Krakow conferences address past and present schisms
Fifty-eight years after its founding by emigre scientists, the Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of America (PIASA) will return to its roots with a Krakow conference held in cooperation with the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (PAU), Jagiellonian University and its rector, Franciszek Ziejka. Although individual scholars have come back frequently in recent decades, the institute has not been an official participant in any events in Poland until now.
PAU, destroyed by the Nazis in 1939, was formally abolished in 1951 by communist authorities, which nationalized its property and created a competing Soviet-style Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) in Warsaw.
For the scientists who emigrated, there was hostility and an attempt to erase them from the collective memory. A case in point was Oskar Halecki, PIASA's first executive director, whose name was expunged from PAN records and never mentioned for decades afterward in the rosters of eminent Polish scientists.
PAU was reconstituted in 1989. Under its current leader, Professor Kazimierz Kowalski, it is in the process of trying to reclaim its Krakow property.
And, slowly, there is cross-fertilization between PIASA and PAN. PAN has sent observer-participants to recent PIASA conferences. A PAN archivist, Stanislaw Flis, has for the past year worked at the five-story brownstone PIASA headquarters in New York, preserving and organizing the 30,000-volume archival Alfred Jurzykowski Memorial Library. He's also putting some of it online for researchers via the PIASA web page.
PIASA Executive Director Thaddeus V. Gromada is the point person for the Krakow conference. "I'm very, very surprised I'd thought we would be lucky if we got 150 PIASA members but we'll have close to 300," he said.
Among the first-day events was the bestowal of honorary doctorates from Jagiellonian University on Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and Piotr S. Wandycz, a Yale University history professor emeritus and PIASA president.
After World War II, there were huge migrations of Poles to both England and the United States. Some had been caught outside the country during the war; others left when the communists took over.
Gromada says the formation of PIASA by six prominent Polish emigre scientists in 1942 set in motion the creation of a major resource for Poles in America. And, he contends, Poles in America have had more influence than their emigre counterparts in England. "You could never have any clout, like Brzezinski did as national security adviser, in England," he said.
The emigre scientists in England also organized but with a difference. In England, "they have a Sikorski Institute but it has remained an emigre society. Their publications are not in English. And I don't think they have brought in the children of emigres," Gromada said. In PIASA "we went through an evolution. It's O.K. to do business in English as well as in Polish," he said. "And our publications were in English from the very beginning (including The Polish Review, published since 1956). If you're going to have an impact, you do it in English. Who reads Polish?"
Of the 1,500 PIASA members today, about half were Polish-born. There are many Polish Americans and some members are not Polish but scholars of Poland.
The American Poles were a major resource in lobbying to get Poland into NATO, resulting, Gromada said, in something "I never thought I'd see Poland and the United States are allies."
Gromada also said he is "surprised that the French are putting the Poles on the spot and saying, in effect, they have to choose between the United States and Europe." That flies in the face of history.
"Poles know damn well that their security cannot depend only on Europe. In 1939 they depended on France and Britain," he said. "Poles know they can't have security without America, and this is not a U.S. vs. Europe issue. This is one great community and we need each other."
Another significant Krakow conference this week is a Tuesday sit-down between influential U.S. and Polish Catholics and Jews. The topic: "The Polish Church and battling anti-Semitism: An exchange of American and Polish experiences."
The organizer is Bohdan W. Oppenheim, a professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Among the speakers are Krakow-based Catholic professors Stanislaw Obirek and Stanislaw Musial; Professor Michal Czajkowski of the University of Stefan Wyszynski in Warsaw; theologian and ethicist John Pawlikowski of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago; University of California Professor Andrzej Korbonski; Gazeta Wyborcza's Konstanty Gebert, who also edits the Warsaw-based monthly Midrasz, a cultural-political magazine; and Martin Brawler of the American Jewish Committee in New York.
Musial has been outspoken in labeling as anti-Semitic the speeches and behavior of a onetime "Solidarity priest" from Gdansk, who had campaigned against Bronislaw Geremek, who is Jewish, as foreign minister when the Solidarity Election Action (AWS) government was being formed three years ago. The Catholic hierarchy removed the priest from his pulpit for a year because of those slurs but denied they were anti-Semitic, saying only that they were too political.
Musial wrote a widely seen banner story for a Krakow newspaper saying, in effect, that the church needed to face up to the reality of what anti-Semitism was. This was met with fury by the Catholic conservatives who control the church.
Gebert said at the time, however, that this was a major step forward that, finally, the Polish Catholic Church was starting its own internal debate on what constituted anti-Semitism. He predicted this would have more influence than attempts by Polish Jews or emigre Jews to "define" the issue for Catholics.
Pawlikowski has also been an influential voice. He is one of several prominent Catholics on the board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.
