Władysław Kowalski

Władysław Kowalski: The Ploughboy Who Became Marshal

For a little over twenty-four hours beginning on 4 February 1947, the acting head of the Polish state was a man whose entire formal education consisted of three years at a village primary school in Biała Rawska. Władysław Kowalski had gone out to work as a manor labourer at twelve, coughed his way through tuberculosis brought on by physical exhaustion, and taught himself to write fiction in his twenties. By the time he briefly stood in as Acting President of the State National Council, he had published several novels, run a ministry, and — through the German occupation — hidden some fifty Jews in and around Warsaw. Eleven years later, his health broken and his political usefulness spent, he killed himself.

The Village of Paprotnia

He was born on 26 August 1894 in Paprotnia, a small village near Rawa Mazowiecka in what was then the Russian Empire and is now east-central Poland, the son of a farm worker. The schooling available to such a child in the Russian partition was minimal and he took all of it: three years of primary instruction, then back to his father's land. From 1906 he worked as a labourer on a manor estate. The work was heavy enough that it broke his health; he contracted tuberculosis, a disease his biographers attribute directly to overwork, and it shadowed the rest of his life. Everything he later knew — literature, political theory, the machinery of parliamentary procedure — he acquired on his own, in stolen hours, without a teacher. He was in the most literal sense an autodidact, and the fact organised his entire public identity.

Learning to Write

Kowalski published his first article in 1919 and turned to fiction in 1922. What he wrote about was the only world he had lived in: the Polish countryside, its labourers, its hunger, its violence and its social humiliations. *The Peasants of Marchat* appeared in 1930, followed by *W Grzmiącej* (1936) and *Rodzina Mianowskich* (1938). These were not pastoral. They were reports from inside rural poverty by a man who had done the work, and that authenticity was their selling point and their limitation. The books travelled further than most Polish interwar fiction, appearing in Hungarian, French, German and Slovak translation. After the war he added *Bestia* (1945) and *Rebellion in Stary Łęk* (1951). He also wrote articles and poems, and used the pseudonyms Sałas, Bartłomiej Zarychta and Stanisławski.

The Political Drift Leftward

In 1919 he joined the Polish People's Party "Wyzwolenie" and rose to county chairman. In 1925 he moved to the Independent Peasant Party, and from there into the orbit of the Communist Party of Poland, holding positions in party leadership bodies from 1926 onward. The trajectory — peasant populism hardening into communism — was common enough in interwar Central Europe, but Kowalski travelled it early and stayed. It is the reason his postwar career was possible and the reason his reputation has never quite recovered.

Fifty People in Hiding

The occupation years are the part of his life that most complicates any simple verdict on him. Kowalski hid roughly fifty Jews at locations around Warsaw. This was, in occupied Poland, a capital offence not only for the rescuer but for the rescuer's household. Yad Vashem recognised him as Righteous Among the Nations in 1995, thirty-seven years after his death. He is not to be confused with the other Warsaw rescuer of the same name — the Polish Army colonel and Philips engineer Władysław Kowalski (1896–1971), who sheltered forty-nine Jews in a bunker through the Warsaw Uprising and was honoured by Yad Vashem in 1963. Two men, one name, two separate rescues, two separate medals.

Minister, Marshal, One-Day President

The postwar communist state needed authentic peasant faces, and Kowalski was the genuine article. He sat in the People's Party leadership from March to September 1945, edited the party paper *Zielony Sztandar* in 1945–46, and served as Minister of Culture and Art from 1945 to 1947. He held the office of Acting President of the State National Council for a single day, 4–5 February 1947. He was then Marshal of the Sejm — speaker of the parliament — through the first postwar term, 1947 to 1952, and in 1949 was elected president of the Central Committee of the United People's Party, the satellite formation into which the peasant movement was folded. His decorations included the Cross of the Partisan, the Order of Polonia Restituta second class, and its Grand Ribbon in 1949.

The Long Silence

He resigned his positions in 1956, citing declining health, in the year the Polish October loosened and then rearranged the country's politics. He died in Warsaw on 14 December 1958, aged 64, by suicide, and was buried at the Powązki Military Cemetery. His personal papers subsequently became the subject of their own scholarly episode, a case study in what happens to the private writings of a political functionary when the regime he served begins to be reassessed.

Why Władysław Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that almost nobody calls him one, and the sources consulted here do not use the word. What the record supports is something narrower and more interesting: an extreme case of self-education. Three years of village school is close to the floor of literacy, and from that floor Kowalski produced novels good enough to be translated into four languages and acquired enough procedural competence to preside over a national parliament. The cognitive quality involved is not originality of thought — his fiction advances no formal innovation, and his political positions were those of the movement he attached himself to — but assimilative capacity: an unusual ability to absorb, from books alone and while doing manual labour in poor health, the conventions of two demanding professional worlds and then perform in both.

The counter-case is strong and should not be softened. His novels are today read, when read at all, as social documents rather than literature. His parliamentary office was largely ceremonial, and he occupied it inside a system where the Sejm did not exercise real power; he was chosen in part precisely because a self-taught peasant writer was useful decoration for a regime claiming to speak for peasants. His most morally impressive act — hiding fifty people — was courage, not intellect, and courage of a kind shown by thousands of others whose names are on the same list at Yad Vashem. If a word is wanted for Kowalski, "remarkable" carries the evidence. "Genius" does not.

Legacy

Kowalski survives in three separate registers that rarely meet: as a minor figure in the history of Polish rural fiction, as a name on the roll of Polish office-holders under communism, and as a tree and a medal at Yad Vashem. The second has largely discredited him; the third is untouchable. That a man could earn both, and that the fifty people he hid neither knew nor cared about his politics, is the durable and uncomfortable point of his life.