What should not be lost
By Catrien Spijkerman and Julia Anna Czarnecka
During her time in the concentration camp, Karolina Lanckoronska finds hope in teaching and the beauty of art. When the war is over and the new Polish regime starts determining what goes down in the history books, she can’t stand idly by.
A postcard depicting Michelangelo’s David, helps Karolina Lanckoronska make it through the days. Incredible how a human being could make something that splendid! Carved from marble to perfection, David, resting on one leg and with a sling over his shoulder, is ready to attack the giant Goliath. Michelangelo managed to make every muscle look tightened and every vein on David’s arms clearly visible. And now, in concentration camp Ravensbrück this image of David reminds her that there is still beauty in this cruel world.
Michelangelo is Lanckoronska’s big love. Ever since she studied art history, she has been exploring his work. She obtains a doctorate on his paintings and teaches his work at the university of Lwow in Poland.
Then, at 47, Lanckoronska ends up in the concentration camp due to her resistance work. In there she secretly starts giving art history classes to her fellow inmates. ‘The audience, never sure if their last day might be drawing near, listened attentively’, she would write in her memoirs later. ‘Sometimes I would hold three lectures in one day, I would squeeze my weakened mind like a lemon and just talked.’ Her aim is to make the others feel some of what she feels herself: ‘The opportunity to free myself from all moral and physical filth, the pus, the diarrhoea and the humiliations surrounding us, and to return to the values that once formed my world.’
Not back to Poland
Lanckoronska is of noble birth and has connections in high-ranking places in Poland, but that doesn’t help her to get out of the camp. Only one month before the end of the war she is released, after two years of imprisonment.
It doesn’t take long for Lanckoronska to realise she is anything but free though. As a resistance fighter she had always strived for Poland to be independent and democratic, but after the war, the country comes under Soviet rule. The communist authorities view resistance fighters and aristocrats as a threat. All of a sudden, she is regarded as an ‘enemy of peace’.
She can’t go back to Poland as she would be arrested and tortured there by the new communist rulers. Even though Lanckoronska can’t wait to get back to work, she turns down a job as university professor in Fribourg in Switzerland. ‘Who would I teach there? Italians, Germans and French’, she would say about it later. ‘And I wanted to teach Polish people.’ But how?
Waste of time
By chance she hears about Polish soldiers who fought in Italy on the Allied side during the war. Just like Lanckoronska, they can’t go back to Poland because of the new communist regime. They are ‘stuck’ in Italy, with nothing to do.
Lanckoronska knows exactly what to do. She leaves for Rome and joins the Polish armed forces. She makes it to the rank of lieutenant and arranges for Polish exiles to study at various universities. Her connections from before the war are now serving her well and because of her, many Polish students manage to take their degrees abroad.
A painful sacrifice
Lanckoronska is worried about the educational situation in her home country. She doesn’t want to just stand by and watch the new regime determine what goes down in the history books about Poland. That is why she and some others found the Polish Historical Institute in Rome, in November 1945. The institute does research and promotes Polish history within the Western academic world. In addition to Polish scholars, it offers Western European and American academics reliable sources on Polish history, free from propaganda and oversimplification.
One could say that Lanckoronska renounced her great love after the war. It is the ‘only painful sacrifice’ in her life, she would write later. ‘It was clear to me that in order to serve Polish culture, there was no need for research into Michelangelo, but something quite different.’
Only the best
In 1992, she decides to donate her late father’s enormous art collection to the state of Poland. From that moment on, his collection of Italian masters, Rembrandts and hundreds of works from the Polish artist Jacek Malczewski can be admired by all Poles. Her explanation: ‘All that’s mine belongs to Poland.’ In one of her last interviews before her passing at the age of 104, she says: ‘I want to give the Poles all the very best in its genre. Masterpieces are the best education.’
