Kazimierz Pużak

Kazimierz Pużak

Kazimierz Pużak (born August 26, 1883 in Tarnopol , today Ukraine , † April 30, 1950 in Rawicz ) was a Polish socialist politician.

After attending grammar school in Tarnopol, where he graduated from high school in 1905, he began studying law at the University of Lemberg , which he broke off because of his political activities. Pużak belonged to the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) since 1904 , in 1906 he founded the "Revolutionary Fraction" of the PPS together with Józef Piłsudski . In 1909, on behalf of the party's fighting organization, he was one of the executors of the murder of a Russian provocateur in his own ranks. For this he was arrested by the Russians in 1911 and sentenced to six years imprisonment in Schliisselburg . Liberated in the revolutionary turmoil of 1917, he returned to Poland a year later.

In the short-lived government of Prime Minister Jędrzej Moraczewski (November 1918 to January 1919) he was Minister of Post. From 1921 to 1939 he was secretary of the Executive Committee of the PPS, from 1919 to 1935 at the same time a member of the Sejm .

After the German attack in 1939, he founded the Wolność, Równość, Niepodległość (Freedom, Equality, Independence) group underground as a continuation of the PPS activities. He was also a member of the political leadership of the underground and since 1944 headed the Council for National Unity (Rada Jedności Narodowej), the governing body of the underground, which was composed of representatives from all the major pre-war parties.

In March 1945 - after the Red Army marched into this part of the country - he was lured into a trap with other important leaders such as the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Army , General Leopold Okulicki , and the representative of the London government in exile, Jan Stanisław Jankowski, of the Soviet secret service NKVD near Pruszków and then deported to Moscow . In the local Stalinist show trial of sixteen politicians of the anti-communist resistance ( Trial of the Sixteen ) he was sentenced to one and a half years in prison. After four months pardoned, he returned to Poland. Since he continued to refuse to accept communist rule and to leave Poland for the west, he was arrested again in 1947 and sentenced to ten years in prison the following year at the trial of the leaders of the non-communist faction of the PPS. Pużak died in prison and was secretly buried in Warsaw's Powązki Cemetery . In 1996 he was posthumously awarded the Order of the White Eagle by President Aleksander Kwaśniewski .

Web links

• Kazimierz Pużak's curriculum vitae on the Polish Radio website (Polish)