The Polish Museum of American launched a new blog over the summer. It is a great source of information on the events at the PMA. I’ve added the link to the blogroll.
From the Herald News: Fall River police investigate Winthrop Street shooting which always gives rise to the question of Christian witness in old, inner city ethnic neighborhoods whose demographics have changed.
I advocate for a continued presence because our history, our democratic Church, speaks to people of every background and is able to bring the message of Christ to every community. It is certainly difficult to concentrate on love driving out all fear (1 John 4:18) when bullets are whizzing by, but it is worth considering before we respond on instinct.
Police are looking for two suspects following a reported Wednesday morning shooting on Winthrop Street near Plymouth Avenue and towed a black BMW that reportedly belongs to one of the suspects.
Two witnesses told The Herald News they heard two initial shots. One man, who declined to be identified, said he fled for safety with his young son. The other witness said a young black male exited the BMW, fired another shot at a black Cadillac Escalade and jumped a wall through her yard.
From there, the second witness, whose identity The Herald News is protecting, said, —I could see the gun through his T-shirt.—
It was the fourth reported city shooting since July 24, including the fatal shooting of Charles Smith on July 27.
The initial call about 11:45 a.m. reported a shooting at 112 Winthrop St.
An hour later, police put out a call in search of a black male who may have been an unexplained shooting victim, according to radio dispatch accounts.
—I can confirm we are investigating a report of shots fired in that area. No reports have been completed,— police spokesman Sgt. Paul Gauvin said.
One of several police officers interviewing witnesses on the lower portion of Winthrop Street, near Blessed Trinity Parish National Catholic Church, said they were seeking —two suspects on foot.—…
From the NY Times: For Poland, a Milestone in Choice for European Post
The job brings no real power and no extra pay. But the election Tuesday of a new president of the European Parliament was a significant moment for the 27-nation European Union, and certainly for Poland.
Jerzy Buzek, a former center-right prime minister of Poland, was elected president of the assembly with 555 votes out of 713 votes cast, becoming the first politician from an Eastern European country to hold one of the bloc’s high-profile posts.
—Once upon a time,— Mr. Buzek told the Parliament on Tuesday, —I hoped to be a part of the Polish Parliament in a free Poland. Today I have become the president of the European Parliament —” something I could never have dreamed of.—
Never mind that the position is largely ceremonial. It carries prestige, a few perks and a lot of symbolism, and Warsaw wanted it badly.
The vote Tuesday was the culmination of months of lobbying by the Polish government, which wants to silence those who argue that the former Communist nations are underrepresented in Europe’s decision making.
Before the vote, Eugeniusz Smolar, senior fellow of the Center for International Relations, a research institute in Warsaw, said that the election of Mr. Buzek would —be symbolic to many people in Central and Eastern Europe of an evenhanded approach —” and that the old-boy network ceases to be in place.—
Poland’s minister for Europe, Mikolaj Dowgielewicz, said, —The fact that Buzek can become the president of the European Parliament is proof that enlargement of the E.U. has been a resounding success.—
Even some political opponents agree, and before voting, deputies from the Green Party had promised to back Mr. Buzek, not because they agreed with his center-right politics, but to send an upbeat political signal as part of the Parliament, which has grown in power even as turnout for elections has declined. Only 43 percent of eligible voters participated in elections to the assembly last month.
As president, Mr. Buzek will serve as chairman of parliamentary sessions. The job also involves representing the Parliament at summit meetings of European Union leaders and international events. All official travel is paid, and the president has the V.I.P. trappings of an international leader. The president also has a cabinet, which totals 39 members, including support staff and advisers.
…
Mr. Buzek, 69, is expected to bring to the post a new focus on Europe’s eastern neighbors, including Russia. Certainly his career contrasts sharply with that of his predecessor, Hans Gert Pí¶ttering of Germany, who has been a member of the European Parliament since 1979 —” a time when Mr. Buzek, then an academic and chemical engineer in Communist Poland, was about to join Solidarity, the movement that helped overthrow the government.
Born in the border region of Silesia, which at the time was a German-occupied part of Czechoslovak territory, he is a Protestant in a country where Roman Catholicism is the dominant religion.
After coming to power in 1997, Mr. Buzek became Poland’s first post-Communist prime minister to serve a full four-year term of office, enacting a series of domestic reforms.
Mr. Dowgielewicz, a political ally, said Mr. Buzek has a good domestic profile: —He is seen in Poland as someone who worked humbly in the European Parliament even though he is a former prime minister. Instead of searching out the TV cameras he was working hard within the Parliament.—…
From the Buffalo News (an older story): France honors WWII hero: Veteran took part in Normandy battle which is an ode to the sons and daughters of immigrants. Men like Mr. Pawlik were part of a great generation, not in the marketing sense of the term, but in the way that service, honor, and sacrifice were part of their very being. It came from family, neighborhood, and Church.
Blood shed during World War II never is far from Joseph E. Pawlik’s mind.
In addition to scrapbook photos, medals and recordings of the war stories he once told, a piece of shrapnel still lodged near his spine serves as a reminder.
Pawlik, now 89, was struck by artillery fire in 1944, during the invasion of Normandy at the Battle of Merderet River.
—He carries with him an all-too-difficult memory of his service that day,— said Assemblyman Robin Schimminger, D-Kenmore.
Monday afternoon, with small American flags on the laps of many in a room at Buffalo’s Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Pawlik was named chevalier —” the equivalent of —knight— in English —” of the Legion of Honor by the French government for his contribution to France’s liberation during World War II.
The honor, dating back to 1802 under Napoleon, was conferred April 16 in a decree by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
—Today, you are our hero,— said Pascal Soares, honorary consul of France in Buffalo, as he presented Pawlik the honor.
As a young man in Buffalo’s Black Rock neighborhood, Pawlik was eager to assist his country at war. He enlisted as a paratrooper and served as a technical sergeant.
Pawlik’s selfless nature would carry him through the war.
Three months after receiving a Purple Heart as a result of fighting at Merderet River, Pawlik was back in the front lines.
He didn’t want to leave the troops,— his daughter Terry Hans explained. —They needed him.—
In 1945, on a bitter winter day at Dead Man’s Ridge in Belgium, no one needed Pawlik more than his sergeant, who was wounded. As others took safety in their foxhole, Pawlik left his comfort zone to help his comrade to safety.
…
James Benz, a Vietnam veteran, was on hand as his friend was honored. —I’m very proud,— Benz, 61, said of Pawlik. —He’s like another father to me.—
Sto Lat! Mr. Pawlik, Sto Lat!
But just to see a chapel like this room,
No bigger: there to watch Polish symbols loom
In warm expanding series which reveal
Once and for all the Poland that is real.
There the stone-cutter, mason, carpenter,
Poet, and, finally, the knight and martyr
Could re-create with pleasure, work and prayer.
There iron, bronze, red marble, copper could
Unite with native larches, stone with wood,
Because those symbols, burrowed by deep stains,
Run through us all as ores run through rock veins.
Translated by Jerzy Peterkiewicz and Burns Singer
O! gdybym jedną kaplicę zobaczył,
Choćby jak pokój ten, wielkości takiej,
Gdzie by się polski duch raz wytłumaczył,
Usymbolicznił rozkwitłymi znaki,
Gdzie by kamieniarz, cieśla, mularz, snycerz,
Poeta – wreszcie Męczennik i rycerz
Odpoczął w pracy, czynie i w modlitwie…
– Gdzie by czerwony marmur, cios, żelazo,
Miedź, brąz i modrzew polski się zjednały
Pod postaciami, co, niejedną skazą
Poryte, leżą w nas, jak w sercu skały –
There are several interesting documents at Project Canterbury related to the PNCC. Among them is Intercommunion between the Episcopal Church and the Polish National Catholic Church: A Survey of its Development by the Reverend Warren C. Platt. The document gives a rather thorough and very well researched look into the history of PNCC-PECUSA relations.
Currently the Rev. Platt is a non-stipendiary priest serving at the Episcopal Church of The Transfiguration in NYC (The Little Church Around the Corner). The Church of the Transfiguration and St Mary’s the Virgin are the two remaining churches of the Oxford Movement in NYC. Rev. Platt was an active participant in many of the PNCC’s annual history conferences.
From Buffalo’s ArtVoice: Before All Memory Is Lost: The Polish story of survival in Buffalo after Hitler and Stalin. The article is enhanced with wonderful photographs which capture more than history , but loss, bravery, and endurance.
Deep in a dark recess in Buffalo’s City Hall is a terrifying piece of art made by the same Polish exile who created the Calasanctius mural. Jozef Slawinski’s hammered-copper bas-relief commemorates the place, the event, the process, the unimaginable suffering that the Poles know as Katyn.
Everybody has heard of Picasso’s Guernica, that terrifying huge canvas at a Madrid museum that portrays the German bombing of a Basque village during the Spanish Civil War. Everybody in the world should know of Slawinski’s abstract piece on the Soviet massacre of more than 16,000 Polish officers, elected officials, nobles, and intellectuals in the Katyn forest during World War II.
Had it not been for the late mayor Jimmy Griffin making a political gesture to Buffalo Poles, then not even Buffalo would know about Katyn.
It’s as if history has been privatized. Just as Slawinski’s Katyn is hidden away in an alcove few visit, the stories of a generation of as many as 20,000 immigrants to Buffalo have never become known beyond the whispered conversations of survivors. On the border between Buffalo and Cheektowaga, there are hundreds of stone monuments to members of the Polish army-in-exile who came to America, specifically to Buffalo, and who lived out the remainder of their lives in the hope of returning to their homeland, but while here created a complex legacy that literally reshaped our collective landscape.
Andy Golebiowski and a small group of volunteers formed the Polish Legacy Project to try to gather up some of the stories of the Polish DPs. DPs were the —displaced persons— who survived the German death camps, including Auschwitz and Buchenwald, where so many of their Jewish and Christian countrymen were murdered. The DPs were also the survivors of the German forced-labor camps and farm-labor slavery, people who then found themselves stranded in Allied zones at war’s end in 1945. The DPs were also thousands of Polish military men, like the legions who fought in Italy, who knew that Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt had decided the fate of their country at the Yalta conference in 1945—”which was to leave Poland in the Soviet sphere of influence, and leave them in need of a place to go that wasn’t going to be ruled by the Russians who had also slaughtered, deported, or brutalized their countrymen.
…
Golebiowski’s mother can still tell how she came to America. His father, a prisoner of war who was forced to work on German farms, told his own harrowing stories, but they died with him in 1999. Many of the people who came to Buffalo have died, taking their stories with them. In the Saint Stanislaus Cemetery on Pine Ridge Road, gravestones in a special military section are marked with the names of regiments and the briefest of notes about war-time experiences. These notes form a succinct code of service, and of suffering. —Sibyr,— say many of them, a brief reference to the horrors of young men and women who were deported to Siberia. —Auschwitz— is carved into several of these crosses, reminding us that three million Christian Poles died during the same period that three million Jewish Poles were murdered. —Monte Cassino— is on several, a note about the Poles’ unheralded capture of Sicily before the armies of Patton and Montgomery won glory there.
The world the Poles made here
They began arriving after 1948, when President Harry Truman signed a special displaced persons immigration bill, which he criticized for being so insufficient a gesture that he called it —inhumane.— Americans today can be forgiven for having forgotten how immense the destruction of World War II was—”because that cataclysm ended 65 years ago, and since then we have seen Vietnam, Central America, the Rwanda genocide, the Bosnian massacres, Iraq, and more.
The story that will unfold in the Polish Legacy Project’s conference October 3 and 4 here in Buffalo, though, is partly about the local impact of the largest forced migration in history.
Everybody more or less knows about our great 19th-century immigrant stories. Joey Giambra recently made the documentary La Terra Promessa, about the Sicilian story. Irish-Americans succeeded, after many years, in erecting a memorial to the Irish famine of the 1840s, in which hundreds of thousands died, and which led to the mass exodus of the Gaeltacht. There has even been a film made of the pre-1920s Polish migration.
But the thousands of Poles who found refuge here after World War II are a different, separate, largely untold story.
…
The urgent task
The children of the DPs are themselves now in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. If the DPs themselves are still alive, there is not much time in which to do the job of —rescue— or —salvage— collecting.
Thus the urgency of the conference. Strolling the rows of crosses at the Polish Veterans’ Plot at St. Stan’s Cemetery, one senses the urgency-cognizant of the fact that in five years, when the 75th anniversary of WWII is commemorated, there may be no one left who can give a firsthand account of life then.
The Polish Legacy Project’s mission is to record and to share the untold stories before they join all the other undocumented stories at the cemetery. The PLP is fighting against the clock, trying to make up for 60 years of silence. Unlike the stories of the Holocaust, these stories of survival, suffering and heroism largely do not exist in the English language…
The new Kresy-Siberia Virtual Museum website has been launched successfully!
All whose families were deported by the Russians to the outer reaches of the Soviet Union, will be able to add families’ stories and photos on this new fantastic website for all to see. The KSVM will be an important research site for anyone interested in Polish history.
The museum contains a beautiful memorial wall of names containing the names of over 31,000 persons deported from Poland when Russia invaded Poland on September 17, 1939 as part of its pact with Nazi Germany. The Virtual Museum’s logo is a reminder of the part of Poland torn away by the Russian invaders.
Give me a mile of land – or even less.
A piece of turf would serve me, friends, if there
You placed a man, one man whose fearlessness
Had freed him, soul and body, from despair.
Within his brain I’d work my spells to show
A statue with two faces, both aglow.Give me a planet smaller than the moon,
A golden squadron tinkling from its tail,
And let it skim the forests, let its croon
Be hallowed by one patriot’s dying wail
Then shall I fetch unknown angelic things
And stand, wings open, on that star that sings.When I, my friends, implore my God to grant
Me a poor country and the right to fight,
I seem to see our chivalries aslant
The thunder of our enemies in flight.
Hot in pursuit, I reach the stars : then sleek
Sneers of sharp light ask crudely what I seek.Stars, you are cold small Satans made of clay,
Intense with disbelief. And I, half-crazed,
Am broken by your hate. Dreams make me say
That Poland burns already: and I have raised
Fountains of flame to prove my country could.
But all that burns is my own heart – like wood.
Translated by Jerzy Peterkiewicz and Burns Singer
Dajcie mi tylko jednę ziemi milę —“—“
Może, o bracia, za wiele zachciałem!
Dajcie mi jedną bryłę —“ na tej bryle
Jednego —“ duchem wolnego i ciałem,
A ja wnet z siebie sprawię i pokażę,
Że taki posąg —“ dwie będzie miał twarze.Dajcie mi gwiazdę mniejszą od miesiąca,
Kometę złotym wiejącą szwadronem,
Niechaj po lasach będzie latająca,
A tylko święta jednym polskim zgonem,
A ja wnet siły dobędę nieznane,
Skrzydła wyrzucę —“ i wnet na niej stanę…O bracia moi! kiedy krzyżem leżę
A proszę Boga o kraj, o człowieka —“—“
To mi się zdaje, że tętnią rycerze,
A wróg z piorunem przed nimi ucieka…
Chcę biec —“ lecz kiedy na blask gwiazd wynidę,
Gwiazdy mię drwiące pytają, gdzie idę.O gwiazdy zimne, o świata szatany,
Wasze mię wreszcie niedowiarstwo zwali…
Już prawie jestem człowiek obłąkany,
Ciągle powiadam, że kraj się już pali,
I na świadectwo ciskam ognia zdroje —“—“
A to się pali tylko serce moje!…
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New blog post: Daily Digest for September 18th http://bit.ly/12FW5A [deacon_jim]
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New blog post: September 17 – Sparrows by Antoni Górecki http://bit.ly/FSrKk [deacon_jim]
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New blog post: September 18 – That Angel by Juliusz Słowacki http://bit.ly/3L7Q2 [deacon_jim]
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New blog post: September 19 – Give me a mile of land by Juliusz Słowacki http://bit.ly/2soEtR [deacon_jim]
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New blog post: Kresy-Siberia Virtual Museum http://bit.ly/4GZtw [deacon_jim]
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