Mieczysław
Mieczysław in a fine sailor suit. White was only worn on rare dress-up occasions by middle-class boys of this age. in the first decade of the 20th century in Europe
Sankt Petersburg
My maternal grandfather, Mieczysław [pronounced: mye-CHI-swahf] was born in St. Petersburg on 28th October 1898. The date is according to the "old style", i.e., the Julian calendar. To convert “old style” to “new style” one needs to add 12 days, if the “old style” date falls in the nineteenth century. So according to the calendar we use today (i.e. Gregorian) my maternal grandfather was born on 10th November 1898.
Why two different calendars? The solar calendar, which was established by Julius Caesar after conquering Egypt in 46 BCE, had a year as 365.25 days long; the year in the Julian calendar started on March 25, the first day of Spring. In the year 325 CE, the council of Christian bishops (at Nicaea, now Iznik in Turkey) set the vernal (spring) equinox to the date 20 or 21 March (depending on the year's position in the leap year cycle), and agreed that Easter will be celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox. But as the centuries passed people noticed that solstices and equinoxes were occurring a few days too late. By the year 1500, the seasons were 10 days off from where they started out in Caesar’s time. Since the Julian calendar had an average equinox date on March 10th, Pope Gregory XIII decided to remove ten days from the Julian calendar putting the average vernal equinox date back to March 20th. The ten days removed were October 5 to14. Thus, the day after Thursday October 4, 1582 was Friday October 15, 1582, and the seven-day week cycle continued without interruption. The calendar change in 1582 happened only in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Poland. Other countries lingered on. England and its colonies did not begin using the new calendar until 1752; Sweden adopted the new style only in 1853. Russia and Greece did not switch to the Gregorian calendar until 1918 and 1924 respectively. The Eastern Orthodox church still uses the “old style” Julian calendar to set the dates of feasts.
Mieczysław made his entrance into the world during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia. “Mieczysław” is an old Slavic name of Polish origin and consists of two words: sword and fame, which combined together mean a “famous swordsman”. Do names determine our destiny, I wonder, thinking about Mieczysław’s fate, or do we subconsciously try to live up to our names? If so, then parents should be really careful when choosing children's names. In those days, the custom decreed that sons of ethnically mixed marriages should be raised in their father's faith. Mieczysław was christened in the largest and one of the oldest Catholic churches, St. Catherine’s, in St. Petersburg. The tomb of the the last Polish king, Stanisław August Poniatowski is to be found in this church.
The Wilinskis were rather well off. With Jan’s handsome salary (and perhaps Maria’s substantial dowry) they lived a relatively comfortable life. Their apartment was lavishly decorated and sumptuously furnished in a typical late-nineteenth-century Russian style. Maria could afford a live-in nanny for the baby, a maid, a cook, a seamstress who would come to the house several times a year to make her gowns, and a laundress. She and her little son would spend summers in dachas with friends or in Riga with her family. Maria did her shopping at the elegant shops or at busy Gostiny Dvor ("Guest Court", a vast departament store) on the Nevsky Prospect. In pre- revolutionary times, the Nevsky Prospekt could be said to be the financial center of the Russian Empire. The Wilinskis might even visit an opera house to see “A Life for the Tsar”, a patriotic-heroic tragic opera in four acts with an epilogue by the composer Mikhail Glinka - a work “being favorite with all the classes” - in the opinion of a journalist in the 1902 American Monthly.
Built on the banks of the Neva River in 1703 by Tsar Peter the Great, St. Petersburg was nicknamed the“Venice of the North”, due to its majestic canals and bridges. The large, elegant and solidly built eighteenth century brick and stucco buildings, wide streets called “Prospects” arouse admiration. Unfortunately, St. Petersburg was also the most unsanitary imperial capital in Europe. The habits of life were not healthy: poor families lived in dark, damp and cold cellars, crowded together in one room. The water of the Neva was simply poisonous; smallpox, typhus and cholera epidemics were frequent among poor and rich alike. The diseases did not spare even the Tsar’s family. No question about it, Russia lagged behind the West in matters of public health.
Odessa
Around 1902, when social unrest started in St. Petersburg, due partly to famine in some provinces of Russia, and partly to industrial depression, Mieczysław’s parents decided to leave the beautiful although unhealthy “Venice of the North” and move to the “Russian Florence”, as Odessa was called at that time. Odessa was the third largest city in European part of Russia after St. Petersburg and Moscow. This another ethnically diverse port city, on the Black Sea, was also a cultural oasis, as St. Petersburg was. There were some two dozen public and private libraries and reading rooms, three museums, several theaters, Italian opera, public auditoriums, a university and nearly 200 public and private schools.
I’m not sure to what extent my great-grandparents appreciated the cultural bounties of Odessa, but they must have had their son’s education in mind. This required thought and consideration, as there was no compulsory school attendance in Tsarist Russia. I’m sure they would have loved to send him to a Polish school, but Polish schools as such did not exist in Russia and the Russian part of Poland because of the offensive Russification program imposed on Poles by the tsarist authorities, especially after the Revolt of 1863. Thus, in 1869, the Higher School of Warsaw was turned into a Russian university, and Russian supplanted the Polish language in all intermediate schools. In 1885, the compulsory use of Russian was extended to all elementary schools. Religion instruction was delivered by the Catholic priest in the Russian language. When in school, pupils were forbidden to speak Polish among themselves. Primary schools in the whole Russian empire had the aim of giving children a religious and moral education, developing in them a love of Russia.
The use of the Polish language was not allowed in schools, it could not be forbidden in homes, where Poles taught their children Polish history and literature. Mieczyslaw’s parents were no different, they made sure that he got a proper Polish education, while his mother also taught him German. It turned out that young Mieczysław possessed a gift for languages.
Although my great-grandparents were not members of Russian nobility, they expected Mieczysław to choose a military career, as it was proper for the sons of families of noble background or, simply because it was a pragmatic option. Therefore, after primary school Mieczysław - gladly or reluctantly, we will never know - entered a military gymnasium where young men were taught to drill, gymnastics, and use of the saber. The young cadets also learned religion, composition in Russian, algebra, elementary geometry, geography, and Russian history. Upon his graduation in 1913, Mieczysław continued his education at the Sergievsky Artillery School in Odessa.
Mieczysław at the cadet school in Odessa. Students of military schools wore a uniform: a tunic in summer, and in winter a caftan, with the number of their class embroidered on the collar.
During this time, the political situation in Russia was worsening, and in 1917 had developed into full-blown revolution. The Bolsheviks were quickly taking over. Since many of the Russian officers did not wish to submit to the Communists, a volunteer “White” Army against the Red was organized. In this whirlwind of history, Mieczysław, less than twenty years old, enlisted in the White Russian Army under General Anton Denikin, and was assigned to serve as a gunner on the armored train. Armored trains were used extensively by both the Red Army and the White Army as most fighting was along railway lines, the main means of transport in many contested areas. Armored trains had a brief moment of military glory, and with the advent of motor transport faded from view.
On July 17, 1918, Tsar Nicolas II, his wife and children, and even their servants met a tragic end at the hands of the Bolsheviks. On November 11, 1918, Poland regained its independence after 123 dramatic years of partition and again appeared on the map. At the end of 1919, Denikin's Army was defeated. The Whites were driven back to the Black Sea, where they evacuated on British ships on March 27, 1920. Russia has changed fundamentally.
Łódź
In March 1920, Mieczysław crossed the Polish border and reported to the newly established Polish Army. As he had a military education, as well as some war experience, he received the rank of lieutenant and was assigned to the 4th Regiment of Heavy Artillery which stationed in Łódź, a city he did not know.
“Imagine a broad plain covered by a forest of black-factory chimneys, whose smoke rises perpendicularly, and, slowly sinking saturates the air with soot and gas. That is Łódź. Beneath this canopy of smoke is the low murmur of music - the humming of thousands upon thousands of spindles and looms”, wrote a Swiss journalist in 1922. “ Łódź is a young city, without tradition or history. A hundred years ago a little primitive cloth-factory was set up in a forest hamlet here. Half a century later the place had 50,000 inhabitants.”
Did the city’s ugliness, smoke and smell repel Mieczysław? Did he miss the sunshine and the fresh sea air of Odessa? The beauty of its buildings? The Nikolaevsky Boulevard above the Richelieu steps? (The steps will later become famous thanks to Eisenstein’s 1925 silent movie “The battleship Potemkin”.)
Maybe, but things were happening fast, and he was only 21 years old. Young people do not tend to look back, as they have their whole lives ahead of them.
In Łódź, Mieczysław met my future grandmother, 18-year-old Jadwiga (née Łuckiewicz), who worked in the military censorship office; her job was to read letters from Polish soldiers to their families in Russia and blacken out the military “secrets”. Jadwiga was born in Kiev to Polish parents; her father served in the tsarist army and died of battle wounds in 1914, at the very beginning of the First World War, when Jadwiga was only12 years old. Jadwiga, her 2-years-older brother Staś, and her mother managed to survive the Bolshevik Revolution in Kiev, and left Ukraine with the Polish Army units in 1919.
Jadwiga was beautiful; she had dark hair (not quite black, but dark brown), brown eyes, a slender graceful body, and pride in her personal appearance. She dreamed of becoming an actress, like Octavia Zoll, her step-brother’s mother-in-law, who had achieved a success as an operetta and cabaret actress in Vienna. Octavia once made a light promise to take the young woman under her wings. Jadwiga’s own mother strongly disapproved the idea: performing on the stage was not a respectable profession for a respectable woman. Jadwiga naïvely believed that by marrying Mieczysław she would gain independence from her mother and will be able to try her luck on stage. But instead of becoming an actress in Vienna, admired for her indisputable beauty, she gave birth to a girl, my mother Lidia, in 1922., and had to forget her dreams and accept reality of being a wife and mother in the early twentieth century.
I should mention that in those days, officers were expected to live in style, for which reason marriages were strictly regulated. An officer without private means wishing to marry a poor girl would have to leave the service. Mieczysław did not have private means, and Jadwiga was not affluent either, so they married in complete secrecy. Their marriage was, however, discovered, and Mieczysław got sacked from the army. Since teachers were in demand, he became a teacher; but either the regulations changed or someone interceded for him, for he was soon readmitted to the army, and restored to his rank.
The young Wilińskis led a life typical of a military family - a life which did not abound in too many excitements, although they had plenty of friends and acquaintances. They led a rich social life, attending dances at the Officers’ Club, making trips to vacation resorts. But the officers not only danced with their beautiful wives: to maintain the army in combat readiness, various trainings and maneuvers had to be held from time to time. Also, Mieczysław was given the task of writing down the history of the 4th Heavy Artillery Regiment in which he served. The book was published in Warsaw in 1929. 90 years later, it can be still bought in antique shops.
Like any officer in the Polish Army, Mieczyslaw had an orderly to shine his boots, and see that his uniforms were always clean. Orderlies were soldiers of the lowest rank, recruited from peasants from the eastern borderlands who, being illiterate, could not serve in any other capacity. Lidia, a teenager at that time, fondly remembers one Hryćko, whom they treated like a member of the family, and even took him to their summer vacation spot. Every evening, he delayed going back to the barracks as long as he could; he enjoyed helping the maid to cook and clean, as well as the walks with my grandmother to the market. He had one endearing weakness, namely that he loved being photographed. This is why on almost all their vacation pictures we see Hryćko standing at attention - as befits a good soldier - in the very foreground, while the rest of the merry company is leaning out from behind him. How joyous and jaunty they all look on those faded old photographs!
In the early 1930s Mieczysław decided to catch up on his education. He followed in his father's footsteps and chose law, and enrolled in the extramural classes at the University of Warsaw. Was he thinking of leaving the army? Probably not - armies need lawyers too. After studying hard for four years he got his JD degree. Meanwhile he also managed to bring his parents to Poland from Odessa, who had suffered severe hunger and hardships under Soviet rule. Jan did not have a job any more, and Maria made some money sewing clothes for workers. They became so poor that could not even pay customs fee for the food parcels their son sent them. Neither could they board the train and come to Poland. Like many other Poles who did not leaveSoviet Russia before the communist regime had solidified its power, Mieczysław’s parents were stranded. Seeing no other option, Mieczysław put on his officer's uniform and went to the Soviet Embassy. To the disbelief of friends and family who expected him to disappear without trace in the depths of the grim building, he secured a permission for his parents to leave Russia.
It still was not so easy, but they finally arrived - together with the Singer sewing machine which saved them from starvation, and almost nothing else. During the first few weeks in Łódź, they were amazed by the new environment and culture: they could not believe that one was able to buy food without standing in endless lines. And what food! Every time the maid brought home groceries Jan would look at them in wonder, touch them and even smell them; he would smell butter, tea, coffee, bread with a dreamy expression on his face, as if remembering something from the distant past. His mind probably wandered to the pre-revolutionary times when he and Maria were wealthy and lived a comfortable life.
The War
War had been in the air for some time, although nobody knew anything specific. The Polish government, however, was expecting German invasion and (for reasons which are not quite clear to me) ordered the navy to leave and cruise to Britain. The Polish navy left the ports on August 20, 1939. The rest of the army, Mieczysław’s regiment too, expected imminent mobilization and waited for orders. Then the hell started.
“On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s unstoppable armies surge into Poland. Blitzkrieg becomes his signature attack, combined with extensive bombing that destroys the enemy's air capacity, rail system, communications, and munitions dumps. The German infantry then moves in, destroying everything in sight, silencing any remaining resistance.” - wrote a New York Times reporter in September 1939.
From the first days of the war, Poland was torn apart by fast-moving German army. The commander of Mieczysław’s unit, Major Hipolit Burchard, decided to evacuate the regiment south, in requisitioned cars, and across the border into Romania. Officers’ families, my grandmother and my mother among them, joined the regiment in this flight. There was total havoc: they were bombed, some of the cars broke or run out of gas. To make matter worse, the Soviets invaded Poland on September 17, 1939. Although the Polish government managed to evacuate to Romania, with substantial military forces and some of the air force, Mieczysław’s unit did not make it out; the regiment was demobilized in Kovel (now in Belarus) on September 19, 1939. Once the Soviets established firm control of the areas they occupied, they sealed the Romanian border. My grandmother and my mother had no choice but to return to their home in Łódź, whereas Mieczysław, since surrender was not an option for him, had to go into hiding. He decided to head for Warsaw. After they said their goodbyes in Lublin in the end of September, 1939, my mother (then less than seventeen years old) was to never see him again.
The Occupation
Mieczysław disappeared. Like a stone into deep water. In October 1939, many secret military and intelligence groups were already organized, some by the army officers who, like Mieczysław, had avoided being taken prisoner. A few months later, my grandmother was contacted by a female courier, one of those heroic women who smuggled false documents, money, and arms. The figure of the female courier is an iconic image of the Second World War in Poland. The messenger conveyed a message from Mieczysław, as well as arranged a meeting for them in Warsaw. There, while strolling together through a park, Jadwiga learned that her husband had joined a clandestine organization. He did not, of course, provide any details other than “we even have an airplane” which sounded like bragging. Jadwiga still did not know where he lived, what he did, who his comrades were.
Then, in the fall of 1942, he fell into the Gestapo's hands. The circumstances of his arrest are unclear, but there are documents available on the internet from which we learn that he was put in the infamous Pawiak prison on October 3, and deported to Auschwitz on November 18. He was imprisoned as a Polish political prisoner, and assigned the number 76168. As he was fluent in German, Russian and Polish, he is registered as a translator in the camp ledger.
Jadwiga learned about the arrest from a messenger. According to what the organization managed to establish, Mieczysław walked into a trap that was set by the Gestapo agents in somebody’s apartment or shop. They probably didn't know whom they caught (hoped the messenger), so there was a chance that he could be bailed out. Jadwiga immediately got in touch with a lawyer who was willing to mediate Mieczysław’s release from the prison. As most wives would do in a such situation, she gave the lawyer all her valuables to cover expenses which might include bribing the prison clerk. It turned out, however, that Mieczysław’s case was not negotiable, and the valuables were returned to her.
I have been searching for clues to what activity he was involved in by analyzing the list of people brought to Pawiak on the same day as he, as well as the list of all men deported to Auschwitz on November 18. My line of thinking is this: some of them might have fallen into the same trap, or they were caught a couple of days earlier, and the trap was set up to catch their co-conspirators. One name that stands out is that of Stefan Plater-Zyberk, a member of the so-called Musketeers, a clandestine organization.
Little is known of the Musketeers today. Established in early October 1939 in Warsaw, the organization conducted mainly intelligence and counterintelligence in the area of the Reich and of Poland occupied by the Russia. Only few names of those involved and a handful of facts are known today with any certainty. Apart from the group founder, engineer Stefan Witkowski, a colorful (some say, controversial) figure, the group included such individuals as: Antoni Kocjan, a pre-war glider designer; Tadeusz Derengowski, a glider and airplane pilot (Mieczysław told his wife that his organization had an airplane, so this might be a clue); Stefan Dembiński, an officer who served in the same artillery unit as Mieczysław (an even better clue); Mieczysława Ćwiklińska, an actress whom no one today would suspect of being in this role - that of a conspirator; and, last but not least, Stefan Plater-Zyberk, a famous photographer…
Stefan Plater-Zyberk was the owner of the “Photo-Plat”, a well-established studio, an agency and a photo-archive in downtown Warsaw, on New World Street. Before the war, he took part in the life of the Warsaw photographic community, actively participated in exhibitions, and regularly exhibited his work. In 1931, for his achievements in the field of photography, he was admitted to the Polish Photo Gallery. Many of his photographs have survived to this day, and are sold on auction. The artist continued to photograph in occupied Warsaw and to run his business, while also falsifying documents for the Musketeers, who engaged in some mysterious matters that sent them, masquerading as German officers, to Berlin; and even, as agents of the British intelligence, to Russia. Were Stefan’s connections with the Musketeers the reason for his arrest? (This is almost certain.) Was the trap set in his photo studio? Did Mieczysław fall into this trap? Was Mieczysław a Musketeer?
There is another name on the Pawiak and Auschwitz lists, which seems a more promising clue: Witold Zacharewicz, a popular Polish actor of the 1930s. At the beginning of the war, according to his wife, he also joined an “organization”. (The Musketeers?) The cause of his arrest is known: he and his mother were involved in helping Jews who, after escaping from the Warsaw ghetto, needed the “Aryan” papers, i.e. false Christian birth certificates, false Aryan kenkarts. Halina, Witold’s wife, writes in her memoirs published on the Internet: “That afternoon [October 1, 1942] Mrs. K., the photographer's wife, came to me with news of her husband's arrest by the Gestapo - she also knew about my mother-in-law's arrest. I did not know anything about Witold.” Later Halina learned that Witold was arrested at the theatre, during a rehearsal. Witold Zacharewicz and his mother had been denounced to the Gestapo by someone they knew and trusted, a certain lawyer. Halina, like my grandmother, tried to bail her husband out. She spoke to a German, an acquaitance of a friend, who promised to help. She sold her jewelry and gave him the requested money, but never saw the man nor her money again. Three days after the arrest of Witold and the rest of his group (10 people), Mieczysław fell into the trap. Witold’s group operated in the town of Włochy near Warsaw. Was Mieczysław arrested in Włochy? Did he know Witold or somebody else from the group? On November 18, 1942, after 7 weeks of harsh interrogations at the Pawiak prison, Halina’s husband was deported to Auschwitz. So was Stefan Plater-Zyberk and Mieczysław Wiliński, and the rest of those arrested at the same time.
According to the camp ledger, they arrived the next day. Their hair was immediately shaved off, they got the underwear and prison uniforms in exchange for their clothes. They were assigned the camp numbers which were then tattooed on their left arms: Stefan 76147, Mieczysław 76168, Witold 76174. Then, their photographs were taken; I can see that Mieczysław has a large bruise on his nose.
They were allowed to write postcards (in German) from Auschwitz. They were also permitted to receive Red Cross and private food parcels, and warm clothing. Witold wrote directly to his wife, Halina; Mieczysław addressed his correspondence to Stefania Mieczyńska, Warsaw, Bahnhofstrasse 7/17. Who was Stefania Mieczyńska? Although he called her “Liebe Tante”, she was not a relative of his. According to the documents on the Internet, Stefania Mieczyńska was a member of the Home Army, whose task was, among the others, to maintain underground communications with Polish officers in POW camps. She passed Mieczysław’s postcards to Jadwiga. His first postcard, however, dated November 20, 1942 (his second day in Auschwitz), is addressed to Sydonia Wólkowska, probably his land-ady. He felt very sick, and predicted he would soon die.
According to the Auschwitz ledgers, Mieczysław, Witold and others from the two lists mentioned above died on Tuesday, February 16, 1943. (Stefan Plater-Zyberk had died one week earlier.) Some witnesses claimed that they were killed by a phenol injection, others that they were shot. Which is true? There exist a record of their admission to the prison hospital on that day. Families received notification of their relatives’ death with the date of 16 February 1943: Mieczysław allegedly died of typhus, while Witold allegedly died of heart attack.
Anne Frank, just before her arrest, wrote: “I’ve reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, I can't do anything to change events anyway.” I remember these words every time I look at Mieczysław’s Auschwitz photographs.
