The Exile Mission. Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann
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women with sick children or dependent elderly parents; others were the wives or mothers of Polish soldiers and officers serving in the armed forces in the West, imprisoned in POW camps in Germany, or murdered in Katyń. For them, war meant not only loss of or separation from family members, but also disabilities, illnesses, and exhaustion resulting from their experiences in the Soviet labor camps or in Germany.103
The refugees established the Polish War Refugee Association in the United States (Zrzeszenie Uchodźców Wojennych z Polski w Stanach Zjednoczonych), based in New York, and the Circle of Polish Refugees in the Chicago area. The association, headed initially by Stefan Zagórski, and then by Władysław Korczak, turned to Rada for help. Rada allocated some financial resources for the refugees, and in March 1941 it formed a special Executive Committee for Aid to War Refugees from Poland in the United States, headed by Walter Bayer, to coordinate the aid distribution. At the end of August 1940, the lists prepared by the association in cooperation with the Polish consulate general in Chicago included about 250 persons living in the New York and Chicago areas.104 A year later, a similar roster for New York contained names of 577 Polish Christian refugees. The Polish War Refugee Association’s lists of persons receiving financial aid for 1944 through 1946, however, included both Polish and Jewish names, for example, Lazar Markeles, an unemployed rabbi, and Chil Trunk, a Jewish writer.105
The Polish government was concerned about the care of the refugees. Both Consul General Karol Ripa and Ambassador Jan Ciechanowski negotiated with Rada on behalf of the exiles. In the summer of 1941 Ciechanowski himself turned to Censor Świetlik, asking him to support an increase in aid to the refugees in New York. Responding to this request, Świetlik quoted the opinion of the Executive Committee for Aid, declaring that a thousand dollars a month was a sufficient sum for the time being. Świetlik reminded him that the type of support the refugees could expect in the United States would differ from what they might have gotten used to at other stages of their journey, when they were able to lean on the Polish government. “In the United States the refugees will have to depend on their own resourcefulness to a larger extent,” he cautioned. “All refugees in Chicago, with the exception of a few individuals really unable to work, found themselves jobs and settled down nicely. . . . We are under the impression that the refugees from the New York area are showing less willingness to rely on themselves,” he added.106
Beginning in September 1940, Rada allocated $150 per month for Chicago-area refugees, and $500 for those in New York.107 Between the beginning of 1941 and the end of 1945, Rada subsidized the Polish War Refugee Association in New York with roughly a thousand dollars a month and covered some additional outstanding sums for medical emergencies and treatment. Rada’s report for its second national convention in 1942 indicated that more than $21,000 were spent from the organization’s funds to aid Polish refugees in America. Rada’s report of 1948 showed that the help provided by the Committee for Refugees in New York exceeded $68,000.108 In the years 1942 through 1945, the refugees could also count on some financial support from the Ministry of Welfare of the Polish government in exile. In July 1945, when the United States and other Western countries withdrew their recognition of the London government, the subsidies stopped. In December of the same year, Rada terminated its obligations toward the Polish War Refugee Association. Throughout 1946, the association’s leaders wrote eloquent pleas to Rada, hoping for the resumption of payments. In the spring of 1947 the association’s own funds ran out as more and more refugees landed on American shores; in the summer of 1945 alone, about two thousand persons had registered with the New York association.109 The association dissolved, transferring its responsibilities to the newly created Polish Immigration Committee of New York.
In addition to humanitarian action, politics was another area of contact and cooperation between the refugees and Polonia. Franklin Delano Roosevelt won an overwhelming majority of Polish-American votes in 1940.110 Convinced of the benefits of Polonia’s loyalty, the president made friendly gestures toward the representatives of the London-based Polish government in exile.111 But the support for Roosevelt and the Democratic Party that Polonia demonstrated in the first years of the war was tested when, in June 1941, Hitler’s army invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin became an instant ally and the American government rushed in with material assistance for the Soviets. For the Poles who vividly remembered “the stab in the back” from the Soviet army that had invaded and annexed territories of eastern Poland during the 1939 war with Germany, accepting the Soviet Union as an ally of Great Britain and the United States was difficult indeed. In the summer of 1941 Polish prime minister Władysław Sikorski signed an agreement with Soviet ambassador Ivan Maiski, which allowed deported and imprisoned Poles in the Soviet Union to leave the country. Stalin, however, did not give any guarantees of a return to the prewar Polish borders. Sikorski’s moderate position and his restoration of Polish-Soviet relations prompted a serious rift within the Polish government in exile, resulting in staunch opposition to any further dealings with the Soviets. The situation changed again when the United States entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The constraints of neutrality had come to an end, and Polish Americans could fully demonstrate their support for the war effort. The number of Polish Americans in the American military totaled nine hundred thousand.112 Those who did not actively serve contributed to the war economy and purchased government bonds in record numbers.113
The political unity of the first years of the war, however, seemed to be breaking up. On the left side of Polonia’s political spectrum, a relatively small but significant group of pro-Soviet Polish socialists based in Detroit became involved in the creation of the American Slav Congress, established in April 1942 under the leadership of Leo Krzycki, a vice-president of the CIO’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Krzycki was considered to have a following among left-wing Poles, centered in the Polish Labor Party and the nine thousand members of the Polish section of the International Workers Order. The CIO opted for American-Soviet friendship, support for the Red Army, and the opening of a second front. In 1943 another pro-Soviet group, the Kosciuszko League, composed solely of Polish Americans, was formed by a maverick Roman Catholic priest, Stanisław Orlemański. The most eminent spokesperson for the pro-Soviet element, Oskar Lange, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, worked closely with both of the above organizations.114
The right side of the political spectrum was occupied by the National Committee of Americans of Polish Descent (Komitet Narodowy Amerykanów Polskiego Pochodzenia, KNAPP), formed in New York in 1942. The leadership of KNAPP included representatives of the Polish-American press, editors and publishers Maksymilian F. Węgrzynek and Frank Januszewski.115 They were aided by a vocal group of new arrivals from the prewar Polish government’s Piłsudski faction (called Piłsudskiites, or Piłsudczycy, supportive of the prewar regime, or Sanacja), which included such distinctive figures as General Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszewski, ambassador of Poland in Rome and member of governmental circles in interwar Poland, Wacław Jędrzejewicz, Henryk Floyar-Rajchman, and Ignacy Matuszewski. They believed that American Polonia had not only a moral obligation to Poland but also the political means to have an impact on United States foreign policy. Shocked by the presumed lack of involvement and inaction of Rada, they formed a political lobby to promote the anti-Soviet position and to denounce Sikorski and his moderate policies. Although KNAPP’s membership never surpassed two or three thousand, its impact on the increasing politicization of American Polonia at that time and on the creation of the Polish American Congress in 1944 was considerable.116
The Chicago headquarters of the major Polish-American organizations and Francis X. Świetlik, the president of the Polish American Council, represented a more centrist position, which included support for Sikorski and his policies and for Roosevelt as well. The turning point in the wartime relationship between American Polonia and Roosevelt’s Democratic administration came in the spring of 1943. At that time, the Germans announced the discovery of mass graves of some fifteen thousand Poles in the Katyń Forest, near Smolensk. The Germans blamed the Soviets for the mass murder; the Soviets announced that the Germans had committed the crime after entering the Soviet territories in 1941. When the Sikorski government confronted Stalin and demanded a Red Cross–led investigation, the Soviets unilaterally broke diplomatic relations with the Polish government in exile. Shortly thereafter, Sikorski died in an unexplained plane