Interviews with Andrzej Celinski

So I was born on February 26, 1950 in Warsaw. My birth family was perhaps a mismatch – my mother came from a very wealthy family of Warsaw burghers. This is important to note because the intelligentsia at that time, such as in Warsaw and Kraków, played an important social role which is meaningful in Poland´s history. My father, on the other hand, was of peasant stock, came from a very poor rural family. When he died in 1969, as a wealthy man – comparatively speaking under then-Polish conditions – he was dying from a disease caused by malnutrition.

This testifies to the poverty that he came from in his birth family. And he was only able to get an education because, which was an absolutely miraculous circumstance, because at the time when he completed his course in rural elementary school, and he went to the junior Catholic seminary – this was his only opportunity for any education – in 1933 or 1934, – he was almost immediately thrown out because it turned out that his personality was very poorly suited to this.

It turned out, and this family did not know about this because it was not only very poor but also culturally-deprived, the director of the elementary school came over to Dad’s parents’, my grandparents’ home, and shared that his [father’s] grandfather was active in the January Insurrection in 1863. [The January Uprising of 1863 was a series of peasant revolts in Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus against czarist Russia. Eventually subdued by the Russians, the uprising became a focal point in Poland’s national consciousness.] Which in the region of Podlasie, where all this was taking place, was an extremely rare circumstance because during the January Insurrection the peasants in that region were on the side of the czar, rather than on the side of the insurrectionists.

Thanks to this, he was accepted into the Cadet Academy in Rawicz, as the only peasant child that time. The Cadet Academy was a military secondary school of sorts, which prepared youths for service in the armed forces as officers. Mainly these were badly-behaved children of officer families or of governmental civil servants. So he was the only peasant child in the course that he was enrolled in, and afterwards things just rolled along. He was recognized to have promise, and he continued his education. So these are, these are my roots.

I graduated from high school in 1967, and a very good Warsaw liberal arts high school. Just to make very sure – my parents never ever had any links with any authority in power in Poland – to the contrary, my father concealed his wartime biography because during the war, owing to the Cadet Academy and also other various events in his youth, he served in a detachment called OSA-KOSA. [A specialized unit within the Home Army formed to resist Nazi occupation during World War II.] This was a detachment of the “KEDYW” [Subversion Branch] of the Central Headquarters of the AK [Home Army].

This was the name that it had, it was part of the counterintelligence service and also in charge of executions for agents, spies, Gestapo and NKVD [a law enforcement agency of the Soviet Union associated with the Soviet secret police] agents and such, et cetera. Luckily for my father, all the members of this detachment, except for 3 persons, were actually killed in action. I say luckily – this is a typically Polish historical situation, so there was no one left to denounce him to the Communists in later years [for his involvement in the execution of NKVD agents]. Incidentally, he never spoke, even to us, about where he was during the wartime years. And only when he passed away, his commanding officer came by, who dictated the biography to the journalists of a Warsaw daily that is no longer in circulation which was called Zycie Warszawy.

Obituaries were the only place where censorship was not really involved much, especially when someone did not have any current controversies ongoing with the authorities, so that those bios were not censored much. So thanks to that we found out things which we would have never known if not for this particular circumstance. So that was Dad, he worked as an engineer, he passed away relatively early. My mother is still alive today, and incidentally, she counts as one of The Righteous Among The Nations.

She has that medal, the Righteous Among the Nations of the World from Yad Vashem, so that is pretty much it. [“Righteous Among the Nations” is a distinction bestowed by the government of Israel upon non-Jews for heroism during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem is the memorial and institution established by Israel to document and commemorate the Holocaust.]

Andrzej Celinski was born on February 26, 1950, in Warsaw, Poland. Celinski graduated from the University of Warsaw with a degree in social sciences. After graduation, he became actively involved in several opposition movements including the Workers’ Defense Committee and Solidarity.

Celinski began organizing protests against Poland’s communist regime at an early age. As a teenager in 1966, he rallied thousands of people gathered for a High Holy Mass at Saint John’s Cathedral for a peaceful, anti-government march to the Communist Party headquarters in Warsaw. Celinski joined the 1968 and 1970 protests that were suppressed by the government.

Following the 1980 Lenin Shipyard strike in Gdansk, Celinski was tapped as an expert advisor to the Founding Committee of Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the communist bloc. Soon after, the members of the committee recognized his ability for organization and appointed him the secretary of the board of the Founding Committee. In this position, Celinski was tasked with structuring and organizing the body’s meetings. When authorities declared martial law and officially banned Solidarity in December 1981, Celinski was arrested for his activism and spent a year in prison.

After the fall of communism in Poland, Celinski was elected as a senator from Solidarity and served from 1989 to 1993. Celinski was then elected to parliament where he served for over a decade, including a stint as minister of culture from 2001 to 2002 in Prime Minister Leszek Miller’sgovernment.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndrzejCeliski1 

Poland is a central European country bordered by the Baltic Sea, Belarus, Ukraine, Germany, Russia, Lithuania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Poland has a population of 38 million people; nearly 90 percent are Roman Catholic.

Poles struggled against foreign dominance from the 14th century and the modern Polish state is less than one hundred years old. Polish borders expanded and contracted through a series of partitions in the 18th century. After a brief period of independence and parliamentary democracy from 1918 to 1939, World War II brought occupation by Nazi Germany and the near annihilation of the Jewish population. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Poland’s Jewish population went from over 3 million in 1933 to 45,000 in 1950.

After the war, Poland became a Soviet satellite state and a communist system was imposed. Farms were collectivized, basic freedoms curtailed, and a culture of fear developed under a Stalinist regime. The 1960s brought greater prosperity and some liberalization. Labor protests in the early 1970s tested the communist government’s resolve and prompted modest reforms.

In 1978, Polish Archbishop and Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian to hold the position since the 16th century. The pope’s triumphant return to Poland in 1979 saw massive outpourings of public support, shaking the foundations of the government and inspiring the opposition to press for peaceful change.

In 1980, shipbuilders in the seaport city of Gdansk united to confront the government. Their calls for greater political liberties and improved working conditions developed into the Solidarity movement. Solidarity’s leader, Lech Walesa, became the movement’s voice. Protests and unrest spread throughout the country and the communists replaced their leadership. General Wojciech Jaruzelski became prime minister and declared martial law on December 13, 1981. Solidarity was outlawed and Walesa and other Solidarity leaders were imprisoned.

While martial law was lifted in 1983, Poland continued to stagnate. Mikhail Gorbachev’s elevation to leadership of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985 brought new pressures for reform in Poland. A failing economy and continued repression incited workers to a new wave of strikes in 1988. A desperate regime agreed to legalize Solidarity and conduct semi-free elections. In the 1989 parliamentary elections, Solidarity won 99 of the 100 Senate seats and 160 of the 161 lower house seats they were allowed to contest. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarity leader, became Poland’s first non-communist prime minister in over four decades. In 1990, Lech Walesa was elected president with 74 percent of the vote. While Solidarity splintered as Poland democratized, a coalition government of anti-communist parties won fully free parliamentary elections in 1991.

Poland transitioned to a market economy and applied for integration into western institutions. Economic dislocation returned the former communists, now social democrats, to power in 1993. Free elections and peaceful transitions in the following decades solidified Poland’s multi-party democratic system. Reforms eventually led to a more robust economy and Poland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.

In Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2013, Poland earned the status “Free,” (as it has since 1990) receiving the best possible rankings in the categories Political Rights and Civil Liberties.