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Professor Władysław Bartoszewski Is 85
February 12, Warsaw (PAP – Polish Press Agency) He has been the Polish foreign minister, a writer and historian, a wartime member of the Jewish Aid Council, an Auschwitz prisoner, and an indefatigable proponent of Polish-German and Polish-Jewish dialogue. His friends call him a phenomenal example of vitality with an unconquerable nature. On February 19, Professor Władysław Bartoszewski observes his 85th birthday.
“I know what retirement means. I am the child of office workers and, for them, retirement meant withdrawal from life. For me, everything is upside down,” says Bartoszewski in an interview in a special supplement to the latest issue of Tygodnik Powszechny, dedicated to him in its entirety on the occasion of his 85th birthday.
“I made my first trip abroad thanks to Tygodnik Powszechny, at the age of 41. I first held government office when I was 68. I became a government minister at 73 and a senator at 75. I became a minister for the second time at 78, and stopped being one on the eve of my 80th birthday. My father retired at 70. . . . He died at 75. At that age, I was just beginning to blossom,” Bartoszewski told the weekly newspaper.
He was born in Warsaw on February 19, 1922. His father was a director of the Polish National Bank, and his mother a city official. He began attending the private St. Stanisław Kostki Catholic gymnazjum at the age of 8. He passed his “minor maturity examination” in 1937 and enrolled in the Educational Society lyceum, from which he graduated in May 1939.
The Second World War left a lasting imprint on his biography. After the outbreak of the conflict, Bartoszewski went to work for the Polish Red Cross in Warsaw. Remembering the siege of Warsaw in September 1939, he says “I became a stretcher-bearer and was assigned to work in the orderly service. I simply carried stretchers with men who were strangers to me. I carried the wounded and the dying. You picked up your stretcher and headed for where the bombs were falling. . . . It was a normal civic matter, but it was very difficult for a 17-year-old boy, he says in an interview with Michał Komar in the supplement.
From September 22, 1940 to April 8, 1941, Bartoszewski was a political prisoner in Auschwitz, with camp number 4427. He was released from the camp as a result of the intervention of the Polish Red Cross with the International Red Cross.
“I lost consciousness on December 12, while cleaning bricks. . . . I was exhausted, injured, and in pain. That was normal for Auschwitz. Just as it would have been normal if I had died under a blow from a club, or from having my throat crushed by a capo’s boot. The strange thing was that prisoners carried me to the Krankenbau and laid me out next to the stairs. They could do nothing more, because they had to return immediately to work. They saved my life.”
During ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 2005, Bartoszewski remembered how he first stood at roll call at the parade ground in Auschwitz I in September 1940, as an 18-year-old Pole among 5,500 other Poles. It never entered his mind, he said, that he would outlive Hitler and survive the Second World War.
From the summer of 1942, Bartoszewski worked against the occupation regime in the Home Army and the Internal Affairs Department of the Office of the Delegate of the Polish Government in Exile. From 1942 to 1944, he was one of the organizers of the clandestine Jewish Aid Council (codenamed “Żegota”). He helped edit the underground press, played an active role in the Catholic Front for the Rebirth of Poland, and fought in the Warsaw Uprising.
Writing in Tygodnik Powszechny, the historian Krzysztof Kunert notes that Bartoszewski treats the majority of his more than 1,200 publications as “the fulfillment of the imperative to bear witness” to the times of the war. One of Bartoszewski’s works was a study of Public Executions in Warsaw 1943-1944, which was included among the documentation placed in evidence by Poland at the Nuremberg Tribunal.
“No witness remaining alive today had such a complete view of the reality of the times, in the Warsaw of those days, as Władysław Bartoszewski,” wrote the historian Aleksander Gieysztor in his introduction to Bartoszewski’s book The 1,859 Days of Warsaw, a chronicle of the capital under occupation and during the Uprising.
After the war, Bartoszewski worked for the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, and was also a member of Mikołajczyk’s Peasant Party (PSL).
The postwar years were another arduous period in Bartoszewski’s life. Persecuted by the communist regime and sentenced on espionage charges, he spent six and a half years, from November 1946 to August 1954, in communist prisons. He was rehabilitated in 1955.
Bartoszewski was a contributor to Tygodnik Powszechny. In the 1980s, he joined a range of opposition initiatives, and was one of the founders of the Society for Academic Courses and a lecturer in the “Flying University.” From 1974 to 1985, he lectured in the history of Poland at the Catholic University of Lublin.
Active at the time of the creation of the “Solidarity” trade union, he was interned from December 13, 1981, to April 28, 1982. From 1983 to 1990, he was visiting professor of political science at the German universities of Munich, Eichstaett, and Augsburg.
He is an honorary citizen of Warsaw, Gdynia, and Wrocław and an honorary member of the World Association of Home Army Soldiers, and has been awarded the Order of the White Eagle (1995), the Great Cross of Germany (2001), high decorations from Austria, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, and Spain, and the Righteous among the Nations of the World medal (awarded in 1963 in Jerusalem). In 1991, he became an honorary citizen of the State of Israel.
From 1990 to 1995, Bartoszewski was Polish ambassador to Austria. He was Polish Foreign Affairs Minister on two occasions, from March to December 1995 and again from July 2000 to October 2001. He is the chairman of the International Auschwitz Council and of the Council for the Protection of the Remembrance of Struggle and Martyrdom, and president of the Polish PEN Club.
He is the author of some 40 books on recent Polish and European history, concentrating especially on Polish-German and Polish-Jewish issues and published in Polish, German, and English. The titles include This One Is from My Fatherland, The 1,859 Days of Warsaw, The Days of the Fighting Capital, My Jerusalem—My Israel, and A Journal of Internment.
He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Warsaw, Wrocław, and Marburg, the PONO in London, and the Jewish University of Baltimore.
He is the winner of the Herder Prize (1983), the Peace Prize of German Booksellers (1986), the Heine Award (1996), the Guardini Award (1995), and many others.
During the observance of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, he became the fourth foreigner in history to address a gala session of both chambers of the German parliament in Bonn.
The professor’s biography is a history of an unconquerable nature, courage, and readiness to help, say his friends. They emphasize his vitality.
Bartoszewski is famed for his oratorical talent. “Endowed with a carrying voice, he can speak for lengthy periods without losing control of the rhythm of the oration and its conclusion,” says Michał Komar, who adds that he himself has been a witness when Professor Bartoszewski spoke to a numerous audience for two and a half hours.
When asked by Father Adam Boniecki, in the course of an interview in Tygodnik Powszechny, whether he regards his life as a success, Bartoszewski answered, “I have been very fully rewarded, and that is no illusion. Beyond anything I deserve. Heroism? I did indeed take part in aiding the Jews, but I was also damned frightened. Terribly frightened. No one knows that, because I would have been ashamed to admit it. Other people did equally splendid things. They ran with grenades and shot at Gestapo colonels. They too, surely, were afraid. I was afraid in a different way. However, the fact that I was able to help someone to some degree, minimal in regard to my willingness, turned out in the end to make sense.”
The cardiologist Andrzej Szczeklik tells Tygodnik Powszechny: “I conclude that Professor Władysław Bartoszewski has at his disposal a unique center in his cerebral hemispheres. It is a center of decency.” (PAP)
