About Jacek Woźniakowski and the history of his family, the Woźniakowski and Pawlikowski families, about the landed gentry, the House Under the Firs in Zakopane, and also about “Tygodnik Powszechny”
In the Zakopane House Under the Firs, one of the most beautiful buildings of Podhale architecture, the buzz of the salon, which hosted the most distinguished figures of the Second Polish Republic’s politics and culture, will soon fall silent. The manor in Chorzelów will soon come under the management of a German administrator, a German general will live in the upstairs annex, the rest of the rooms in the house and the outbuildings will be bursting with displaced people from the Poznań region, and a Jewish family will find refuge in the orangery, under the cover of palms and ficuses. The abandoned manor in Medyka will be completely dismantled, brick by brick, by the local peasants. Meanwhile, the thoroughbred horses, the pride of the Widzów stud farm, will run in German colors at the Lviv racetrack until they are driven west by the advancing Red Army, which will come with a sure step, though in holey shoes, on its way to conquer Berlin. But for now, in the summer of 1939, no one expects any of this yet.
The Manor in Independent Poland
Jacek Woźniakowski, a young man with impeccable manners, constantly corrected by various aunts and uncles, carefully taught languages by governesses, so-called mademoiselles, from Belgium and Switzerland, a keen rider, mounting noble horses from his father’s stud farm, was designated by the family as the heir to various family estates.
There was concern about Jacek’s lack of interest in rural life, and even more about his excessive inclination towards books and paintings, so during family gatherings, the possibility was discussed that the future heir might end up in diplomacy. Such an option seemed worthy of consideration to the young gentleman.
– Even before my final exams, Józef Czapski, a friend of our friends and relatives, initiated a fundamental conversation with me – recalls Professor Jacek Woźniakowski today. – I laid out my then ideology to him, completely idiotic, that studies were pure fun for me, and my true desire was to lock myself in an ivory tower and think and write there. Czapski said with clear pity in his voice: “With such views and a few languages, you would make an excellent ambassador.”
If at that time someone had told young Jacek that soon the landed gentry would be spoken of in a condemning past tense, he probably would not have been able to imagine it. After all – he probably thought – this class bears a significant responsibility for national culture, for education, for nurturing values without which the world would inevitably collapse. It was enough to delve into the history of his ancestors, even just along the line of the most famous ones, the Pawlikowskis from Medyka, who out of love for their homeland not only fought for independence and conspired but also founded libraries, publishing houses, orchards, and nature protection leagues.
The longed-for independence, however, brought many disappointments to the landed gentry. They lost political significance, and the agrarian reform resolution adopted by the Sejm of the Second Polish Republic in 1919 – although later softened and implemented very cautiously – fundamentally shook their economic position, bringing many landed estates to the brink of ruin.
Szymon Rudnicki, in his book “The Polish Landed Gentry in the 20th Century,” writing that after the adoption of the agrarian reform, there was depression and nervousness among the landowners, quotes some of their statements: “It was already better under the partitions,” “crushing of the landowning class,” “mourning of the landowning world,” “buried alive.”
– Until the end of the First World War, most of the landed gentry fought for independence – explains Woźniakowski – and when it was regained, there was no longer much to fight for, and the state of possession was shrinking, estates and property had to be gradually sold off. However, in the environment in which I was raised, there was predominately joy and pride that one could serve in the Polish army, that there were booths of Polish painters at international exhibitions, that the democratization of society was progressing. At the same time, there was a feeling of enormous economic hardship. Debts, loans, parceling, and disproportionately low food prices compared to industrial products became a constant topic of conversation. I remember many cases of unsuccessful attempts to switch to the milling or sawmill industry, which, due to the inability to repay loans, ended in the bankruptcy of entire families.
Medyka, the enormous, hitherto prospering estate of Jacek Woźniakowski’s mother’s family, began to decline significantly during the interwar period.
Maria Dąbrowska, in her essay “Crossroads. Studies on Rural Issues,” published in 1936, where she declared herself a staunch supporter of agrarian reform, also described the spiritual crisis of the Polish landed gentry: “The Polish manor no longer radiates much to the countryside or the city. And if anyone from this sphere radiates, it is those who, for various reasons, have given up land ownership and found other fields of creative work.”
The young Witold Gombrowicz saw his class even more sharply: “At the age of ten – he wrote in “Polish Memories” – I discovered something hideous: namely, that we ‘gentry’ are a completely grotesque and absurd, stupid, painfully comical, and even disgusting phenomenon… Just like that! I didn’t care much whether we were exploiters of the people and what our morality was, but I was terrified that we looked so idiotic against the background of simple people.”
– Gombrowicz, though he mocked and hated, also snobbed – says Woźniakowski. – And snobbery is, after all, proof of attachment. This split, a critical attitude mixed with longing and contemplation of the picturesque nature of this formation, is visible in Prus, Sienkiewicz, and Wyspiański. And the nostalgic “Nights and Days” by Dąbrowska was one of the most beloved readings in all landed gentry homes. Also, Stanisław Witkiewicz, extremely critical of the landed gentry’s past, described one of Julian Kossak’s paintings depicting a Sarmatian equestrian epic with incredible admiration!
The Youth of a Landowner
Jacek Woźniakowski was born on April 23, 1920, in Biórków, the manor of his grandparents – Maria from the Rodakowski family and Marcjan Woźniakowski.
At the age of twelve, he was sent, as was fitting, to study abroad. First, there was a French school in Fribourg, Switzerland, run by Marian priests.
– It probably didn’t give me anything good in terms of religion; I really disliked the engravings in the thick Benedictine missal, the daily mass was a torment, and I didn’t understand a thing about the liturgical calendar and its oddly formalized explanations.
Then he was almost sent to England, to an exclusive Benedictine private school, but he managed to persuade his parents to change their decision. Throughout his stay in Switzerland, he experienced what he called “le mal du pays” – a longing for the country – and the “physical lack of Tatra landscapes.” A century earlier, his great-grandfather, the painter Henryk Rodakowski, was so homesick that he twice escaped from the elite Theresianum school in Vienna.
Jacek was sent, according to the fashion of the time, to Rabka, to the Sanatorium Gymnasium of Wieczorkowski, to treat his “enlarged glands” in the local microclimate. The school’s owner, Dr. Jan Wieczorkowski, redistributed the income of others like Janosik: he charged wealthy parents heavily and admitted local highlanders for free.
Jacek’s friends in the boarding school were: the son of a landowner, the son of a German industrialist from Łódź, and the son of a Jewish lawyer from Warsaw, who infected him with a love for Tuwim.
– Various silly, schoolboy snobberies had no deeper impact on my relations with people – Woźniakowski asserts. But he admits that in some matters he found a common language only with the sons of landowners. Only with them, for example, could he talk about horses or hunting. He remembered from landowner homes that intellectuals invited to hunts easily earned the nickname “Sonntagsjaeger,” or Sunday hunters, when they couldn’t behave according to hunting customs or when they exaggerated in correctness, elegance of hunting outfits, or erudite knowledge of hunting terminology. Intellectuals in landowner salons sometimes also earned the name “trebienists” – as those who try so hard that they do everything “tres bien,” without the necessary dose of nonchalance.
Although for a century Woźniakowski’s ancestors were swarming with professors, artists, and writers, they were all grounded in the land, and this largely constituted their identity. At Kozińiec, in the House Under the Firs, where Żeromski, Reymont, Tetmajer, Modrzejewska, Staff, Orkan, Pigoń – to name just a few from the long list of distinguished names – even in this very nonconformist environment, connections with the customs of the rural manor were obvious.
– The world of landowners, encountered at hunts, name days, and funerals, was colorful, embedded in the tradition of the distant times of the Republic, while the intelligentsia appeared colorless. In the canon of our readings at the time were Kaczkowski, now forgotten, Kraszewski, Sienkiewicz, Choynowski… They prepared us for identification with the knightly-landowning class, not the intelligentsia-professional one. Although the intelligentsia largely derived from the landowning class, the landowning class was characterized by an anachronistic distrust of people who earned money and did not live off the land.
If his grandmother, Wanda from the Abramowicz family Pawlikowska, had to point a finger at a particularly unpleasant image of an intellectual, her choice would undoubtedly fall on Stanisław Przybyszewski, who, incidentally, appeared in the Lviv home of the Pawlikowskis only once – the grandfather was the president of the Literary Society, so he had to accept various writers. The author of “Children of Satan” got drunk, vomited on the piano, and played Chopin so badly that Mrs. Wanda couldn’t recover from it for a long time. She played the piano excellently herself. And not only that, Przybyszewski later behaved despicably towards the grandparents’ ward – Aniela Pająkówna, the daughter of their manager, whom they helped to go to Paris. Przybyszewski seduced her and left her with a child, and then, when he came to Paris, he took his daughter – who later, as Przybyszewska, wrote famous plays about the French Revolution: “Thermidor” and “The Danton Case” – for a walk and instilled in her contempt for her mother.
The landed gentry’s dislike of the bourgeoisie was as strong as their reserve towards the intelligentsia.
Woźniakowski’s great-uncle, Tadeusz Pawlikowski, was the first director of the Słowacki Theatre in Krakow and sank his entire family fortune into the theater. A liberal by conviction, he ruled there in a truly dictatorial manner, and once he bought out the entire hall, invited workers from Krakow factories, and greeted them with the words: “For the first time, I have a truly respectable audience before me.” It’s hard to say whether he did it out of socialist inclinations or rather for the sheer pleasure of insulting the bourgeoisie, most likely both, in any case, the latter was a great success, and so-called all of Krakow was outraged by this self-righteous performance.
– The city appeared to the landed gentry for centuries as something somewhat foreign, poorly integrated with Polish tradition – Woźniakowski reflects. – The city was a bit German, a bit Italian, a bit Jewish, a bit unclear, a poorly understood organism. The city – with a few exceptions – had no customs, no style, no norms of its own. This infamous weakness of the “third estate” was still visible in the 19th, maybe even the 20th century: when townspeople hung paintings in their homes, they were paintings of manors, which greatly amused people living in the countryside.
Idyllic
Many years later, in times when there was no longer a landed gentry, Woźniakowski picked up Andrzej Kuśniewicz’s last novel and read with surprise that the essence of a landowner’s life was pinching girls and wandering with a double-barreled gun in the woods. He himself remembered something quite different from his childhood. The house was constantly filled with a stream of visitors. The parents tried to help them, starting with dispensing medicines – every decent manor had such a pharmacy – and ending with teaching in village schools. His mother, like his grandmother Maria, the daughter of Henryk Rodakowski, ran a rural women’s circle – teaching the local people how to run a household and manage modest means. In the summer, they would go en masse to the harvesters. Woźniakowski remembers once sitting down on the roadside, tired from the heat, only to hear from his father: “What are you doing! Don’t you see people are working?” Sitting when others were working bordered on indecency.
I tell Woźniakowski that his idyllic memories of the landed gentry starkly contrast with what Konstanty Jeleński, for example, remembered from the same time.
“The manor – it’s the daily contrast between kindness, warmth, delicacy in the salon and beating the face of a peasant whose cow strayed into the field – wrote Jeleński in the afterword to Maria Czapska’s book “Europe in the Family”. – Moreover, how can one, crying over Janek the Musician, remain indifferent to the fate of scrofulous, pimply, snotty children who flee when caught bathing in the manor pond?”
Yes, Woźniakowski already saw certain flaws in the noble image of his class back then. The stench, dirt, and poverty were shocking for him when he first looked into the outbuildings of a certain charming, beautiful, and meticulously maintained manor: he could have been 14, maybe 15 years old then.
But…
Firstly, he says, for his generation, it was obvious that far-reaching social reforms were necessary, and soon the anachronistic relations between the landowner and the peasants would disappear. And thus, the custom that invariably embarrassed him – the peasants kissing the master’s hand – would pass into history.
Secondly, he recounts with amusement, Jeleński softened his views with age. The last time, shortly before his death, they had lunch with his wife, accompanied by Józef Czapski, in a small French bistro.
– Kot Jeleński and Józio reminisced about the old days in Lithuania, exchanged anecdotes about neighbors, and held conversations, just like in Soplicowo. In their old age, they appreciated the traditions of the Sarmatian tale, its richness, and literary qualities. It was unexpected for me how people, so independent of this tradition, savor it so much.
The Cavalry Style
But let’s return to 1938, when Józef Czapski sowed the seed of doubt in young Jacek Woźniakowski about the sense of a diplomatic career. The young man, however, didn’t have much time to ponder the painter’s bitter remarks – there was the final exam, then the Reserve Cavalry Officer School in Grudziądz, and practice in the 8th Uhlan Regiment, during which he spent the summer of 1939.
“The basic test of military virtues was undoubtedly cutting willow rods – he would write 50 years later in a memoir recently published by the Krakow literary magazine “NaGłos”. – I cut the rods poorly, especially because I am left-handed. And the track leading along the stands with willow rods was set up for right-handed cutting, and the horses knew what ‘cut from above’ meant – from above and near their right ear. I dreamed of a charge: at last, I will grab the saber in my left hand.”
But he was not destined to experience any cavalry charge, even though he set out for war on horseback. The Germans attacked them from airplanes and tanks. In the notes made hot on the heels of the September campaign, the 19-year-old presents the war as a chaotic scramble: night watches, night shootings, some orders, scattered couriers.
He joined a group of uhlans who decided to make their way to Hungary to continue fighting. “I just warn you, you’ll have to groom your horse yourself” – cautioned the captain.
September 17 found them on the road. From then on, they avoided villages where freshly armed Ukrainians by the Germans were building triumphal arches for the Red Army soldiers. Once, due to one of the uhlans losing his helmet and putting on a forage cap, they were mistaken for Bolsheviks and greeted with honors by the local population, who came out to meet them with the priest at the head.
When they were already approaching the Romanian border, Jacek was hit by a Ukrainian bullet. “When I was falling – he would write – I remembered someone saying that mortally wounded people fall backward, and lightly wounded forward; so with all my willpower, I bent forward, spun around, and pressed my forehead to the ground.”
Saved thanks to happy coincidences and human kindness, he spent the war in family homes, with a break for a year’s stay in Warsaw, where he completed a school that could be completed at that time – a vocational trade school. First, as a convalescent in the House Under the Firs, he went through a significant part of the art history study program.
In the Chorzelów manor (his mother remarried Karol Tarnowski from Chorzelów), already in somewhat better health, he got involved in the resistance. He became an adjutant to the commander of the Mielec district of the Home Army. Among his numerous tasks was the distribution of distillery products: money from the sale of moonshine went to help the families of the fallen and arrested.
In all the manors he visited during the war, there were long, night conversations about what would happen next. It was clear to everyone that an era was ending, although no one expected to be simply thrown out of their home and land.
In 1944, Woźniakowski observed the German retreat, which proceeded in impressive order. Soon he also experienced his second encounter with the Russians in his life. After a night of artillery shelling, he went out on the road and saw a gypsy-Mongolian caravan approaching with small horses and smelled the tar in the air. Their hostility did not bode well. Later, an order came to concentrate the units in the forest, dig in, and in case of a Bolshevik attack, to accept the fight.
– “Accept the fight” – it was grotesquely absurd. We saw the Bolshevik mass sweeping through the country on one side and our pathetic armament on the other. My commander wrote: “I release you from the duty of executing the order, although I myself will execute it.”
Woźniakowski got on his bike – the cavalry style had long been forgotten – and rode 30 kilometers to convince his higher-ups that further fighting was nonsense. When he reached the AK Inspectorate Command – it turned out that the order had already been formally revoked. Meanwhile, the Rzeszów subdistrict command proposed to the Russians to incorporate AK units as autonomous units – alongside the Red Army and Berling’s troops – and march together on Berlin. The Soviet commanders courteously replied that they accepted the offer and put suburban barracks at their disposal.
Adjutant Woźniakowski had no doubts. An order is an order, and politics sometimes requires acting by trial and error. The peasants belonging to the local AK unit were, however, suspicious, and rightly so. In total, only a few dozen partisans showed up. Then the Red Army entered the barracks, and the arrests began. Jacek was playing bridge upstairs. He put down his cards, went down the side hall by the kitchen stairs, and rode off on his bike. That was the end of his military activities.
Today he no longer remembers whether it was already after that or just before that, he was involved in the resistance, supporting young AK members who were trying to reconstruct the organizational network, but he saw no sense in these activities. When he heard Okulicki’s order from January 19, 1945: “In the belief that you will remain forever faithful only to Poland and to facilitate your further work – with the authorization of the President of the Republic of Poland, I release you from the oath and dissolve the ranks of the Home Army,” the feeling of relief probably outweighed the sense of defeat.
The Hardest Exam
He focused on searching for his sister Kasia, who was deported as an AK nurse in 1945 to the depths of Russia. He traveled to Lublin, where a Jewish lawyer, whom Jacek’s family helped survive the occupation, became an important figure in the government. He got his sister, who – as it turned out – was working as a nurse in a coal mine, on the list of repatriates. Katarzyna Woźniakowska, later Łopuska, returned on one of the first trains.
Jacek Woźniakowski says that primarily because he had to strive for his sister’s return, he did not attempt to cross the border in 1945. Perhaps considerations he wrote about in the book “Canadian Notes,” pondering the fate of an emigrant, also weighed in: “In many of us, a poignant feeling arises that we would betray the blood-heavy testament. Someone must do what those could not.”
He bought and sold sugar, taught English, translated, and thanks to Professor Pigoń, he got into Polish studies and connected with “Tygodnik Powszechny”.
His father, Henryk Woźniakowski, found himself in the Opole region right after the war, trying to revive German sugar estates from ruin. He had already achieved considerable success when the first arrests of agricultural administrators of landowning origin began, and soon there was a notorious trial of Witold Marenge, an excellent manager, a landowner of French descent, who was appointed president of the State Land Properties just after the war. Expecting the worst, Henryk Woźniakowski packed his things one day and moved to Katowice.
– He never reminisced about the past. He never complained – his son recalls. – This was a fairly common attitude among the landed gentry. They found satisfaction in being able to adapt and be useful. The post-war period was the hardest exam for my parents’ generation, and most of their environment passed this test of character.
Jacek Woźniakowski’s father made a living by painting portraits for miners and teaching art history in accelerated courses for workers. He founded a small company that produced road signs. He painted left turns, right turns…
At the end of the 1940s, a postman knocked on the door of the modest M-2 in the Bytom housing estate with an unexpected addition to the small earnings – a breeding bonus payout. This was how Jacek’s father learned that some of his horses, taken from the Widzów stud in 1939, had returned from the West as part of war reparations. He remembered each of them, and their pedigrees interested him much more than the genealogy of his own family. He would have recognized them, of course, had he appeared at the Warsaw racetrack one day, he could also have given the new director of the Widzów stud a few valuable tips. But he never visited either the Warsaw track or the Widzów stables.
From the Salons of Paris
Before the war, the very thought of living permanently in the city filled him with horror. But the family manors were either beyond the eastern border or were soon to be taken over by the new authorities. Jacek Woźniakowski somehow liked Krakow and has lived there happily for over half a century.
In the winter of 1945, shortly after the First Ukrainian Front entered Krakow and the Germans hurriedly left the city, pre-war Krakow, a city of 200,000, welcomed about 300,000 newcomers from Vilnius, Lviv, and all of eastern Galicia, from the destroyed Warsaw. Among the displaced was 25-year-old Jacek Woźniakowski, until recently the adjutant of the Mielec district command of the Home Army.
His friend, Stefan Kisielewski, described him years later as follows: “A nobleman, uhlan, dandy; democrat, friend of all the despised or ridiculed; traveler, world frequenter, and at the same time a Polish provincial by inclination, Krakauer and Zakopian; a homebody by nature, though never at home; a devout, Catholic activist, yet enjoying pondering (not without pleasure) various heresies and undermining; an authority, erudite, a man of extraordinary activity, yet not very well known, avoiding excessive publicity – such avoidance may also be an element of ‘style,’ an attitude he values above all; apolitical in interests, yet very unyielding in politics (style, opinion, tradition?!); a patriot without illusions about some of the shameful backstage of Polishness, but extremely sensitive when someone steps on a Polish-traditional toe; author of six books and four children, expert in painting, philosophy, aesthetics, history. Mein Liebchen, was willst du noch mehr?!” (from “Fermentum massae mundi,” a jubilee book on the 70th birthday of J. Woźniakowski).
And so Jacek Woźniakowski, a non-practicing homebody, sets out from his apartment on Pijarska in the morning and is unlikely to return until evening. Urgent matters await him: he chairs the Board of Founders of the International Cultural Center and the Publishing Council of “Znak,” is on the presidium of the “Krakow 2000” Committee, participates in the Social Committee for the Reconstruction of Krakow’s Monuments, and various other committees, councils, and commissions that somehow cannot do without him.
Most of these esteemed bodies meet in the historic buildings of the Old Town, so Woźniakowski is close to everywhere. This does not mean, however, that he will quickly reach his destination. To get from Pijarska to the Foundation’s Cultural Center office in the Market Square, he only needs to cross Sławkowska Street. But there, too, he will inevitably meet some relatives, in-laws, and acquaintances who will not fail to exchange a few words with him. And there are also strangers who stop him: “Mr. President, wouldn’t you advise something for the Planty…”. He was indeed the President of Krakow, but only for six months at the end of 1990.
– My children love to visit Krakow – says Jacek Woźniakowski’s daughter, Róża Thun, who lives in Warsaw. – They like walking with grandpa in the Market Square because everyone greets him.
And yet there are those around who have long since departed, leaving traces and memorabilia that stand in the Professor’s path wherever he goes.
If, upon leaving the house, Jacek Woźniakowski turns right, he will soon find himself in front of the Słowacki Theatre, directed from the very beginning by Tadeusz Pawlikowski, the brother of Jan Gwalbert Pawlikowski, his maternal grandfather, who revolutionized Polish theater and introduced Scandinavian plays into its repertoire.
And if, taking a stroll to the Market Square, he turns left upon leaving the house and walks through Reformacka to Szczepański Square, passing the Palace of Arts, he will have to pass by a niche in the wall where the bust of the famous great-grandfather, the painter, is located.
Henryk Rodakowski debuted at the Paris Salon in 1852 and immediately achieved spectacular success. At the height of his fame in the salons of Paris, he decided to return to his country, disregarding what his brothers wrote: that he would not find the artistic environment necessary for a painter to create in Lviv. He wanted his children to be educated in Polish schools. His wife Kamilla, an Austrian, landed straight from Paris in the remote Galician countryside near Lviv. She had to raise her children in the spirit of Polish patriotism.
Her daughter Maria – Jacek Woźniakowski’s grandmother – already as the wife of a landowner, Marcjan Woźniakowski, in Biórków, was involved in cutting the hair of the village landlords and explaining to the peasants, albeit with a French accent, that they were Poles. They knew only that above them were the parish priest, the landowner, and the emperor, even though the estate was located a few kilometers from Racławice, which retained the memory of Bartosz Głowacki.
If, heading to the Market Square, Jacek Woźniakowski preferred to extend his route just a little to continue walking the green Planty, he would bypass Rodakowski, but he would inevitably have to pass under the monument of Artur Grottger. The painter, although not a family member, liked to draw his great-grandmother Helena from the Dzieduszycki family Pawlikowska and had serious intentions towards Wendy Monne, later the mother of the Young Poland poet Maryla Wolska, who through the marriages of her children became closely related to both the Woźniakowskis and the Pawlikowskis, and whose godfather, fondly remembered, was Henryk Rodakowski.
And the Pope Said: Fiu, Fiu
Either way, he would continue to the Market Square along Szczepańska, passing on the right-hand side a plaque embedded in the wall of the Old Theatre commemorating Władysław Żeleński, a composer whose cousin married Ignacy Woźniakowski, Jacek’s great-grandfather.
That great-grandmother, née Dąmbska, belonged to a family with magnate affiliations. Boy-Żeleński wrote about her in “Fredro’s Reckonings”: “I could see remnants of Fredro’s types in the clan of closer and more distant uncles and aunts. How many were provided by the richly prolific, yet so expressive Dąmbski family (necessarily through ą and m!). The anecdote about Mrs. Woźniakowska, who at an audience with the Pope [Leo XIII], fearing that the name alone would not sufficiently define her true position on the social ladder to the Holy Father, added with emphasis during the presentation: nee Dąmbska, to which the Pope was said to whistle a long fiu, fiu! and rise slightly from the throne. The second part of the anecdote is probably made up, but the first, as far as I remember that aunt, seems completely plausible. She was a Fredro-like woman.” Jacek Woźniakowski remembers that various aunts were outraged at Boy for this text – everyone laughed at that anecdote, but it was obvious that such jokes were to remain in the family. He also remembered another anecdote about the proposal of one of the future sons-in-law of the great-grandmother. None of her daughters were married at the time, and he proposed to the second in line. The great-grandmother, who loved sayings, was supposed to declare: “Take from the edge! Don’t mess around!”.
No One to Sing Vespers
If Jacek Woźniakowski wandered along the Planty to Saint Anne Street, he could meditate in the church of the same name under a plaque commemorating a particularly dear great-great-grandfather, Jakub Ignacy Woźniakowski.
The likeness of a determined gentleman with thinning hair, in a fur coat and white cravat, looked down on Jacek from a gilded-framed portrait when he visited his grandparents in the house where he was born, in Biórków, during his childhood.
He managed to carefully reconstruct Jakub Ignacy’s life over the years. Writing his master’s thesis, doctoral dissertation, and preparing for habilitation, he spent a lot of time in the Jagiellonian University library – which, incidentally, is also within walking distance of his home. And he developed the habit of checking various family data while browsing catalogs. There, in the university archives, he found a letter written in elegant French by Nowosilcov himself, demanding the removal of his great-great-grandfather, a professor of medicine and senator of the Republic of Krakow, from the university. For what – it’s hard to establish, but one can assume that the governor considered Jakub Woźniakowski a subject of the Russian Tsar, as his estate was already on the Russian side of the partition border. Among various documents was also a complaint written by one of the university professors that in the year of Our Lord 1813, Jakub Ignacy had declared in the Market Square that he would sit with a vendor and eat hot sausages, and when a fellow professor deemed it inappropriate, the great-great-grandfather was said to have hit him on the head with a cane twice; the injured party, fearing further violence, asked for the assignment of a gendarme to escort him from the university to his home. – This was just after the Battle of Leipzig, a time of the collapse of the Napoleonic era when the greatest world dramas of the time were unfolding – comments Woźniakowski.
– And here, in the province of Europe, two elderly gentlemen were hitting each other with canes.
Earlier, in some memoir from the era, he read that Jakub Ignacy, known as a glutton, after consuming two eels and washing them down with English beer, breathed his last from overeating. But according to documents preserved in the archives, it turned out that Jakub Ignacy’s death had a completely different cause – when an epidemic broke out in the Jewish community in Kazimierz during the November Uprising, the great-great-grandfather ran to help the sick and contracted cholera.
Documents about the family reached him not only through academic archives. In the 1950s, in Katowice, a stranger knocked on the door of his father, Henryk Woźniakowski’s apartment, holding a paper found on the street after a fire that broke out in one of Krakow’s tenements. The document bore the name Woźniakowski and the date: 1819. “I swear on the Holy Gospel that I will strictly perform the duties of a chosen Knight, and I allow myself to be killed by this dagger if I ever fail in these duties” – the great-great-grandfather signed the oath on the paper of the Masonic lodge “Superstition Overcome in the East of Krakow”.
– He was probably not the only mason in our family. I suspect that my great-grandfather Mieczysław Pawlikowski (husband of the aforementioned Helena, who posed for Grottger) was also a mason. I have no documents for this, but my uncle, Jaś Pawlikowski, once found a Masonic apron while rummaging through drawers, which caused considerable embarrassment to my grandfather. Membership in the Masonic lodge, then primarily a secret patriotic organization, was not as rare as commonly thought. One of my favorite sayings must have come from somewhere: “No one in Warsaw to sing vespers today. Today is a lodge meeting.”
Due to Bad Roads
A further walk along the Planty would lead him all the way to Wawel, and a significant part of this route would be along Florian Straszewski Street, who invented the Planty and spent a large part of his fortune on realizing his idée fixe. His perhaps cousin was the husband of one of Woźniakowski’s grandfather’s five sisters, but the ties of kinship with the Straszewskis do not end there.
– We are connected with them through multiple marital ties. Similarly with the Dąmbskis – Woźniakowski recounts. – When two families were united through marriage, those connections lasted in subsequent generations. Both families met at weddings, hunts, and funerals, and new acquaintances were made there. The roads were rather terrible in the 19th century, so those whose estates were nearby mostly visited each other. A historian who analyzed the marriages of the Pawlikowskis in the 15th and 16th centuries found that for about 150 years, no marriage was contracted between young people from houses more than 25 kilometers apart. The wealthier nobility, more burdened with dignitaries, married in all directions, but the lesser nobility – in a small territorial radius.
Finally Home
When Jacek Woźniakowski finally landed in Krakow in the winter of 1945, at the urging of Professor Stanisław Pigoń, an old acquaintance of his grandparents, he enrolled in Polish studies.
In 1946, he participated in organizing a congress of Catholic students in Poznań. Some organizers went to Warsaw, where they were received by Stefan Żółkiewski, a very influential figure at the time, who supported their idea. However, barely had they begun the congress debates when the militia entered. Woźniakowski, already experienced in escaping dragnets from his time in the Home Army, somehow avoided arrest. He boarded a train to Warsaw, where he managed to reach Żółkiewski, who philosophically stated: “Where wood is chopped, chips fly,” but promised to intervene. He did not keep his promise.
– And we expected a minimum of loyalty, I don’t know why – Woźniakowski comments today.
He worked at “Voice of England,” a weekly published by the British Foreign Office. However, he didn’t like that the British considered the Oder-Neisse border a temporary solution that should be written about only with the utmost caution, and after some time, he resigned from further cooperation. In 1948, he joined – forever – the editorial team of “Tygodnik Powszechny,” where he wrote from the first issue. And finally, he felt at home.
Before Ecology Was Born
Of the numerous family homes scattered throughout Galicia – from Medyka near Lviv to Biórków near Krakow – only the Zakopane House Under the Firs survived. By some miracle, it was not occupied by the Germans during the occupation, and by an even greater miracle, it avoided nationalization seven years later. These miracles were probably mainly due to the authority of his grandmother, Wanda Pawlikowska, whom the outbreak of war in September 1939 kept on Kozińiec until the end of her hundred-year life. Perhaps the lack of sewerage and electricity also played a role.
It was not very possible to live on Kozińiec, but Jacek Woźniakowski continued to visit there very often. It was in the House Under the Firs that he met his future wife, Maja from the Plater-Zyberk family, who once dropped by with her mother and aunt, and there they were married on June 22, 1948, and their children spent their vacations there.
The year was 1952. Censorship was cutting out most of the prepared texts from “Tygodnik.” Then Jacek Woźniakowski proposed publishing an issue entirely dedicated to the Tatras. All his colleagues from the editorial team, with Jerzy Turowicz at the helm, thought it was a great political joke to imply that censorship was not letting anything through, while he took it completely seriously.
When they later went to Minister Antoni Bida, head of the Office for Religious Affairs, to argue for subsequent issues of “Tygodnik,” he greeted them from the threshold: “Oh, the mountaineers have arrived!”.
– He, like my colleagues, treated that issue about the Tatras as a political manifestation. Environmental protection was a virgin topic at the time. Similarly, later, when the “Znak” Parliamentary Circle was formed and we discussed at meetings what the specificity of our group should be, I tried to convince them that this distinguishing feature should be ecology, although this term did not yet exist in the Polish dictionary. Stach Stomma probably thought I was joking.
Already Woźniakowski’s grandfather, Jan Gwalbert Pawlikowski, the creator of the idea of the Tatra National Park, editor-in-chief of the “Wierchy” yearbook, postulated at the beginning of the century the renewal of culture through reconciliation with nature: “When, under the modern slogan of protection, culture again makes a pact with nature, then under the influence of this current, the renewed nature will no longer be what it was before: it will inevitably bear the marks of cultural goods. Only, let us hope, not that philistine and barbaric culture that made a fashionable dress out of love for nature or understood it as a source of commercial profits, but true culture, the inner culture of spirit and heart.”
Jan Gwalbert Pawlikowski was an avid climber (first ascents of the north face of Lomnica, Kieżmarski Peak, Mnich), many peaks were conquered together with Adam Asnyk. He believed that living with the pristine nature of the mountains served to purify and elevate the spirit. It was he whom Stanisław Witkiewicz, exactly a hundred years ago, in 1897, built the House Under the Firs for. And it happened like this. Jan Gwalbert, “by no means extravagant when it came to his own and his family’s needs” (as his son described him, and Jacek Woźniakowski remembers that the spirit of asceticism dominated their upbringing), wanted to build a modest summer house, but Witkiewicz convinced him that the building he would erect on Kozińiec, “opposing foreign patterns, would become a monument of truly national art.”
Correspondence from Wojciech Roj, Tytus Chałubiński’s Tatra guide and later carpenter, Witkiewicz’s assistant, who wrote to Woźniakowski’s grandparents in Lviv in May 1895, has been preserved: “I have agreed on Kozińiec, but they are asking for four thousand and eight hundred. What do you say to this, my dear friends? Kozińiec must be taken. The place is beautiful, the most beautiful of these places.” And in subsequent letters: “Then there were various perturbations because someone tried to buy one of the plots, and it was full of fir trees. I wouldn’t have encouraged you, but Mr. Witkiewicz is trembling with joy at how beautiful the house will be.”
The House Under the Firs was built at a time when, apart from those with lung diseases who were recommended Zakopane, few thought of spending winter there. It could be reached by horse from Chabówka or by a railway built in 1899 by a private consortium, thanks to the efforts of Władysław Zamoyski, but this also threatened with long delays in winter, caused by uncovering tracks from snow. Initially, the House Under the Firs was only used in summer, and in winter, Roj sent news in a letter with Christmas wishes ending with the words “glory, glory, and other strange things.”
But every pre-war summer Jan Gwalbert obligatorily spent on Kozińiec. Jacek Woźniakowski remembers how, at the end of the 1920s, professors Szafer, Goetel, and other future members of the State Council for Nature Conservation came. Jacek, along with his cousins, looked from the garden through the window at what his naturally taciturn grandfather was discussing with such enthusiasm. And grandfather was laying the foundations for the Polish ecological movement.
– There must be some gene for nature interests – Woźniakowski ponders. – My father’s passion for dogs and horses was inherited by our children and some grandchildren. My grandfather Jan Gwalbert’s mother and grandmother were Dzieduszyckis, and the Dzieduszycki Museum in Lviv was probably the first natural history museum in Poland. Among my distant relatives on the maternal side is a zealous geologist in Seattle and his father, Kazimierz Wodzicki, who ringed storks before the war in Poland and founded an oceanographic institute in New Zealand after the war.
This gene – literal or metaphorical – works in any case, and Jacek Woźniakowski is currently preparing, as part of the “Krakow 2000” program, a large festival “Between Wawel and Giewont” – exhibitions, concerts, seminars, and meetings. As part of this event, the centenary of the House Under the Firs will be celebrated under the slogan “Nature and Culture”: this is the title of Jan Gwalbert’s groundbreaking work from 1913.
A Vaccine Against Endecja
“Tygodnik Powszechny” was dissolved, and there was nothing to live on. Another passport refusal came, and it was impossible to travel abroad. However, Jacek Woźniakowski always had his refuge: in Zakopane, on Kozińiec, stood the beautiful House Under the Firs, built according to Stanisław Witkiewicz’s design.
In the hospitable House Under the Firs right after the war, as soon as he was released from prison, Bolesław Piasecki appeared. He encouraged Jacek Woźniakowski to cooperate. Piasecki, before everyone he spoke with, unfolded the prospects of participating in some groundbreaking political actions, creating the impression that this current interlocutor had a key role to play in the new reality. But Woźniakowski was not taken in. He would always keep away from PAX.
Various branches of his family, both paternal and maternal, stood out among the landed gentry not only for their passionate love of books but also for their form of religiosity.
His paternal grandmother and his own mother, as well as some closer and more distant relatives, had contact with Belgian Benedictines and French Dominicans, read Maritain, Mauriac, and Bernanos. Jacek and his sister were prepared for First Communion by Father Korniłłowicz from Laski, during their stay in Switzerland they both met Antoni Marylski, a personal friend of Maritain, also associated with the Institute for the Blind in Laski, and immediately – despite the age difference – became close friends.
But of course, his family did not belong to the most typical representatives of the Małopolska landed gentry. The Biórków neighbors of Woźniakowski’s grandparents seem much more typical.
They once decided, after World War I, to go to Paris. They had suits made, got new suitcases, and got into a carriage to reach Kocmyrzów, where they were to transfer to a train to Krakow, from where they were to take an international train to France to see the Arc de Triomphe. But when the coachman swung so vigorously in front of the Kocmyrzów station that they fell out of the carriage straight into the spring mud, they returned home and never went to Paris again.
In Jacek Woźniakowski’s family, he remembers only one staunch endek and anti-Semite – Michał Pawlikowski, the older of his mother’s two brothers. His father read “Literary News” and Celine, and that uncle repeated that it was poison for the national soul and that it was worth reading Słowacki above all. He couldn’t understand how young Jacek could read Tuwim.
– He was shocked that I had my own opinion – Jacek Woźniakowski recounts. – Endeks often have authoritarian tendencies. Watching my uncle, I learned a lot about endecja: that it is a certain type of mentality more than views, that it needs a simplified, mythologized history, always seeing two currents in it, the one on the surface and the hidden, conspiratorial one. Interacting with my uncle, a man of warm heart and disinterested, noble impulses, was like a vaccine against national democracy.
Jacek Woźniakowski did not participate in “Odrodzenie” before the war, the association of Catholic academic youth with which the co-founders of “Tygodnik Powszechny” – Jerzy Turowicz in Lviv, Antoni Gołubiew and Stanisław Stomma in Vilnius – were associated in the 1930s, as he was only a high school student at the time. But their orientation, originating from “Odrodzenie” – personalist and anti-endek – was particularly close to him.
The “Tygodnik” team enjoyed great support from Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha and Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński at the beginning. The latter issued them an official letter stating that “Tygodnik Powszechny” was under his special protection, which was meant to encourage priests to cooperate. Parishes across the country invited them for retreats, lectures. Woźniakowski even conducted a premarital course with the Cistercians.
– We were feted and respected beyond our merits – he recalls.
However, the first post-war contacts with Western Catholics brought him great disappointment. He remembers a visit from Emmanuel Mounier, editor-in-chief of the French Catholic weekly “Esprit,” who was not very willing to listen to what they had to say. He was so enthusiastic about the idea of a union of Catholics with the so-called left, sold to him by the PAX people, that he stopped seeing the totalitarianism of the communist regime. Many Western Catholic activists only opened their eyes after the Hungarian uprising, and even then, not all of them.
Later, tension arose between “Tygodnik,” which wanted to develop conciliar thought, and that part of the hierarchy that was quite one-sidedly moving towards a conservative, folk church. Their protective umbrella became a friendly priest, soon to be Archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyła, who understood both views and both reasons and with whom they regularly met.
I ask Jacek Woźniakowski how he feels today about the fact that the “Tygodnik” team was never received in an audience by Primate Glemp, and for several years neither the Primate nor the Archbishop of Krakow, as far as I know, sends even jubilee wishes to the editorial office.
Woźniakowski replies that it is not a particularly painful disappointment for him, perhaps because he experienced the first surprises in relations with the church hierarchy back in the second half of the 1970s when Primate Wyszyński seemed to have gotten closer to Bolesław Piasecki. During their last conversation, shortly before the Primate’s death, Woźniakowski asked how it was possible that someone who had harmed the Church for so long – in the opinion of Cardinal Wyszyński himself – was currently enjoying his trust. He was told that Piasecki was one of the rare people who took the Church’s social teaching seriously.
– That troubled me immensely. I knew that Piasecki could wield phrases, but I didn’t expect that even someone as wise as the Primate would succumb to the illusory charms of “applied terminology.” Today I understand – certain things one realizes gradually – that part of the clergy treats laypeople somewhat like sacristans, who are supposed to do their thing under the guidance of the clergy. Their value is primarily measured by usefulness, and distinguishing who is a decent person doesn’t have much to do with it. Laypeople are to perform service functions. Today, PAX has printing houses and various means, so the only Catholic daily must be handed over to PAX.
Refuge on Kozińiec
When “Tygodnik Powszechny” was closed in 1953 (no one in the editorial team had a shadow of a doubt that it was not allowed to print a good word about the deceased Stalin at the cost of keeping the magazine), the Woźniakowski family found themselves without means of subsistence. There was no sense in staying in Krakow, in an apartment where they shared a kitchen and bathroom with a five-member family assigned by the office, sympathetic but highly alcoholic.
The House Under the Firs served as a refuge. Beautiful but somewhat impractical: without light and water, daily life there was quite burdensome. The well in the garden with a roof in the highland style, also a Witkiewicz design, was made with such craftsmanship that among visitors (in season, the House Under the Firs is visited by hundreds of tourists a day) there are usually a few who stop to cross themselves, mistaking it for a chapel. But it is located far from the house and much lower, so one had to walk uphill with full buckets.
If the owners of the House Under the Firs had the opportunity to let a crowd of visitors inside, they would surely hear exclamations of admiration for the beautiful steep stairs, stone on the outside, thick planks on the inside. But carrying buckets of water up those stairs is quite another matter.
Kerosene lamps cast beautiful light on the furniture, furnishings, and ceiling carvings, but in their dim glow, one also had to manage bathing and putting the children to bed.
Considering that the dissolution of “Tygodnik” occurred shortly after the Security Office entered the Krakow Metropolitan Curia, where a search was carried out from attic to basement and priests were arrested, sitting on Kozińiec instead of in a prison cell could be considered a lucky turn of fate.
The Family Treasures of the Pawlikowskis
Whenever Jacek Woźniakowski visits the House Under the Firs, he tries to find some time to delve into the remnants of the family archive of the Pawlikowskis, his maternal ancestors, gathered there. There are a good few thousand letters written by successive generations, some graphics and drawings, hundreds of photographs of ladies in bustles and young gentlemen in white frocks, paintings, 18th-century albums, ivory likenesses, and hundreds of other souvenirs and trinkets. And all this is just a small fraction of what was lost in the upheavals of history.
In the 18th century, many Pawlikowskis belonged to the middle and poor nobility, which the famous genealogist Włodzimierz Dworzaczek said Poland was paved with. The era of the Pawlikowski family’s prosperity was initiated by the great-great-great-grandfather Józef Benedykt, who multiplied the family fortune many times and bought Medyka, an estate near Przemyśl, eventually totaling nine thousand hectares. He took the office of mayor of Przemyśl, and during his administration, the city was sewered. It was he who started the family collections.
His son Józef Gwalbert Pawlikowski became one of the great collectors and patrons of the arts of his time. Working in Vienna, in the office of Francis I, he formed a close friendship with Józef Maksymilian Ossoliński, then the prefect of the Imperial Library. He was probably often a witness to how his friend, in the capacious pockets of his coat, carried out of the imperial library what he considered necessary to complete the collections of the future Ossoliński National Institute. When he himself took over the Medyka estate in 1830, he dedicated himself to the passion he had caught from Ossoliński, thanks to which the Medyka library reached a state of 20,000 volumes. In addition, 700 maps, a collection of valuable prints and old manuscripts, and the most serious collection of graphics in this part of Europe (25,000 pieces). He focused on Polonica and native creators, whom he invited to Medyka, commissioned drawings of architectural monuments, historical costumes, so that the collection would form a “stream of national history.” He treated all this as a patriotic duty, an obligation to fight for the preservation of continuity and national identity under the partitions. He used to say that every poor Polish print was a hundred times more valuable to him than all the works of Italian masters combined. His son Mieczysław took care of his father’s collections and patronized artists.
In the solid cellars of the House Under the Firs, where the archive is stored (a constant temperature is maintained there, for which the whole family taxed themselves), I read the wills of the Pawlikowskis.
So the last will of Józef Benedykt from January 20, 1829: “I leave four children with Franciszka Rokicka, my only wife, as Józef Gwalbert Pawlikowski, court secretary of His Imperial Majesty in Vienna, Konstanty, also in Vienna without need, and two daughters Alexja now Countess Krasińska and Teofila, a spinster […]. I bequeath Rozubowice, Stanisławczyk, Rakowice, and Brześciany to my younger son Konstanty, except for the wines in the Rozubowice cellar, which all the successors are to share equally.”
Or the will of another ancestor, written in 1792: “To the cook Ignacy, if he marries and ceases his drunkenness, I designate 200 zlotys, and if he serves my wife faithfully until her passing, I grant him his freedom, although he cost me much to acquire.”
Jacek Woźniakowski remembers how, in Medyka, his uncle Michał Pawlikowski showed him the manuscripts of Juliusz Słowacki kept there.
Grandfather Józef Gwalbert, enamored with Słowacki, published “King-Spirit” at his own expense with nearly a 500-page commentary. Having inherited from his father a fascination with evolutionism, he wrote an essay titled “Darwinism in Poetry,” where he argued that “King-Spirit” was an attempt to describe the beginnings of Polish statehood in an evolutionary way. Słowacki believed that every nation evolves from an era of brutality to an era when bread-eaters turn into angels, hence the bloody cruelty of King Popiel should be understood as inevitable.
– Much later, Sigmund Freud described a similar mechanism, giving it the name “founding murder,” which gives rise to every civilization, and civilization atones for the sins of its founders, cleansing itself of its bloody origins – Woźniakowski says. He also recalls how before the war, Professor Stanisław Pigoń would come to the House Under the Firs to talk with his grandfather about Słowacki. He remembers evenings when they read aloud the most incomprehensible fragments from “King-Spirit,” and Michał Pawlikowski, his mother’s brother, first explained, and then everyone discussed the text.
In the 1960s, Lela Pawlikowska, the wife of the late uncle Michał, found a box with various notebooks on Kozińiec, and among them a notebook where Mieczysław Pawlikowski, Józef Gwalbert’s son, noted his conversations with Cyprian Kamil Norwid. They sent these materials to Juliusz Gomulicki, and they were included in Norwid’s collected works. There is also a letter that Norwid sent to Pawlikowski upon hearing of his marriage to Helena Dzieduszycka: “For three loves most distinctly express love on this planet – and these are to each other in such order: egoism, which immolates everything for itself, heroism, which immolates itself for everyone, and finally by no means eclectically intermediate, but creatively above those two real: marriage – because in it immolation is to become preservative, and preservative immolative – and it is no longer a counter-composite existence, but a movement, a whole, and an astral force having creation.”
Norwid held Mieczysław Pawlikowski in high esteem. He wrote that a Society for the Respect of Man should be established in Poland, and Mieczysław should be placed at its head.
– My great-grandfather helped Norwid financially. I know this from my grandmother, who said that her father-in-law had quite a problem with it, as Norwid was very touchy.
During World War II, family councils were held on how to save the remaining archival materials from Medyka. Jan Gwalbert Pawlikowski donated the collections to the nation in the 1920s, attaching them to the Ossolineum (according to his grandfather’s will, the archive had its own building in Lviv), but with a prudent reservation – this was after the Ukrainian-Polish fights – that if Lviv were to change its political status, the archive would return to the family. After the war, Michał Pawlikowski, together with Professor Tadeusz Kotarbiński, who was then the president of the Polish Academy of Sciences, sent a letter to the Soviet authorities, stating that since Lviv had changed its political status, the family requested that the collections be transferred to the Ossolineum in Wrocław, where part of the Lviv Ossolineum had already been sent earlier. Not only did they not receive any response, but – as Professor Gębarowicz, who heroically remained in Lviv to guard the Polish collections, later said – shortly after this letter, part of the archive was hastily packed and sent somewhere to Kyiv. Only a small part of the collections, which remained in the Medyka house in the 1920s and then traveled to Lviv, was saved. When the Russians left Lviv and the Germans entered, a German relative obtained permission to transport this part of the collections to the Jagiellonian Library, from where, informally, they ended up on Kozińiec.
And there, for almost a hundred years, new, extraordinary archival materials have been accumulating. I read a card from 1924 from the guest book. An entry by Jan Kasprowicz:
Sitting on Kozińiec
Truth not for the first time
Though I can’t write
Even four lines
Yet I will say honestly
That seeing the Peaks from here
Sentiment takes me
That there is no more pleasant view in the world.
I don’t end with a rhyme because in the face of the magnificence of nature, I don’t have to be a rhyming writer.
Below is an entry by Karol Szymanowski, a drawing of a chapel by Karol Stryjeński, a blot, and a rhyme by Kornel Makuszyński:
There where someone gave birth to a Jew
Let a Catholic name be useful.
Barefoot, but in Spurs
The impoverished Woźniakowskis, like other family members, possessed family heirlooms saved from the war conflagration, often of great value. However, apart from completely forced situations, they did not have the habit of getting rid of these things. But after the dissolution of “Tygodnik,” life forced Jacek Woźniakowski to sell the sketchbook of Henryk Rodakowski and his diploma, which certified the gold medal won at the great Paris exhibition, to the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
To somehow make a living, Woźniakowski strained his eyes, copying Jan Matejko’s letters for the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, located in the museum named after the great painter. He transcribed from morning till night, and the money was received through an intermediary lady, as it was a time when no one wanted to risk signing any open contract with him.
After some time, when the ostracism slightly eased, he began to live from translations, first “as a ghostwriter,” and then openly.
– My father’s grandfather – recalls Jacek’s daughter, Róża Thun – specialized in painting flower pictures, which he sold to Desy, my mother’s grandfather sold silver teaspoons, both helped us a little. There were four of us small children. We lived poorly, always in ill-fitting clothes, always lacking tights or socks, and the shoes were always too small. At school on May Day, they made us come in white tights, and I simply didn’t have any. And I remember that feeling of pride: “We are poor because we do not collaborate.”
We Evolve, You Do Not Evolve
Defining his attitude towards Gomułka in 1956, Woźniakowski does not hesitate to use the word “enthusiasm.” The new First Secretary invited the “Tygodnik” team to him – Stefan Kisielewski, Jerzy Turowicz, Stanisław Stomma, Gołubiew, and Jacek Woźniakowski went. They were surprised by the sincerity of the conversation. Gomułka spoke about the Soviet threat, about the chance to oppose it being a united front of Polish society. And they were ready to belong to this united front. They agreed that a few of them would enter the Sejm – Kisielewski was somehow amused by this, it was also obvious that Stomma, who was always their political leader, would go to parliament. But Woźniakowski was never drawn to politics. Similarly, many years later, in 1989, he did not allow himself to be persuaded to run for the Senate from the “Solidarity” list.
When the editorial team in its old composition regained the “Tygodnik Powszechny” seized by PAX, to devote enough time to it, Woźniakowski had to withdraw from translation contracts. He was also already lecturing at the Catholic University of Lublin. And when “Tygodnik” managed to launch its own publishing house, Znak, he became its director for many years.
Every year they struggled with the same thing. They submitted publishing plans to the book department in the Ministry of Culture and to the Office for Religious Affairs, where 3/4 of the books were crossed off their plan (these were the same officials who swapped positions and could be found here or there). With the few titles that passed through the sieve, they had to wait half a year for plan approval and another half year in censorship. He lists the publication of Thomas Merton, Tadeusz Żychiewicz, and Henryk Elzenberg as Znak’s greatest successes.
The thaw also meant the possibility of travel. Although he had a passport in his pocket for a moment earlier, it was only a game of cat and mouse – barely had he collected it when he was immediately summoned to the UB and told to return the passport.
– I told them: “He who gives and takes back is tormented in hell.” They looked at me with fear, as if they thought it was some magical Catholic curse that really had the power to send them to the depths of hell. They even said reproachfully: “We didn’t expect this from you.” But they didn’t return the passport.
The first trip was to Rome, to the Pax Romana congress in 1956 or 1957 with Zygmunt Kubiak and Jerzy Turowicz. Then he received an invitation from Harvard, where Henry Kissinger was conducting a seminar, recommended by Professor Pigoń.
Enthusiasm quickly turned into disappointment. The lack of will to cooperate was evident at every turn. He remembers, for example, how they later tried to arrange with “Polityka” to conduct a fundamental discussion on what differentiated them in the pages of both magazines. A meeting date was set. Turowicz, Gołubiew, and a few others went to Warsaw. They found the editorial doors closed. The editors of “Polityka” received instructions not to talk.
The “Znak” Parliamentary Circle was forced to wade into increasingly far-reaching compromises, and Woźniakowski believed that they should have returned their parliamentary cards a few years earlier.
And again, he was systematically denied a passport. Once he counted how many times, then he only remembered that it was “way too many.” On one occasion, already in the 1970s, he heard from some “factor”: “You probably understand. We evolve, and Cardinal Wyszyński does not evolve.”
Many Children and Self-Discipline
At a seminar led by Professor Jerzy Jedlicki in the PAN Institute of the History of Intelligence, Professor Jacek Woźniakowski delivers a paper on the landed gentry, its attitude towards the intelligentsia, its diversity. He recalls a book from his youth, Józef Weyssenhoff’s, where “various intangibilities were brilliantly ridiculed and caricatured.” The main character, Mr. Podfilipski, flawlessly shaded and distributed bows from his carriage: he bowed differently to a name without money, differently to money without a name, and differently to money and a name together. Woźniakowski talks about the fairly common belief in the 19th century in landowning circles that a profession lowered the social rank of the professional. The chance of access to anything, as Norwid wrote, was given only by owning a village. But he concludes his paper, titled “Hreczkosieje and Trebienists,” by stating that with such a diversity of attitudes and styles, it is difficult to reduce the features of the landed gentry to a common denominator. – But what is Dad talking about – whispers his daughter Róża Thun, present in the room, loudly enough to draw the attention of those gathered. – I can list those common denominators on the spot.
Jacek Woźniakowski grew up in an environment that had a relatively uniform moral style: respect for traditional values and self-discipline. At home, children were taught that telling the truth is linked to the concept of honor, that lying places one outside the norm. Tradition included mortification on Fridays and during Lent. This had a religious meaning and was also a lesson in how to deny oneself.
– I received a French book titled “L’education de la volonte” (“Education of the Will”) when I was still small – he says. – Whether I was able to use it is another matter, but that was the tendency. The Christian ideal of self-improvement was sometimes betrayed, but that ideal existed, and perhaps it’s a pity that today such guidance means little to anyone. None of the close relatives, except for one slightly mentally delayed boy, joined either PAX or the PZPR. Parents raised us according to more or less the norms and principles in which they were raised, and we similarly raised our children.
Róża’s husband, Franz Thun, comes from an Austrian aristocratic family. They are distant relatives: Róża’s great-grandmother on the maternal side was the sister of Franz’s great-grandfather on the paternal side. Józef Czapski is their mutual great-uncle.
– Among some of Franz’s Austrian relatives – Róża says – weddings are still held on Wednesdays and Thursdays; presumably, it originally served to emphasize that one does not belong to the working class, which only has weekends off.
– It’s one of those more closed environments – interjects Jacek Woźniakowski – whose members, despite all affinities or even kinships, would have been quite surprised before the last war by an alliance with a middle Polish landowner.
Róża Thun talks about the world she grew up in and the customs that persist in her family.
She addresses her parents in the third person, showing particular respect to the entire older generation. Róża claims that interest in the broadly understood family, including fifth-degree cousins, is natural. Fifth-degree kinship is considered close and entitles one to say aunt or uncle.
Further: large families. She remembers from her childhood that such large families as theirs were only found among alcoholic caretakers or relatives or in-laws. She herself also has four children: Marynia, Sophie, Christophe Jacek, called Babu, and Jadwiga.
Finally: a sense of responsibility for others. – Our grandmothers founded village schools, small hospitals – she says. – And we try, as much as we can, to do something for the common good, starting with planting a few flowers on the lawn in front of the house, up to charitable, social, or political activities.
What unites them is primarily Catholicism, the feeling that in the church, one is at home.
When the family recently gathered for the funeral of one of the Dziedus