The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers' Diaries from Warsaw, 1939-1945

Chapter 2. Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz: The Holocaust and the Struggle for Humanism

25 The conduct of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1894–1980) toward the victims of the German Occupation was beyond reproach. The State of Israel and Yad Vashem posthumously awarded Anna and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz the medal of the Righteous Among the Nations in 1987. The award citation states that the couple hid Jews on their Stawisko estate, helped others find hiding places, and returned money paid for an unrealized prewar real estate transaction to Jewish buyers who were incarcerated in the Ghetto. Anna Iwaszkiewicz risked her freedom, if not her life, when she entered the Ghetto to undo the transaction. The couple also obtained, often with great difficulty, false documents for Jews to enable them to pass as Poles on the “Aryan side.”1 They gave shelter to hundreds of destitute fugitives after the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. Thanks to Anna’s inheritance of the estate, the Iwaszkiewiczs were relatively affluent, and also extended hospitality and monetary assistance to Polish friends, relatives, and acquaintances, as well as generously supporting fellow writers and artists; Nałkowska and Da ˛browska benefited from their support, and Rembek also visited Stawisko.2 Iwaszkiewicz was steeped in European humanism and its culture. His behavior during the war and his reactions to wartime events must be seen through the lens of his European Weltanschauung. How deep and steadfast did his ideological beliefs, grounded in the tradition of the Enlightenment, prove to be under the Occupation? Was Iwaszkiewicz capable of maintaining his faith in humanity’s moral nature while witnessing the horror of the Jewish extermination? To what extent was he Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz: The Holocaust and the Struggle for Humanism chapter 2 26 jarosław iwaszkiewicz able to reconcile his patriotic identification with his fellow Poles and the moral disintegration of Polish society under the German Occupation? A close look at Iwaszkiewicz’s three autobiographical texts traces his evolving ethical worldview as he sought to reaffirm his humanistic picture of the world during a time of dehumanization and genocide.3 Toward Europe: Youthful Hopes and Ambitions Iwaszkiewicz’s extensive knowledge of European philosophers, musicians, writers, and of European languages informed his intensely Eurocentric ideological orientation. He was born in 1894 in the village of Kalnik in the Ukraine. After completing his high school studies in Kiev, and serving with a Polish battalion in World War I, he moved to Warsaw in 1918. There he joined a mixed group of Christian and Jewish intellectuals and artists who became known as Skamandrites (Skamandryci) after the avant-garde literary journal Skamander, to which they contributed their earliest works. Ardent admirers of western European culture and its modernistic trends, they became famous for the public readings of their avant-garde poems in the café Picador. Iwaszkiewicz first expressed his attachment to Europe in his 1921 poem “Europa.” In this poem, which introduces the collection of poems Return to Europe (1931), Iwaszkiewicz declared his unequivocal love for Europe, whose welcome was like “the touch of a native land . . . like a mother’s unrestrained joy on the return of her son from faraway places.”4 In his study of Iwaszkiewicz’s affinity with Europe, Piotr Drobniak argues that Iwaszkiewicz’s extensive prewar travels in Europe—he participated in the meetings of the European International Intellectual Union and Pen Club in the 1920s and 1930s—inspired his vision of a unified Europe, whose various cultures would eventually coalesce into a multicultural whole.5 This idea of European cultural unification is especially important in view of Iwaszkiewicz’s persistent aspiration to have Poland qualify as a member in the family of western European nations. While acknowledging that Poland’s unhappy history of partitions was a hindrance to its cultural and intellectual progress, he nonetheless saw his country as making important contributions to European culture through its artists and poets, such as Mickiewicz and Kochanowski.6 jarosław iwaszkiewicz 27 For Iwaszkiewicz, therefore, western Europe was the model of cultural, ethical, and aesthetic excellence which he followed and emulated. To understand the way in which European Weltanschauung inspired his Bildung , namely, his self-education in the spirit of the European cultural and aesthetic tradition, it is important to consider his initial self-presentation to his readers. In 1921, the year in which he wrote “Europa,” Iwaszkiewicz also wrote a short memoir, “Fragments from Diaries” (“Fragmenty z pamie ˛tników”). The memoir, which tells about his childhood, school years, and brief service in the Austrian...