Josef Pilsudski, Poland's Strong Man

The Jewish Tribune: The American Jewish Weekly, May 21, 1926 (cover story).

With breathless expectation, Eastern and Western Europe, as well as millions in America, have watched the development of the last fortnight on the Vistula, for many generations the scene of battles which initiated world events.

Situated between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the east and Germany on the west, the resurrected Republic of Poland, in its eight years of existence, has hardly succeeded in emerging from its formation period, made more difficult by the sharp conflict of class differences, modern influences and ancient traditions, national minorities’ problems, cultures and adjustment, financial and economic difficulties and handicaps.

Out of the turmoil there rises again the name of Josef Pilsudski, who accomplished almost a miraculous stroke, which, he claims, is to make Poland “safe for democracy.”

Josef Pilsudski is not a new name to those who followed developments in Eastern Europe during the World War. The first Chief of State of the new Polish Republic, when the time came for the election by the National Assembly of the first President of the Republic, Pilsudski declined and, withdrawing into retirement, remained the new Republic’s great and puzzling question mark.

Who is the man and what consequences will follow his successful coup d’etat? What may be the effects on the welfare of the Republic in general and its Jewish community of three millions?

Much of what is known of Pilsudski is connected with his ascent, following the conclusion of the Armistice and the formation of the Polish State.

A Most Romantic Career

The career of Josef Pilsudski is perhaps one of the most romantic that any of the European statesmen claim. His was a life of dreams and idealism, dire need, suffering and daring action. One must wonder where the poetry in Pilsudski’s life ceases and where reality begins.

Born in 1867 in Polish Lithuania, near Vilna, two years after the last of the participants in the Polish Rebellion against Russia in 1863 died on the gallows, under the administration of “General Murawieff, the hangman,” imbued with the spirit of prophetic verses of his countryman, Adam Mickiewicz, Pilsudski, a son of a landed Polish family, grew up under the influences which were permeated with the experiences and recollections of the defeated Polish Rebellion against Russia. Many of his relatives, in fact, his father and his aunts, were victims of “Murawieff, the hangman.”

While at the University of Charkoff, where he was enrolled in the medical college, Josef Pilsudski soon became the object of the Czarist persecutions and was excluded from the university for participating in the students’ movement. A year later, back at home, in Vilna, Pilsudski was accused of having some sort of connection with the attempt on the life of Czar Alexander III and, as a young man of 20, was sentenced to five years’ exile in Siberia.

In these five years on the cold and silent snows of the distant Siberia, Pilsudski laid the foundation for his future career, learning there the greatest of all arts: the art of self-control. “To govern others one must first learn to govern oneself” has since become the favorite saying of Pilsudski. When he returned from his five years of exile, his family urged him to return to the medical college and offered him its connections and assistance in order that he might continue his studies. Pilsudski, however, imbued with a spirit of Polish patriotism, with a feeling of revenge against the obnoxious Czarism and influenced by the social and economic tendencies then dominating his youth, decided that his mission lay not in administering to individual sufferers, but in administering to his people, whom he considered thoroughly “sick” while under foreign domination.

Pilsudski with a small group joined in the formation of the Polish Socialist Party and became its theoretician and exponent. For the six years from 1894 to 1900, Pilsudski, under the eyes of the Russian gendarmerie and secret-service men in Poland, was the editor of the “Robotnik,” the illegal paper of the party. He was not only the editor, but also the typesetter, circulation manager, everything. All he had at his disposal was a portable printing plant, the innumerable names under which he operated, an exceptional calmness of mind, and ability to wander from town to town and from lodging to lodging, persecuted by the Russian gendarmes, nevertheless always escaping, despite the fact that the Russian government had offered large sums for his head. About this time he acquired as assistant editor the cooperation of Stanislaw Wojoiechowski, the president of the Polish Republic whom he has now compelled to resign.

Once Pilsudski lost his vigilance. In Lodz, in 1900, he was suddenly besieged by the Russian gendarmes, arrested and put into the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel, the chamber of horrors for many a Polish and Jewish youth in those story years.

When captured, he at once decided that the best way would be to simulate insanity in the hope that he might be transferred to the hospital for the insane at Tworki where he might have a chance of escape. He simulated insanity to perfection and the Russian officials were compelled to send him to an insane asylum.

By a strange coincidence, one of the doctors of the St. Petersburg asylum happened at that time to be Dr. Wladyslaw Mazurkiewicz, a Pole who was also a member of the party of which Pilsudski was the leader. Coming to examine Pilsudski, he brought in his bag civilian clothes in which the “insane” man dressed himself and walked out of the asylum with the doctor.

Soon Pilsudski left Russia and transferred his activities to Galicia, where the Poles enjoyed a sort of local autonomy and greater freedom to develop their cultural activities. Instead of conducting his activities underground, he decided to come out in the open and lay the foundations for a Polish military youth movement. He made frequent excursions to Congress Poland under assumed names, organizing secret fighting groups of the Polish Socialist Party, which engaged frequently the Russian authorities in Poland. During the period, he traveled to Western Europe, visiting Switzerland, Belgium, Germany and England, studying the international situation, having one dream in mind: a free, resurrected Poland, the testament of Tadeusz Kosciusko. A member of the Polish Socialist Party, fighting for social justice, he always laid emphasis on Polish independence as a condition sine quo non to the fulfillment of the party’s other social program. His socialism was more in the way of an approach than a task in itself.

His Mission to Tokyo

During the Russo-Japanese War, Pilsudski urged his countrymen to refuse to respond to the call of the Russian government’s mobilization and instead to rise against Russia. Opposed and even ridiculed by the majority of Polish groups and parties, Pilsudski undertook a new mission. He went to Tokyo with the hope of influencing the Mikado to take up as an issue of the Russo-Japanese War the question of Poland’s independence. The Japanese government was willing to give assistance to a movement which would make trouble for Russia at home, but was too distant to appreciate Pilsudski’s arguments in favor of an independent Poland.

Disappointed, Pilsudski returned to Poland and renewed his work of organizing the Strzelcy (the shooter) in Galicia and the secret groups in Congress Poland, leading many a spectacular fight during the revolutionary period, in the hope of awakening the will of the Polish people to what he termed “action.”

The majority, however, of the Polish groups and parties, particularly those of the landed classes and the townsmen, were afraid of the risk. The National Democrats, the strongest party which then developed the anti-Semitic edge of its program, became Pilsudski’s bitter opponent. It believed in cooperation with the Czarist government. So did many others. Pilsudski alone persisted and when the World War broke out on Aug. 5, 1914, on the night of Aug. 6, he moved his loose forces in an independent and hopeless effort into the territory of Russian Poland.

Against the opposition of the cool-minded Polish official leaders, who flirted with the Czarist government, Pilsudski organized his legion which marched together with the Austrian Army, although it never was recognized as a part of that Army. When Poland was occupied by the Austrian and German armies, Pilsudski turned against the occupants of his country and started to organize the Polska Organizacjia Wojskowa, the Polish military organization, which was an open challenge to the plans which the Germans had prepared for Poland’s future.

At the orders of the German Governor General of Warsaw, von Beseler, Pilsudski was arrested on July 20, 1917 and jailed in the Fortress of Magdeburg.

When the Armistice was signed and the revolution broke out in Germany, Pilsudski, released from the Fortress, came to Warsaw where he immediately assumed supreme power and set the Polish Republic in motion, much to the displeasure of the leaders of the National Democratic Party and the other groups who could not see Pilsudski in this role.

It was during the period of his command, when a democratic government was organized, the Sejm called, the constitution adopted and the first president elected, continuously exercising the power which he acquired in distant Siberia: to govern himself before governing others. He mastered himself into declining to run for election as the first president of the Republic, his opponents bestowing upon him, instead, the proud but empty title of first and only Marshal of the Republic.

When Gabriel Narutowicz, the first duly elected president of the Republic, was murdered at the hand of Niewiadomski, a partisan of the anti-Semitic nationalistic party, because of the fact that in the majority by which Narutowicz was elected, the votes of Jewish deputies were included, Pilsudski broke his silence and in a striking book poured out his wrath on those Polish “patriots” who could go to the length of murdering their president because of the participation of Jewish deputies in his election. He stated at that time that the task which Narutowicz faced was that of internal consolidation and curing the people of the “after effects” of foreign domination.

Having contributed as no other man in Poland toward creating and strengthening Poland’s independence, striking now to make liberated Poland safe for democracy, will the one-time medical student apply himself to curing the “after effects” also with regard to the Jewish question?