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An Aristocratic Account of Poland's Occupation

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An Aristocratic Account of Poland's Occupation Karolina Lanckoronska. Michelangelo in Ravensbrück: One Woman's War against the Nazis. Translated by Noel Clark. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, Incorporated, 2007. 368 pp. $26.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-306-81537-9. Reviewed by Kyle Jantzen Published on H-German (April, 2009) Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher Memoirs of life in Poland during the Second Vienna in 1926. After a sojourn in Italy, Lancko‐ World War generally revolve around the enormi‐ ronska settled in Lwów, working frst as a private ty of the Holocaust, most often from the viewpoint lecturer and then, from 1936, as a professor of art of Jewish survivors. Countess Karolina Lancko‐ history at the Jan Kazimierz University. The 1939 ronska's Michelangelo in Ravensbrück provides a invasion of Poland stirred her patriotism, and the very different perspective. Hers is the story of a memoir begins at this point, with chapters of Polish noblewoman and scholar watching the de‐ varying lengths devoted to different locations in struction of Polish culture by "barbaric" Nazi and which she lived (or was incarcerated) between Bolshevik invaders. Moreover, it is an account of 1939 and 1945. As early as 1940, Lanckoronska the war years written immediately after the col‐ had joined the Union for Armed Struggle (ZWZ), lapse of Nazism and the occupation of eastern Eu‐ part of the Polish resistance against Soviet and rope by Soviet forces, and not after years of reflec‐ Ukrainian (and later Nazi) occupying authorities. tion. Withheld from publication until after her There she worked with the Polish Red Cross, nurs‐ death (at the age of 104), it remains essentially the ing sick and wounded prisoners of war released same "report" she wrote in 1945 and 1946. from German captivity. By the fall of 1941, Lanck‐ Lanckoronska's ancestors were Polish aristo‐ oronska was working for the Main Council for Re‐ crats with roots in Galicia, but who had served in lief (RGO), responsible for overseeing the care of important positions at the nineteenth-century all prisoners in German-occupied Poland. After Habsburg court. Thus young Karolina grew up not her arrest in May 1942, Lanckoronska was sen‐ only in the highest circles of fn-de-siècle Vienna, tenced to death for her partisan activities. While but also on her family's estate in Poland. Though awaiting execution, she heard a surprising confes‐ deeply interested in nursing, she studied art histo‐ sion from her captor, SS Hauptsturmführer Hans ry, earning her doctorate from the University of Krüger, who had murdered 25 Lwów professors. H-Net Reviews Fortunately, Lanckoronska was spared the death Lanckoronska's robust Polish patriotism is ap‐ penalty, thanks to an appeal by the Italian royal parent from start to fnish. Romantic and at times family to SS Chief Heinrich Himmler. contradictory--sometimes she trumpets the impor‐ After this reprieve, Lanckoronska dedicated tance of character over ethnicity, while at other herself to the quest to bring Krüger to justice, an times she discusses racially instinctive behavior-- important theme throughout the second half of Lanckoronska goes to great lengths to define her book. Indeed, a report she wrote for another Poland as part of western civilization, set apart SS office seems to have contributed both to from Ukraine and Soviet Russia. Adjectives like Krüger's demise and to her own transfer to the "eastern," "Asiatic," and "oriental" pepper the Ravensbrück concentration camp in November memoir, and illustrate Lanckoronska's disdain for 1942. This event marked the beginning of her per‐ what she regards as an inferior Slavic cultural tra‐ manent separation from her beloved Poland. Over dition, if not race. She describes the differences the course of ninety pages, Lanckoronska details between Poles and Ukrainians as a "bottomless her time in Ravensbrück, including her access to chasm" created by the "700 years of neighborly re‐ and refusal to remain in privileged private quar‐ lations with Western culture" that Poles had en‐ ters. It is this section of the memoir that will seem joyed (p. 23). When betrayed by the resistance and most familiar to students of other Holocaust mem‐ forced to fee, she fears that her colleagues "might oir literature, as Lanckoronska describes the hor‐ be headed for the heart of Asia, or wherever else rific conditions endured by women prisoners and barbarity might drag them," while taking solace the range of their responses to such treatment. that "at least [she] was moving westwards" (p. 38). Most of the time, she dwells on the positive side of As she crossed from Russian to German-held terri‐ human nature, suggesting that character and tory, Lanckoronska explains that the Russian community enabled women to retain their dignity guards "were like all Red Army soldiers: dirty, un‐ amid suffering and death. The memoir closes with shaven and in poor-quality uniforms" (p. 39). She a short account of her activities in Italy at the contrasts them to the German soldiers ("splendid‐ close of the war, when she sought to aid members ly built men, looking extremely smart in their of the Polish armed forces stationed there and to spick-and-span turnout") and remembers how she come to terms with her own exile from Poland. and her fellow Poles remarked, "Whatever else, this is Europe" (p. 39). This frank employment of Though Lanckoronska meant her memoir to cultural, ethnic, and racial stereotypes--seen function as an objective, eye-witness record and throughout the memoir--reminds us of just how not a considered reflection, both her personality prevalent such judgments were in mid-twentieth- and her aristocratic upbringing shape the narra‐ century Europe, and illustrates how Nazi racial tive from start to fnish. Snap judgments, sharp stereotyping both blended into and radicalized opinions, and romantic sentiments leap from vir‐ existing interethnic relations. tually every page. Lanckoronska never shies away from offering her frank assessment of the people Lanckoronska's patriotism is also sentimental she met or events she witnessed. Four interesting and optimistic. Often she speaks for "everyone" or facets of her character emerge from the memoir: "all" the people when she describes the resolute her Polish patriotism; her love of culture and opposition of Poles to Russian and German occu‐ scholarship; her quiet, matter-of-fact sympathy pation. In this same spirit, Lanckoronska recalls for Jews; and her ambivalence about her elevated that she joined the ZWZ precisely because she un‐ social status. derstood it to be a Polish-national and not a party- political organization. She waxes poetic about the immense source of strength it was for her to par‐ 2 H-Net Reviews ticipate in such a patriotic act, even while lament‐ ture and scholarship sustained her though the ing the worst it brought out in some of her compa‐ turbulent war years. She and her fellow scholars triots. Likewise, Lanckoronska contrasts the cul‐ would offer dramatic good-byes to one another in tural nobility of J. W. von Goethe with the bar‐ Italian, and at the moment when she believed she barism of the German Nazis she saw, ultimately was about to be executed, her thoughts turn to concluding that (despite what she calls the "Asian‐ Homer's Iliad and Horace's ode, Dulce et decorum ization" of the lifestyle in eastern Poland) there est pro patria mori, which she understands in its was little difference between the Nazi and Bolshe‐ original (literal, not ironic) meaning. During her vik occupations of Poland. time in solitary confinement, she preserves her If Polish patriotism impelled Lanckoronska to sanity by mentally viewing the great art galleries join the resistance and care for Polish prisoners, of Europe: the Prado, Louvre, Uffizi, and Venice her greatest sorrow was the destruction of Polish (this in contrast to the more famous "verbal cook‐ culture by Russians and Germans alike. Frequent‐ ing" coping mechanism, which she does not fnd ly, she contrasts the notion of "civilization" with helpful at all [pp. 132, 139]). While in prison in "barbarism," not least when describing the de‐ Lwów, Lanckoronska was permitted to receive struction of her vocational life or possessions. She books and writing materials. She eagerly began to describes the Russian-Ukrainian takeover of the study books on ancient Rome, Marcus Aurelius, university in Lwów as a severe blow to Polish cul‐ Homer and Greek literature, and Dante, as well as ture, and campaigns persistently for justice for William Shakespeare and Thucydides. It was also university professors and other members of the during this time that she began to write notes for intelligentsia who had been murdered. Closer to a book on Michelangelo. Indeed, while in Ravens‐ home, she reports that her furniture was either brück, Lanckoronska taught art lessons to her fel‐ burned or stolen, while her notes and reference li‐ low camp inmates (thus the title of her memoir) brary simply vanished. Here she laments less her in an attempt to sustain a measure of humanity own personal loss than the wider destruction of within a notoriously inhumane environment. civilized life: "The more people we have among us Upon her release from captivity in 1945, Lancko‐ robbed of their past, the greater the threatened ronska travelled to Italy, and soon began organiz‐ decline of tradition and spiritual continuity--in a ing education for Polish soldier-students. This word, culture" (p. 34). This preoccupation with deep love of culture and belief in its sustaining in‐ culture and civilization (including a deep Roman fluence provides a glimpse into the upper echelon Catholic piety) shapes much of Lanckoronska's of Polish society in the early twentieth century, disdain for both the National Socialist and Soviet and highlights the tragedy that was the decapita‐ occupiers of Poland.
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