Latest news with #Jerzy
The National
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
The Great Polish Map of Scotland, the ghostly soldier, and the poet
Or you could listen to the Krakowiak finale of Mackenzie's Violin Concerto of 1884-5, a Scottish composer's sparkling tribute to Krakow's political and cultural defiance. Or how about the 1683 siege of Vienna with Leslie's Scots Infantry Regiment fighting alongside the Poles and Count James Leslie as general of artillery playing a decisive role? Or much earlier, like 1576 when King Stephen Báthory granted the Scots merchants a royal grant and a designated district in Krakow. By the 1600s there were 30,000 Scots living in Poland. There is a Nowa Szkocja in Gdansk; MacLeods became Machlejd; Sinclairs Szynkler; and many more such. The Baltic trade with east coast Scotland was huge and even influenced our architecture. The Second World War reinforced these old connections by the stationing of Polish troops, airmen and seamen in Scotland. Hence the map. For myself, I was pursuing research into an eccentric Scottish composer of the early 1600s. I wrote about Tobias Hume in A Question Of Identity – Tobias Hume in The National on April 14, 2017. Years before, one of my sources was a CD booklet which made reference to the distinguished Polish writer Jerzy Pietrkiewicz's (1916-2007) novel Loot And Loyalty. It featured Hume as its 'hero', and it had a Saltire on its spine. The booklet notes were written by the great English musicologist Thurston Dart and they set me on a wonderful and enlightening trail. I'd never even heard of Loot And Loyalty, never mind its author, and the problem was, the book could not be bought anywhere. The only copy I could find was in the National Library of Scotland and I didn't have enough time in Edinburgh to read it in the library – which does not lend out books. The Saltire was intriguing as, in those days, even the holy bible of Groves Dictionary Of Music And Musicians declared Hume to be English. I knew he was almost certainly a Scot but why had Jerzy had Hume pictured with a Saltire? The only way left for me to find out was to track down Jerzy himself. There seemed, however, to be no way of tracing the man or his whereabouts and I only rooted him out by working on the principle that all Poles resident in Britain would know the hiding places of all other Polish residents. I was sure Jerzy was a UK resident as he was writing and publishing in English, so I contacted my friend Basil (Julian) Barbour. Basil, as he is known to me, when not losing himself in the philosophical conundrums of space-time, earned a crust translating scientific papers from and into Russian. He would therefore have contacts among other translators. Was one of them Polish? Yes, Mr Tybulewicz was and, on being asked to locate Jerzy, offered to act as intermediary. This was in early January 1991, so the Berlin Wall was down, but I guessed that Jerzy either had contacts with Poland which still called for him to keep a low profile or preferred to be left alone. I sent a letter to him, via Mr Tybulewicz, with a cassette tape of some of Hume's music as the true intermediary and it initiated my enduring friendship with Jerzy who replied and lent me a rare copy of Loot And Loyalty which he allowed me to photocopy. This is what I wrote to him after reading it: 'Loot And Loyalty – strange confederations gathering around a central figure whose innocence is alluringly complex and hovering over the dawn of evil. I have never been to those parts of Europe and you have fed me a vision of them full of clammy mists, foetid marshes and succubating mire and I begin to wonder what kind of people can possibly survive there with their souls intact.' In a pathetic petition to the House of Lords, Hume claimed: 'I am an old and experienced Souldier, and have done great service in other forraine Countries as when I was in Russia, I did put thirty thousand to flight, and killed six or seven thousand Polonians by the art of my instruments of warre when I first invented them.' Hume never specified the war weapon he claimed to have invented, so Jerzy imagined disease, carefully cultured and placed in a huge collapsible tower, spreading death through the entire water system of the Pripet marshes. Tobias experimented with ducks: he starved the birds and then watched them drink, each duck from a different pail of polluted water. Those which died after drinking determined the selection of samples, and the stinking pails were guarded in a special shed, until the day – the captain thought with glee in his eyes – when they would dangle from the topmost scaffold of the Great Machine. That's not my imagination, it's Jerzy's and his mystical turn of mind later connected Hume with the Chernobyl disaster. But I have written about this before in the essay mentioned above. Some clue to the Polish context of Jerzy's mystical thought is to be found in his lecture Messianic Prophecy, given in Polish when he was Professor Emeritus of Polish Literature at the University of London. The lecture was published with parallel English text in MCMXCI 'on the occasion of the state visit to the United Kingdom of the president of the Polish Republic Lech Wałęsa April 1991'. He concludes with: 'And yet, and yet. Maybe, to paraphrase the words of King Lear, we will, again and again, take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were the spies of God.' My copy of the lecture is dedicated to me by Jerzy: 'In the sign of Tobias Hume and Archangel Raphael', under which joint protection I remain confident of a kindly reception in the hereafter. Having reacted warmly to my radio plays, he wanted me to make one out of Loot And Loyalty but I did not have it in me to give it the kind of treatment called for by Jerzy's work. Andrea del Verrocchio's 15th-century painting Tobias and the Angel (Image: Archive) Jerzy's own radio play, The Cosmic Clock, was of disturbing originality, with extraordinary sensual imagery and a feel for language all superbly realised by Paul Scofield in a Radio 3 broadcast in 1991. It was inspired by The Saragossa Manuscript, a novel by Jan Potocki, who took his own life in 1815 with a silver bullet, and it is as mystical a work as Jerzy could have wished for. His imagery is disturbing: 'She wore a silver moon on a dark velvet band around her neck, and inside her beautiful body she held a cosmic clock which kept their fourfold time at bay, and the demons never dared to look into her eyes. One did, a stupid goblin they picked up while crossing the Bosphorus, on the day the Sultan was assassinated in Istanbul, and the goblin lost both sight and speech for seventy-seven days.' Work of that nature, with its strange psychological insights and uncompromising sensuality, was in a different league, and that he thought, from my own writings, that I could do anything good with Loot And Loyalty still surprises me. Jerzy's autobiography, In The Scales Of Fate, I found deeply impressive and wrote to tell him so. He was very touched and understanding of my own decidedly mixed feelings about autobiography, for his book troubled me by the extent to which it rummaged in my conscience. Pietrkiewicz had been in exile in the UK (he was a mature student at St Andrews University) since the start of the last world war, in which he was a courier for the Polish underground. He was a renowned poet in Polish, defending the artistic respectability of the peasant life of which his own past forms a moving revelation. He is a fine novelist in English and handles the language with a freshness and directness of peculiar sensitivity, and moral vision – here writing of his peasant uncle who was innocent of the contemptuous treatment being meted out to him at a market: 'The whole scene imprinted itself on my mind because it exemplified my own desire to see dignity as a posture of angels, therefore winged with silence.' This visionary sense is matched by a pervasive but discreet sensuality: 'I loved to catch the flying type of beetle just to feel its sticky abdomen'. Early encounters with the occult provide a fascinating thread throughout the book, which is refreshed by frequent skips forward and back across decades and borders, from his nightmare escape from Poland to his retreat in Andalusia, as connections spark in the memory. There is no slavery to time or place here, and yet no confusion in the narrative. The book is full of many echoes and is therefore full of questions rather than answers. It has been written in submission rather than self-glory. It adds weight to the chain of life and yet invigorates the muscles which need invigorating to cope with the extra burden. Above all, it unfailingly holds the attention with an intelligent and passionate humour. It is that rare thing; a book of wisdom. Here is part of what he wrote in response to my doubts about autobiography, and perhaps it may serve me as a defence for the existence of these memoirs: '... Yes, at 51, your present age, I would have abhorred autobiography, its probing into the dark corridors of the self. And then the orphan syndrome would have been put in operation: show a good face once more, to appease the world. 'Now I know I can no longer procrastinate. I have to use myself as a witness to the memory of a civilization which is almost gone. But the dead, do they care? Sometimes perhaps one of them answers to the echo of his name. Tobias did. And he rewarded me with his recorded music, and now with your letter ...' Elsewhere he wrote: 'The dead are deaf. Mercifully, they don't have to listen to what is shouted above their graves: they stay in line ready for roll-call.' Having spent so much of my life and energies doing what I could for the music of the dead and the long dead, I prefer what he wrote for me: that sometimes perhaps one of them answers to the echo of his – or her – name. One does not well remember the appearance of all one's friends, but Jerzy's I can envisage instantly. He was slight, and as fragile-looking and beautiful as fine bone china. All his movements were sensitive, gentle and executed with unhurried purpose. His eerie, at the top of a villa near Hampstead Heath, looked out upon the disorder of London,but contained within it an ordered and uncluttered world of simple things, carefully placed – a religious statuette, birds, a mug of flowers, all in their own unostentatious way, beautiful – himself a beautiful man.
Daily Mirror
29-04-2025
- General
- Daily Mirror
'We were lovers who lost each other after escaping Auschwitz - we met up decades later'
As the horrors of Auschwitz unfolded around them, two 20-somethings found love, lost one another then reunited decades later – leading to one of the most remarkable escapes of WWII Jerzy Bielecki, a Polish Catholic, and Cyla Cybulska, a Jew from eastern Poland whose entire family was murdered by the Nazis, worked together in the camp's grain silo. 'Amidst the horrors of the death camp, men and women were actually forbidden to speak to one another,' says historian Dr Kate Vigurs. 'But there were instances where they would come together on work details or brush up against one another within prison life. 'As in the case of Jerzy and Cyla, they met one another on a work detail. She caught his eye and the two instantly fell in love.' When Cyla witnessed an SS guard shoot her best friend dead, Jerzy knew they had to escape in order to survive. Slowly, he gathered all the pieces of a German guard's uniform and a security pass, determined to smuggle Cyla out too. Then in May 1944, with the plan ready, Cyla stopped arriving for work. Jerzy was petrified she'd been taken to the punishment block – or executed. But after several desperate weeks, a noted smuggled from Cyla confirmed she was alive and had been transferred to the camp laundry. Jerzy quickly put his plan in motion. On July 20 1944, he passed a note back to Cyla, telling her to be ready for a guard to take her for interrogation. The next day, a 'guard' arrived at the laundry. To Cyla's astonishment, it was Jerzy dressed in the stolen German uniform. 'They managed to walk through the camp, out the main entrance and out onto the road, essentially to freedom,' says Dr Vigurs. 'And they just kept walking.' They walked for nine days through Nazi-occupied Poland, outwitting the death squads sent to find them, until they reached the home of one of Jerzy's uncles. There, they parted, advised that they were in greater danger of being caught if they stayed together. Jerzy hid with the Polish resistance, and Cyla was taken in by a local family, with the young sweethearts vowing to reunite when war was over. But each later believed the other had died. Cyla moved to America, eventually marrying and having a daughter. Jerzy stayed in Poland also marrying and having a family. Then in 1982, Cyla, then a widow, told a friend of her incredible escape. The friend recalled a Polish man named Jerzy on TV recounting his own remarkable escape. He was alive and working as a school principal in Poland. The pair reunited in 1983, when Cyla flew back to Poland to find the man who had rescued her 39 years earlier, visiting places linked to their escape. Their remarkable story did not end with a romantic reunion, with Jerzy devoted to his wife and children, its huge significance remains. 'This couple have become known as the lovers of Auschwitz,' says Dr Vigurs. 'If it hadn't been for their love for one another inside the camp, perhaps they would never have escaped. They might not even have survived. So their love made sure that they got out of the camp, and that they lived a very full and long life.' Hidden death camp Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in a remote part of eastern Poland, is less known than others like Auschwitz – because almost no-one who went there survived to recount the atrocities that took place. 'This camp existed solely for the extermination of Jewish people,' says historian Mat McLachlan. 'They were sent there on trains, and fairly swiftly killed thereafter.' Of the thousands sent to Sobibor, just 50 or so survived. Among them was Alexander Pechersky, a Ukrainian Jew who fought for the Red Army before his capture in 1941. After harrowing experiences in other camps, Pechersky was transferred to Sobibor along with 100 other Soviet Jewish POWs in September 1943. Forced into labour at the camp, fear loomed large that if he grew too weak to carry on, he faced certain death. Desperate to survive he masterminded a mass escape. Within weeks of his arrival at Sobibor, his plot sprang into action, on October 14 1943. Prisoners lured a senior Nazi to the camp's tailor shop with a pretence of fitting him for a suit. Moments later, he was axed to death in the prison workshop. Over the coming hours, 10 more guards were quietly killed and their uniforms stolen, as Pechersky planned to lead an attack on the SS soldiers guarding the main gate. When a German soldier started shooting elsewhere in the camp, the prisoners were shocked into action and their fightback began ahead of schedule. 'The uprising was incredibly violent,' says Mat McLachlan. 'The prisoners took the opportunity to overwhelm the guards, and most of the guards were killed with axes. It would have been an absolutely horrific environment. 'Once the uprising had been discovered, the guards opened fire and prisoners were fleeing in all directions, people getting shot on the wire, more guards were being killed. It was just absolutely overwhelming violence in the camp.' But 300 men, women and children escaped, chased by guards with guns and dogs. Within days, 100 had been found and executed, with others starving and wandering in the forest. A small number – including Pechersky – evaded capture and survived the war. The Ukrainian hero was sent back to the front before being wounded in battle and invalided out of the Red Army in 1944. He died in 1990. Dr Kate Vigurs says: 'The legacy of the Sobibor uprising is incredibly important… It shows that the Jews did resist, that there was fighting back against the Holocaust and against the prison system. They didn't just willingly go to their deaths, as has so often been said. It showed a real determination for survival.' The brutalities of Auschwitz More than a million people were slaughtered in Auschwitz, 90% of them Jews. That tally may have been even higher without the astonishing actions of two men who managed to escape and reveal to the world the true horrors Hitler and his henchmen had unleashed there. Rudolph Vrba, born Walter Rosenburg, was 17 when he arrived at the camp in June 1942. Within days he witnessed the hanging of two prisoners who had tried to escape. But the guards' brutality made him more determined to escape. For 10 nightmarish months, the young Slovakian was forced to clear wagons of bodies at the railway station, rifling through the personal possessions of the dead. Malnourished and traumatised, even battling typhus, Vrba made a mental record of what he saw – the number of train arrivals, wagons and prisoners. In early 1944, Vrba and fellow inmate Alfred Wetzler, a friend from his hometown, learned the Nazis were preparing for the arrival of Hungary's entire Jewish population - meaning certain death for thousands of men, women and children. So they hatched a plan to escape, determined to expose the atrocities of Auschwitz to the world. On April 7, 1944, the men climbed into a space inside a woodpile. Hidden, they pushed oil-soaked tobacco into the gaps to deter the sniffer dogs hunting them with the German guards. For three days they lay in silence in the dark and cold, without food or drink. Historian Mat McLachlan says: 'At one stage, they could hear a couple of German guards nearby conducting the search, musing as to whether the woodpile would be a good hiding place. The German guards actually began removing wood from the pile. But fortunately there was a commotion elsewhere in the camp and the guards ran off.' Incredibly, by disturbing so much of the wood, the guards had made it easier for Vrba and Wetzler to push their way free. Soon, under the cover of darkness, they crawled to a nearby forest – where they began their treacherous 130km journey through Nazi-occupied Poland towards the Slovakian border. Mat McLachlan says: 'The penalty for assisting Jews and escaped prisoners in Poland was death. Yet, a local lady took them in and provided them with shelter and clothing.' But the danger kept on coming. Travelling onward, the pair were spotted by a Nazi patrol, shot at and chased by tracker dogs - escaping by plunging into a river. Finally, 14 days after evading their captors, they made it to the safety of Slovakia on April 21. There they wrote the earthshattering Vrba-Weltzer Report containing horrifying details about the true nature of Auschwitz, its gas chambers and crematoria. Mat McLachlan says: 'Finally, the rest of the world understood the depth of the horror in the German camps.' On July 6 1944, 90 days after the daring escape, Hungarian Regent Miklos Horthy abandoned plans to send more Jews to Auschwitz. Dr Vigurs says: 'Most of the Jews in the Hungarian suburbs had already been deported straight into Birkenau and murdered straight away, but there were still 200,000 Jews within Budapest, and this report stopped their deportation.' The Vrba-Wetzler Report would later be used as evidence at the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunals of 1946. VE Day 80 on Sky HISTORY marks 80 years since the end of World War 2 with a selection of curated documentaries throughout April and May Greatest Escapes of WWII will premiere on Tuesday 29th April at 9pm
