Stanisław Swianiewicz

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Stanisław Swianiewicz

Stanisław Swianiewicz (born November 7, 1899 in Daugavpils , then: Dynaburg / Russian Empire ; † May 22, 1997 in London ) was a Polish political scientist and economic historian. As the only survivor of the transport of Polish prisoners of war to the Katyn forest , he was the main witness in the investigation of the Katyn massacre in the spring of 1940.

Life

Swianiewicz was born a Russian citizen, his father came from the Polish nobility , an engineer with the Russian Railways, he was for the section Dynaburg- Oryol responsible; his mother was a German teacher at a girls' school. The son, who grew up trilingual, attended a high school in Oryol and then studied law and economics at the Lomonosov University in Moscow .

After the Bolsheviks seized power in the “ October Revolution ”, he left Moscow for the west and joined associations that fought for the restoration of Poland's state. In 1919 he took command of the department of the " Polish Military Organization " (POW), a force armed from Warsaw that fought for the annexation of Lithuania to Poland. In 1920 he belonged to the association which, under General Lucjan Żeligowski, occupied Vilna , the capital of Lithuania, and the southern part of the Baltic republic. In 1922 this part of Lithuania, including Vilnius, was annexed by Poland.

Swianiewicz continued his studies at the University of Vilnius and got a job there in 1928 as a lecturer at the Eastern European Institute. He received his doctorate with a dissertation on " Lenin as an economist" in 1930 and in the same year took over the management of the institute's economic department. He wrote analyzes not only about the planned economy and industrial development in the Soviet Union, but also about the German armaments policy under Hitler . In 1938 he received the certificate of his appointment as Professor of Economics, signed by President Ignacy Mościcki .

At the end of August 1939 he was drafted into a supply unit as a lieutenant in the reserve as part of the general mobilization . In the first two weeks of the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, his unit was deployed in central Poland, after the Red Army marched into eastern Poland on September 17, it was relocated to the east. At Krasnobród he was captured by the Soviets on September 28th.

Via the Kiev station , Swianiewicz came to the Koselsk special camp, which is under the supervision of the NKVD secret police , around 250 kilometers southwest of Moscow, where more than 4,000 Polish officers and ensigns were interned. In May 1940 he was asked about his studies on the German arms industry at the Moscow NKVD headquarters in Lubyanka . But since he refused to work with the NKVD, he was sentenced to eight years of forced labor and taken to a camp in the Komi Republic in the north of the Soviet Union.

Contrary to the agreements of the Sikorski-Maiski Agreement of August 1941 on Polish-Soviet cooperation, he was initially not released, the Polish ambassador Stanisław Kot insisted on this to the Soviet authorities in vain . Only after the Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile, Władysław Sikorski, personally campaigned for it, was Swianiewicz able to leave the camp and travel to Kuibyshev , where most of the embassies, including the Polish one, had been relocated due to the war. With the Anders Army , the Polish units set up in the Soviet Union under the command of General Władysław Anders , he reached the British Mandate Palestine via Iran in autumn 1942 . There he took over the management of the Polish “Office for Studies of the Near and Middle East” in Jerusalem in January 1943 . In September 1943 he took up a post in the Foreign Office of the government-in-exile in London, where he saw the end of the war in 1945.

From 1947 to 1953 he taught at the Polish College in London, after its dissolution he took over a professorship at the University of Yogyakarta in Indonesia . His wife and daughter, whom he had not seen for 18 years, arrived there in 1957. The authorities of the People's Republic of Poland had previously refused them a passport. For the academic year 1958/59 he received a research grant at the London School of Economics . For the next decade he was a professor at Saint Mary's University in Halifax in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia , and he also taught at the University of Notre Dame at South Bend, Indiana .

In 1990, the President of the Polish government in exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, awarded him the Officer's Cross for Services to the Republic of Poland . In the same year he returned to Poland for the first time in 41 years. He died at the age of 97 in a retirement home for Polish veterans in London, and was buried next to his wife in Halifax, Canada.

Role in the Katyn case

In the Koselsk camp, Swianiewicz was interrogated by the NKVD major Vasily Sarubin , who made recommendations to the NKVD leadership for further questioning or the shooting of the prisoners. On April 30, 1940, he was part of a group of officers who were brought by train from Koselsk to the Gnjosdowo train station near Katyn in wagons specially built for the transport of prisoners . According to his own report, Swianiewicz was separated from the group by a senior NKVD officer. While waiting for his onward journey, he watched through a ventilation hole in the wagon as his comrades were being taken away in small buses by heavily armed NKVD soldiers. As he later wrote, at that time the thought was completely alien to him that his comrades would lead to the execution in the forest of Katyn.

According to his own report, Swianiewicz was taken to Smolensk Prison, where he was the only inmate in his cell block, and from there to Moscow after a week. After his release from the Gulag , he reported to the Polish embassy in Kuibyshev and the staff of the Anders Army in Buzuluk about his observations at the Gnjosdowo train station. However, the head of the search office for the missing Polish prisoners of war in the Anders Army, Count Józef Czapski , paid no particular attention to the report, as he received dozens of information about the alleged whereabouts of the officers. Ambassador Stanisław Kot asked Swianiewicz himself to prepare an analytical summary of all these reports. Only after the German press reported the discovery of the mass graves in the Katyn forest in mid-April 1943 was the significance of Swianiewicz's observations recognized, especially since the names of his fellow prisoners from the rail transport from Koselsk to Gnjosdowo were on the lists of deaths published by the Germans.

On April 16, 1952, he was questioned anonymously in London, disguised by a mask, by the Madden Commission , the investigative commission of the US House of Representatives into the Katyn massacre, about everyday life in the camp in Koselsk and his observations at the Gnjosdowo train station. His Katyn reports analyzed the Foreign Office in London, but there was no clear assessment of how out of the historian Rohan D'Olier Butler written memorandum about the attitude of the British government to Causa Katyn ( Butler memorandum stating).

In 1975 he was attacked by strangers in London shortly after it had been announced that he was working on a book about Katyn and that he was to report on it at the Sakharov Hearing in Copenhagen. The perpetrators were suspected to be in the ranks of the Polish secret police SB or the KGB . He lost consciousness during the attack, but was still able to attend the Copenhagen conference after several days in hospital.

Works

  • Lenin Jako Economista. Instytut Europy Wschodnej, Wilna 1930 ( dissertation )
  • Polityka gospodarcza Niemiec hitlerowskich. Polityka Publishing House, Warsaw 1938 ( habilitation thesis )
  • Forced Labor and Economic Development: An Inquiry into the Experience of Soviet Industrialization. Oxford University Press, London 1965, ISBN 0-313-24983-0 .
  • W cieniu Katynia. Institut Littéraire, Paris 1976, ISBN 2-7168-0027-8 .
  • Dzieciństwo i młodość. Ed. Jan Jacek Swianiewicz. Warsaw 1996, ISBN 83-86367-26-1 .

literature

  • Benon Gaziński (ed.): Stanisław Swianiewicz (1899–1997): ekonomista, sowietolog, historyk. Instytut Nauk Uniwersytet Warmińsko-Mazurski w Olsztynie, Olsztyn 2010, ISBN 978-83-89559-07-4 .

documentary

  • Ostatni świadek (2005), directed by Paweł Woldan

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical information, unless otherwise stated, according to Maria Swianiewicz-Nagięć: Moje dzieciństwo i rozłąka z ojcem , in: Stanisław Swianiewicz: ekonomista, sowietolog, historyk idei. Pod red. Benona Gażińskiego. Olsztyn 2011, pp. 18-21.
  2. ↑ The Katyn Forest Massacre. US Government Printing Office. Washington 1952, vol. IV, p. 603.
  3. ↑ Natal'ja Lebedeva: Katyn - čelovečestva Prestuplenie protiv. Moscow 1994, pp. 81-82.
  4. ^ Andrzej Przewoźnik , Jolanta Adamska: Katyń. Zbrodnia prawda pamięć. Warsaw 2010, p. 138.
  5. ↑ Stanisław Swianiewicz: W cieniu Katynia. Warsaw 2010, p. 221.
  6. ↑ Dziennik Ustaw Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej , December 20, 1990, p. 53.
  7. ↑ Stanisław Swianiewicz - ocalony z Katynia dzieje.pl , September 29, 2015.
  8. ↑ Maria Swianiewicz-Nagiec: Moje dzieciństwo rozłąka i z ojcem , in: Stanislaw Swianiewicz: ekonomista, sowietolog, historyk idei. Pod red. Benona Gażińskiego. Olsztyn 2011, pp. 20-21.
  9. ↑ GA Andreenkova, VM Zarubin i katynskoe delo, in: Vestnik Katynskogo memoriala. 14 (2014), p. 78.
  10. ↑ Stanisław Swianiewicz: W cieniu Katynia. Warsaw 2010, pp. 111–114.
  11. ↑ The Katyn Forest Massacre. US Government Printing Office. Washington 1952, vol. IV, p. 607.
  12. ↑ Stanisław Swianiewicz: W cieniu Katynia. Warsaw 2010, pp. 308-312.
  13. ^ Andrzej Przewoźnik, Posłowie, in: Stanisław Swianiewicz: W cieniu Katynia. Warsaw 2010, pp. 375–376.
  14. ^ The Butler Memorandum, p. 6.
  15. ↑ Maria Swianiewicz-Nagiec: Moje dzieciństwo rozłąka i z ojcem , in: Stanislaw Swianiewicz: ekonomista, sowietolog, historyk idei. Pod red. Benona Gażińskiego. Olsztyn 2011, p. 21.
  16. ↑ Ostatni świadek , filmpolski.pl
personal data
SURNAME Swianiewicz, Stanisław
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish political scientist and economist
DATE OF BIRTH November 7, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Daugavpils
DATE OF DEATH May 22, 1997
Place of death London