About Freedom à la Jasienica

On November 8, at 2SLO, on the occasion of the Patron’s Day, a meeting with Mrs. Ewa Beynar-Czeczott, daughter of Paweł Jasienica, took place. The headmaster Anna Sobala-Zbroszczyk welcomed the guest and recalled the incredible fate of the Beynar family and Paweł Jasienica himself.

Leon Lech Beynar, or Paweł Jasienica

Leon Lech Beynar, because this is Paweł Jasienica’s real name, was born in Simbirsk in 1909 in what was then Russia. The family had to settle in eastern Russia because Leon’s father, Mikołaj Beynar, was a descendant of the January Uprising. With the changing political situation, the family moved further and further west until they finally settled in Vilnius, where Leon Lech Beynar studied history at the Stefan Batory University in Vilnius. At the university, he was involved in the Academic Club of Vilnius Vagabonds and was nicknamed Bachus. After graduation, he became, among other things, a history teacher at a junior high school in Grodno, and it was then that his first publications were published as an aid for teachers in the Vilnius and Nowogródek regions.

During the occupation, he was a soldier of the Home Army. In August 1944, during the fighting with the Red Army, he was captured, interrogated by the NKVD, then conscripted into the Polish People’s Army, from where he deserted. In the fall of 1944, he joined the 5th Vilnius Home Army Brigade. In July 1945, he served as adjutant to Zygmunt Szyndzielarz “Łupaszka”, but in August he was wounded and left the 5th Brigade. He hid in the village of Jasienica in the rectory with the parish priest Stanisław Falkowski until the wound healed. Then he took the pen name Jasienica from the name of the village where he received shelter. After the war, his ‘widowed’wife remained in Vilnius, which was already part of the Lithuanian SSR, and Beynar, as Jasienica, got to Krakow, where he started collaborating with Tygodnik Powszechny.

The family left Vilnius in 1946 and lived in various places in Poland at that time.  In July 1948, the communist authorities took action to liquidate the Vilnius group and the Public Security Office arrested Jasienica, who was released thanks to the intervention of Bolesław Piasecki. After being released from prison, the whole family moved to Warsaw, where Paweł Jasienica continued to cooperate with Tygodnik Powszechny and with magazines related to the “Pax” community and Bolesław Piasecki. In 1964, the writer signed Letter 34 addressed to Józef Cyrankiewicz, containing a protest against censorship in the Polish People’s Republic. In January 1968, the Ministry of Culture decided to remove “Forefathers’ Eve” staged by Kazimierz Dejmek at the National Theater from the bill, considering the play anti-Russian. Paweł Jasienica openly supported protests on this issue and the youth rebellion.

Władysław Gomułka, then first secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party, condemned Paweł Jasienica’s activities and publicly imputed collaborating with the government to him. The communist authorities banned the publication of Jasienica’s works, and persecution and surveillance began. The writer was left alone. After the sudden death of his wife in 1965, he also became a widower. Then Zofia O’Bretany appeared in his life, to whom he married in 1969. In 1970 he died. In 2002, Paweł Jasienica’s daughter, while studying her father’s files in the Institute of National Remembrance, realized that her father’s second wife was a secret collaborator of the Security Service, informing on Jasienica first under the pseudonym “Ewa”, and after the wedding under the pseudonym “Max”. In 2009, at 2SLO, during the school ceremony of giving the school the honorable name of Paweł Jasienica, Władysław Bartoszewski said: “We all have to repay Lech Beynar – Paweł Jasienica – a debt of gratitude for what he did for the independence of Poland and the spiritual sovereignty of Poles, especially because fate did not allow him the satisfaction of full political and moral rehabilitation during his life, and the coincidence of morally criminal actions of vile and small people takes on the dimension of a Greek tragedy in the case of Paweł Jasienica.”

Jasienica – a memory

In the next part of the meeting, students asked questions to Mrs. Ewa Beynar-Czeczott. They were curious about her relationship with Jasienica as a father, as a writer, her vision of home, her experiences during the war and school experiences immediately after the war, her reading of her father’s works, her reaction after discovering the truth about his second wife, her favorite book in her father’s works, her father’s memories regarding the Vilnius land, advice given by her father, Jasienica’s attitude towards his second wife, Jasienica’s attitude towards his own successes, how he was able to go to France and Jasienica’s message for posterity.

Jasienica, as a father, was able to allow his daughter to get frostbite while walking. He cared very much about her education and physical fitness, among other things, he taught his daughter how to swim. Over time, he became her best friend. Mrs. Ewa Beynar-Czeczott did not become a writer or an archaeologist, as her father wanted, but a hydrotechnical engineer. Even though her father didn’t influence what she is, she certainly owes who she is to him. During the war, Mrs. Ewa did not attend school in Vilnius, but took part in secret classes held at the Beynar family’s home. She also remembers receiving one orange for the first time in her life on the day the war ended, and the drastic scenes from Łosośna near Grodno, where her and two other families crossed the Russian-Polish border as repatriates in a freight wagon. For Mrs. Ewa Beynar – Czeczott, home is a warm, family place. The most important thing is to be honest, not to worry about financial matters, and to have great respect for books and strangers. After the war, Mrs. Ewa Beynar-Czeczott went to primary school in Tykociny, and to high school in Kielce. At that time, pre-war teachers taught according to pre-war curricula.

In the primary school there was still religion, and in the secondary school the Russian language was sung with opera arias from Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin by a Russian aristocrat. During the war, Jasienica’s family did not know his whereabouts, they had no regular news, and they also lived in fear of mass deportations to the East. Mrs. Ewa Beynar – Czeczott read all of her father’s works. He was a reporter and was most interested in current events, he published in Tygodnik Powszechny and in his articles he was able to positively evaluate the actions of the new authorities, such as the fight against tuberculosis, illiteracy, and the construction of Nowa Huta. At the same time, he opposed censorship and this is probably why he took up historical essays, because he could write what he thought. Generally, at that time Jasienica was accused of having a non-Marxist approach. He himself couldn’t stand snitching and he really didn’t like the fact that one day his family, wanting to surprise him, recorded his reaction to the newly renovated apartment.

Mrs. Ewa Beynar-Czeczott was shocked when, while searching her father’s file at the Institute of National Remembrance to clarify the case of Władysław Gomułka’s slander, she came across denunciations from her own apartment from a co-worker nicknamed “Ewa”.

Her father’s favorite books are “Reflections on the Civil War” and “Wisła Says Goodbye to the Backwater”, which inspired her to choose hydrological studies. The result of the trips around France was a book devoted to the events in the Vendée – “Reflections on the Civil War”. Her father’s trip to France was organized by a family friend, Mrs. Dorota, who went to France after her studies and invited, among others, Paweł Jasienica. Finally, Mrs. Ewa Beynar-Czeczott mentioned Paweł Jasienica’s  typewriter she had just donated to SLO 2 and her father’s school report, in which the only outstanding grade was the grade in history. When asked to convey a message to students, she discouraged them from worrying about grades and encouraged them to live with passion.

(text: Beata Ciacek; photos: Beata Ciacek)