In March, we reported that a ceremony awarding high distinctions to Poles who rescued Jews during the war was held at the Presidential Palace in Warsaw. The Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta was awarded posthumously to Feliks Kwarciak from Bolesławiec. His daughters accepted the distinction on behalf of the honoree: Halina Karolik and Regina Mikulska from Bolesławiec. (The Cross was also awarded at that time to Piotr Kwarciak.)
On the occasion of Independence Day, we wanted to present the story of the father of the late Feliks Kwarciak—Piotr, who was also a figure of great merit to Poland. He was undoubtedly a role model for the Bolesławiec resident honored by President Andrzej Duda.
Piotr Kwarciak was born in 1901 in Częstochowa. His parents died when he was young, and he was raised by his aunt. When he was 16, he ran away from home to join Piłsudski’s Legions. For his participation in the defense of Lviv, Mrs. Regina’s grandfather received the Cross of Valor and land in Dubno, in what was then still Polish Volhynia.
In a town 100 km from Lviv, he met the love of his life, with whom he had three sons: Alfred, Anatoliusz and Feliks.
During the interwar period, P. Kwarciak worked in a prison. Even then... he fed the prisoners. (The family suspects that his being a good person saved him from deportation to Siberia.)
“My great-grandfather’s life would make excellent film material,” Bartosz Mikulski, the great-grandson of the hero of this article, told us in March.
When a ghetto was established in Dubno during the war, a Jewish family managed to escape from it. Piotr Kwarciak agreed to take his friend’s relatives into his home. There were supposed to be four people. Fifteen came...
At the time, Mr. Bartosz’s great-grandfather explained to his entire family: we are helping our neighbors and friends. Their religion did not matter.
The fifteen Jews hid in the Kwarciak family’s home for about 20 months. They all survived, including Michał Fiszer, the father of the opera singer known today throughout the world, Dudu Fisher. (Importantly, when D. Fisher was recently in Poland, he strongly emphasized—and did not mispronounce the name—that it was the Polish Kwarciak family who saved his family from extermination.)
The family preserves the memory of both Piotr Kwarciak and his son. Mrs. Regina and Mr. Bartosz emphasize their ancestors’ courage. And they are proud of them. “Everyone knew what it threatened. If it had come to light, everyone would have died,” they say. “A bullet to the head. Or they would have been burned alive.”
The result could have been that neither Mrs. Regina nor Mr. Bartosz would ever have been born...
During World War II, Piotr Kwarciak was conscripted into the Polish People’s Army, with which he reached Skierniewice. At that point, the correspondence he had maintained with his family suddenly stopped.
What happened? The family suspects that the Soviets murdered him because his wife had sewn into his uniform a photograph from the time of... Piłsudski’s Legions. “We fear that someone denounced him,” Mrs. Regina says.
For more than a year, the relatives waited in Dubno for any word from Piotr. He had promised that he would return and take everyone to Częstochowa.
Nothing came of it. In 1946, a letter in Russian arrived, informing the Kwarciak family very tersely that the soldier had fallen ill and died near Skierniewice. There was no explanation of what illness had caused his death or where he had been buried. In despair, the family left for the City of Ceramics on the last transport.
Later searches for the grave came to nothing. Neither the Kwarciak family in the 1960s nor the Mikulskis recently managed to find it. The latter tried to learn something both through the Polish Red Cross and the Institute of National Remembrance.
The surviving relatives now want to honor Piotr Kwarciak with a symbolic grave in Bolesławiec.
The Mikulski family has many mementos left by P. Kwarciak, as well as a poem from that period. Mrs. Regina and Mr. Bartosz remember the text as follows:
Poland had trouble with three neighbors.
They took our land, shouting, “There is no Poland, there is no Poland.”
Then the boom of cannons shook the entire country
And the neighbors fought one another.
And our grandfather, our great-grandfather, who fought for Poland, rises up:
“There will be a Poland, Commandant, just lead us!
For we have fought, we have lived in misery.”
Then the longed-for hour inherited from our grandfathers and great-grandfathers struck
And Poland regained its independence on November 11.
Almost all members of the family know this poem by heart. Soon, Mr. Bartosz’s little son will learn it too.