Fragments of this year’s Independence Day speech by Deputy Starosta Marian Haniszewski have been online… for several years.
The following quote can be found on the websites of, among others, Wilków, Lublin, Żywiec and Gazeta Olsztyńska:
November 11, 1918, is undoubtedly one of the most important and symbolic dates in our history. After 123 years of captivity, the Republic of Poland once again appeared on the maps of Europe. The dreams of Poles born and raised under foreign rule finally came true. Our ancestors paid for the struggle for the freedom and independence of their homeland with their own blood, and sometimes even their lives.
Deputy Starosta Marian Haniszewski assured us in a conversation that he wrote the speech together with the county spokesperson. When asked whether they had written it from scratch or copied it from somewhere, he replied that he was busy and could refer us to the spokesperson.
Spokesperson Katarzyna Biegasiewicz-Mularczyk, in turn, insists that the text is not plagiarized. According to her, these are fragments of her own speech, which she wrote in 2011 for Starosta Cezary Przybylski.
We searched the Google archive. However, the fragment we quoted predates the speech for Cezary Przybylski. On websites such as Kętrzyn’s, it was published in 2009.