hung with paintings by – among other artists – Jan Matejko, Arthur Grottger, Józef Chełmoński and Jacek Malczewski, who was virtually ‘court painter’ to the Lanckorońskis. Karolina was not at her happiest in the vast, neo-baroque Vienna palace, as she recalled years later: ‘For more or less seven months of the year, we eagerly looked forward to the longed-for visit to Rozdół where we stayed from June to mid-November, when we returned to Vienna. The important feast of St Karol [Charles] – name-day of both my father and myself (as well as father’s birthday) – we always celebrated at Rozdół where, in the dining-room according to family tradition, on that day the chairs of the celebrants were decorated with flowers.’

It was there, in fact, that she passed the happiest hours of her childhood, climbing trees and swearing childish oaths in their shade. While still a student, observing evidence of a neglect in public health care, she took to ‘chasing’ after the sick. On her return to Vienna she resumed attendance at art-history lectures and studied the works of her favourite artist, Michelangelo. From time to time her father expressed discontent with his daughter’s student lifestyle, arguing that ‘women of the Renaissance [. . .] were educated and did not run to catch a tram at eight o’clock in the morning, clutching a briefcase’. But even before obtaining her doctorate, Karolina was thinking about her future. The desire to devote herself to the service of others, the attraction of nursing and her interest in medical matters led her to visit the School for Nurses in Warsaw.

In the end, however, following the kind advice of the Rozdół  doctor, Tadeusz Rawski – ‘a far better and wiser man than most’ – she opted for an academic career. On the strength of a dissertation entitled ‘Studies relating to Michelangelo’s Last Judgement and its artistic descendants’, which she had been preparing, supervised by Max Dvořák (after whose death she completed the thesis under the guidance of Julius von Schlosser), Karolina was accorded her doctorate in the history of art, at the University of Vienna on 21 May 1926.

The same year Dr Lanckorońska paid a lengthy visit to Rome, where she devoted herself to researching Italian art of the Renaissance and baroque periods. The material she gathered on that occasion bore fruit in her subsequent learned works. She was librarian of the Rome branch of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (PAU), where for several years she was in charge of the art-history department, organising among other things collections of books and photographs, partly consisting of her father’s bequests.

Karol Lanckoroński died in 1933, leaving behind properties in Galicia, which forged a further link between the Lanckoroński family and Poland. Karolina herself inherited Komarno and settled permanently in Lwów. Her academic interests played no small part in this decision – namely a possible university career. In 1934 she was elected a member of the Lwów Scientific Society and, in October, the governing board of the Jan Kazimierz University supported her request for admission to the oral examination to qualify for the assistant professorship of modern art, expressing the unanimous opinion that ‘the acquisition of Dr Lanckorońska by the Jan Kazimierz University as Art History lecturer is highly desirable’.

The same year – as a private lecturer – she began giving lectures and conducting classes. Her examination thesis based on her dissertation, entitled ‘The decoration of the Church Il Gesù in the context of baroque development in Rome’, was received with unanimous acclaim on 13 December 1935 by the Council of the Humanities Department, and on 13 January 1936 by the Senate of the Jan Kazimierz University.7 That was how Dr Karolina came to be the first woman in Poland to obtain a professorial appointment in the field of art history. Now she was able to devote herself wholeheartedly to what she most earnestly desired: the work of teaching and research at university level. However, as she used to say, her happiness was short-lived.

Her wartime memoirs begin with the outbreak of the Second World War and the invasion of Lwów by Soviet forces in September 1939. With emigration as a possible option, she chose instead the ‘destiny of  the belated grandchild’ of her valiant forebears and refused to leave Poland while the country was occupied by foreign armies. At the turn of the year 1939-40, she was still teaching art history at the university. However, it was not long before she was actively engaged in the underground resistance. In January 1940 she swore an oath of allegiance to the underground Union for Armed Struggle (Związek Walki Zbrojnej, or ZWZ). The heart-rending, tragic events of that period – the deportations to the heart of the Soviet Union, the kidnappings and anarchy, the climate of human despair and helplessness – she has tried most faithfully to record in her memoirs. Numerous arrests of members of the Lwów underground, as a result of informers’ reports to the authorities, brought about Karolina’s hurried escape from Lwów in May 1940. As soon as she arrived in Kraków, she resumed her contacts with the underground. On the orders of Colonel Tadeusz Komorowski, commanding the Kraków regional branch of ZWZ, she undertook various duties, including the translation into German of appeals designed to demoralise the German forces. These notices were then pasted on billboards and walls in the city. Chiefly, however, she was engaged in the activity of the Polish Red Cross, in which as a nursing volunteer she brought Samaritan help to sick and wounded prisoners-of-war released from the German Stalags and Oflags. In that capacity she witnessed ‘many deaths and many burials’. In the second half of 1941 the Main Council for Relief (Rada Główna Opiekuńcza, or RGO) entrusted to Karolina Lanckorońska the care of all prisoners in the whole German-occupied territory of Poland – the so-called General Government. She dedicated herself totally to this assignment. Her excellent knowledge of German, her aristocratic descent and her steadfastly courageous attitude towards the Germans helped her to operate effectively. Collective action organised by her for the supply of extra food in prisons, and the procurement of parcels and other assistance for approximately 27,000 prisoners, were instrumental in saving the lives of many of those in captivity.

In January 1942, as an official of the RGO, she travelled to Stanisławów. Having learned of mass murders carried out by the local Gestapo (German secret police), she sent an immediate message to General Komorowski – at the time commanding underground resistance units in the Kraków area. Although officially appointed the RGO Commission’s Manager for the Stanisławów region in March, with German agreement, Karolina ran into problems, arousing ever-increasing suspicion about her activities, especially on the part of SS Hauptsturmführer Hans Krüger.

On 12 May 1942 she was arrested during a committee meeting of the RGO in Kołomyja and was later taken away to the prison in Stanisławów. While she was being interrogated, her persecutor, Krüger, exasperated by the unflinching demeanour of his prisoner, her display of Polish spirit, and convinced that a sentence of death awaited her, confessed to the murder of twenty-five professors of the Lwów colleges of higher education. Thus she became the first witness in the case of a crime that has remained unpublished to this day. What Krüger had not expected was intercession by members of the Italian royal family to Hitler’s Gestapo chief, Heinrich Himmler himself. This led to her death sentence being quashed. A few days later, on 8 June, the Countess found herself in jail in Lwów. There, while undergoing interrogation by SS Kommissar Walter Kutschmann, she gave an account of her interrogation by Hans Krüger in Stanisławów and, at his request, wrote a fourteen-page report in which she revealed (among other things) Krüger’s confession to the murder of the Lwów professors. The text of her report reached Himmler himself and he was surely responsible for having the ‘chauvinist’ Polish countess sent to Ravensbrück, the women’s concentration camp. On 27 November 1942, with an SS escort, she left Lwów and Poland for ever.

After a short spell in a Berlin jail on the Alexanderplatz, she was transported on 9 January 1943 to her appointed quarters in Ravensbrück. On arrival in the camp, she was allocated the number 16076. As a result of repeated representations by the International Red Cross, she was placed on her own in Sonderhaft, or ‘special confinement’. This ‘favour’ Karolina regarded as humiliating and, at her own request, she was sent back to the camp as an ordinary prisoner. ‘There are things going on in there,’ she wrote after leaving Ravensbrück, ‘which people cannot bear to hear about, things the human mind cannot comprehend.’

The memoirs present us with heart-rending documentary descriptions of scenes in the camp life of the women prisoners, of their terror and suffering, faced with disease, torture and death. The atmosphere of constant tension is almost palpable. Against this background, some outstanding women prisoners of invincible character succeeded in redeeming human dignity amid the dire conditions of the camp. They managed to organise meetings, lectures and discussions on subjects pertaining to actual normality, so proving that ‘in countless cases, all this nameless brutality, all these cruelties can neither break nor destroy, nor even harm the human spirit’. Karolina Lanckorońska, in fact, has devoted to such women brief character studies and portraits from  memory – sketched, as it were, in passing. She herself conducted art-history lessons for the ‘rabbits’ – that is to say, women who had been subjected to dangerous medical experiments.

A month before the end of the war, on 5 April 1945, as the first Polish woman to be freed, Karolina was released from the camp with a batch of 299 French women prisoners. This was the result of intervention by the President of the International Red Cross, Professor Carl Burckhardt. Along with many others, the final scene in Ravensbrück will be certain to lodge in the reader’s memory: Karolina’s farewell to her fellow prisoners, when, in deference to a prison superstition, she turns to take a last look at the camp as she passes through the gates.

In Switzerland, Karolina Lanckorońska handed over to Professor Burckhardt her report on the situation of women prisoners in Ravensbrück. She also published an account of her recent experiences in the columns of a French-language learned periodical ‘Souvenir de Ravensbrück’ (Revue Universitaire, 1945, vol. 2), and in German, ‘Erlebnisse aus Ravensbrück’ (Schweizerische Hochschulzeitung, Jg 19:1945/46 Heft 2). At the same time she began writing her Wspomnienia (Memoirs).8 Travel to Italy and an encounter with soldiers of the Polish Army 2 Corps, who were unwilling to return to a Communist Poland, confronted her with a new and unusual task. At the wish of General Władysław Anders and with the rank of Public Relations Officer, 2 Corps (later Lieutenant, AK [Armia Krajowa], or Home Army, as Poland’s wartime resistance was officially known), Karolina undertook to organise educational studies for about 1,300 former soldiers of 2 Corps. Her acquaintances and pre-war academic contacts made it possible for Polish students to attend Italian universities and colleges in Rome, Bologna and Turin. Later she was instrumental in promoting similar activities in England and Scotland.

In November 1945, with Father Walerian Meysztowicz and Polish émigré professors, she signed the founding charter of the Polish Historical Institute in Rome. Closely involved with this ‘small nerve centre of free Polish learning’, Karolina devoted herself entirely to publishing and organising activities to promote Polish culture. Many years later, speaking about her determination and options at the time, she had this to say: ‘Poland’s destiny guided my inclinations to such an extent that I felt obliged to abstain from my beloved art-history research [. . .] It seemed to me then – and I believe I was right – it was the only painful sacrifice of my life – that the service of Polish culture at  that time required of me not the study of Michelangelo, but work of a completely different kind. It was clear to me that the need was to dedicate all my energy to researching and publishing the sources of Polish history to be found in the archives of the West.’9 Under the aegis of the Polish Historical Institute (financed by the Lanckoroński Foundation) were published twenty-eight volumes of an annual review devoted to Polish history, Antemurale, and seventy-six volumes in a monumental series of sources, Elementa ad Fontium Editiones, as well as the Acta Nunciaturae Polonae. It is difficult to appreciate the scale of activity initiated in 1967 by the Lanckoroński Foundation in promoting Polish learning and science.

Karolina Lanckorońska, who dedicated her whole life to the service of Polish learning and culture, also displayed the traditional patriotism of a Polish citizen. She inherited from her father a unique collection of paintings, which, as the last of her line, she presented as a gift in 1994 to the royal palaces in Kraków and Warsaw, ‘in honour of the Free and Independent Republic’. When the monthly periodical Znak (The Sign) distributed a questionnaire to distinguished personalities in the field of culture, asking ‘Polishness – what does it mean?’, Karolina Lanckorońska replied succinctly: ‘Polishness is for me the awareness of belonging to the Polish nation. I consider we should do everything possible to provide concrete proof of this awareness, though I do not understand the need to analyse it.’

Karolina Lanckorońska’s fundamental activity consisted in the promotion of intellectual life with ceaseless vigilance in order to ensure that Poland’s learning and culture remain in the sphere of European and world culture. She died in Rome aged 104 on 25 August, 2002.

Lech Kalinowski and Elżbieta Orman

PROLOGUE

This memoir, intended for possible publication after my death, was written during the years 1945-6, following my liberation from German captivity.1 It was originally intended for publication in English, and I had a few extracts from the book translated and sent to two publishers, both of whom rejected them out of hand on the grounds that the text was ‘too anti-Russian’. A few years later I sent the specimen extracts to two other English publishers, who also turned them down, this time on the grounds that they were ‘too anti-German’.

My memoir is meant to be a report – and only a report – of what I witnessed during the Second World War. I know that others have lived through a great deal more than myself. I was never in Auschwitz or Kazakhstan. Nevertheless, I also know that every first-hand account contributes fresh detail to the picture of those years. I have made nextto-no textual changes, despite the fact that in some places I refer to things nowadays familiar to a wide public and better described elsewhere. I leave it to my publishers to decide on any possible future ‘abbreviations’, since it is impossible for me to assess, let alone rework, the contents of a book written more than fifty years ago. My one stipulation is that any omissions should be limited to matters of detail and include nothing that bears on the general atmosphere that engendered this memoir. I am confiding the editorial task in the first  place to Professor Lech Kalinowski and Eli Orman. They may like to involve other friends in their discussions about any ‘cuts’.

K.L. 

Rome, 20 February 1998

Michelangelo in Ravensbrück