Sejm (Lower House of parliament), recognizing the great achievements of Józef Mackiewicz, incl. persistently supporting the ideas of Poland’s independence, freedom, and friendly coexistence of the nations of Central and Eastern Europe, and steadfast resistance against communism established 2022 as the Year of Józef Mackiewicz.
The resolution recalled that “Józef Mackiewicz, one of the greatest Polish writers in history, was born on April 1, 1902, in St. Petersburg, and spent his childhood and youth in the Vilnius Region”.
It was recalled that after the outbreak of World War II, when Vilnius was occupied by Lithuanians, he published the Polish daily “Gazeta Codzienna” for several months.
“In May 1943, with the consent of the Polish underground authorities, he witnessed the exhumation by the Germans of the bodies of officers murdered by the Soviets in Katyn,” the resolution noted.
In 1944, Józef Mackiewicz, together with his wife Barbara Toporska, fled to Warsaw, and then to Kraków.
“Then the spouses made their way to Rome. The report
was written there – a shocking description of the genocide committed by Germans against Jews, and a report entitled with an introduction by General Władysław Anders. (…) In 1947 he moved to London, where the first book he wrote in English on the Soviet genocide against Poles, . In 1952, he testified before the United States Congress commission to investigate the Katyn massacre,” the resolution stated.
In 1955, Mr and Mrs Mackiewicz finally moved to Munich, where they lived until the end of their lives. The resolution indicated that in the following years he wrote his most important literary works and other journalistic texts, some written together with Barbara Toporska.
It added that “on the factual level, which Mackiewicz took special care of, he presented the life of the inhabitants of the Polish-Lithuanian-Belarusian border against the background of groundbreaking historical events and referred to the multinational tradition of the First Republic”.
Józef Mackiewicz died on January 31, and Barbara Toporska died on June 20, 1985.