from the right bank of Vistula River. Despite the repeated pleas for help that the PAC directed to the American government, no decisive action was taken as the Germans suppressed the uprising, killing and deporting the population of Warsaw and turning the city into a sea of ruins.
The Republican Party failed to capitalize on the growing dissatisfaction of Polish Americans with Roosevelt’s policies toward Poland. In October 1944 Roosevelt went to Chicago and met Rozmarek, convincing him of his good intentions regarding the Polish question. Rozmarek, the most influential political leader of Polonia at that time, was swayed by FDR’s eloquence and announced his support for Roosevelt. On Election Day the Polish-American community gave Roosevelt 90 percent of their votes.123
International events in 1945 continued to follow an adverse course for Poland. In February 1945 Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Yalta to formalize the agreements arrived at in Tehran and to conclude the settlement of the postwar world. The Allies affirmed that the boundary between Poland and the Soviet Union would run along the so-called Curzon Line, which meant a loss of 178,220 square kilometers in the east, including the cities of Wilno and Lwów. Although Poland was to be compensated by the award of German lands in the west (101,200 square kilometers), Poland became the only country in the victorious Allied camp that came out of the war with a territorial loss.124 It was also agreed that the Lublin government installed by the Soviets would be reorganized to include a broader representation of Polish society and democratic leaders from abroad. This Provisional Government of National Unity (Tymczasowy Rząd Jedności Narodowej, TRJN) was to be recognized by the Western powers and to have the responsibility to hold “free and unfettered elections.”125 The reaction of the PAC, Rozmarek, and the group of Polish-American congressmen was an immediate and vehement criticism of the Yalta agreement and Roosevelt’s politics as well. Leo Krzycki, however, as president of the American Polish Labor Council (APLC) and claiming to represent six hundred thousand trade union members of Polish background, supported Roosevelt and Yalta and called on the president to reject the divisive claims of other Polish-American leaders. The APLC manifesto was signed by representatives of the auto, steel, electrical, clothing, transportation, and smelter workers unions.126
Both political factions of Polonia were represented at the San Francisco United Nations conference in April 1945, but their presence was symbolic. At the beginning of July 1945, the United States and Great Britain withdrew recognition from the London government and recognized the Provisional Government of National Unity formed in Warsaw on June 28, 1945. Despite hopes that Truman would adopt a tougher stance on the Polish question, the Big Three, meeting in Potsdam in July 1945, only confirmed the previous agreements. The PAC bulletin of August–September declared: “It was not Russia but America that broke Poland.”127 In the growing climate of the Cold War, the Yalta agreement—often referred to as the “betrayal at Yalta”—became a rallying point for the PAC and Rozmarek. Coming closer to the position taken by KNAPP, the PAC called for the repudiation of the Yalta agreement, recognition of the London government, and Allied supervision of elections in Poland. In the Cold War atmosphere and as the Left gradually lost its significance, the PAC became the voice of the majority of American Polonia, gaining in stature and support, and representing Polonia before the American government and society.
The loss of recognition was a serious blow to the Polish government in exile in London, but its leaders were determined to carry on and, recalling the nineteenth century tradition, revived the concept of the “state in exile.” The state in exile, or Mała Polska (Little Poland) in exile, assumed a certain institutional completeness, with governmental, political, military, and social structures as intact as possible. For instance, its leaders discouraged naturalization, which was
considered to be an act of disloyalty to the exiled Government. If an officer of the Polish Army became a British subject, for example, his name was removed from the officers’ list of the future Polish Army and added to the list of the deceased. Any Pole who felt that the nature of his job justified his becoming a British subject was expected to apply for permission to the London Polish Government. They saw the preservation of the Polish character of the community, of its sense of its own Polishness, as a major task, involving the encouragement of separate Polish political, cultural, social and even quasi-military organizations.128
After the Polish armed forces in the West had been disbanded, many still continued to believe that, in the case of imminent war between the West and Russia, Poles would take an active part in the struggle for Poland’s independence. They “considered themselves to be ‘on long leave’ rather than fully demobilized,” a view reinforced by General Anders.129 The state in exile concept assumed that Polish diaspora had the right to consider itself a true nation in exile, being an intrinsic part of the Polish nation in Poland, and its main goal was “the duty of struggle for independence.” According to Adam Pragier, minister of information and a respected politician, the nation in exile included soldiers of the Polish armed forces, the war emigration (emigracja wojenna), and the old emigration, or Polonia. He further assumed that leadership over this structure belonged to the Polish political circles in London.130
Although the political goals of Poland’s independence and a shared anticommunism brought the exiles and American Polonia closer together, neither cooperation nor day-to-day coexistence proved easy. For example, the goals of KNAPP included full mobilization of the Americans of Polish descent on behalf of Poland and their activism in support of the war effort and a just peace after the war’s end. According to KNAPP’s historian and cofounder, Wacław Jędrzejewicz, the organization became the arena of both confrontation and negotiation between the divergent leadership styles and methods adopted by the exiles and Polish Americans. Jędrzejewicz thought that the main reason for this not-always-harmonious relationship was the newcomers’ lack of familiarity with American conditions in which the organization had to function. “One could not always utilize similar methods of work from Poland and transfer them to American soil,” he wrote. At the same time, he emphasized that the differences “never related to political matters, but rather to tactical and organizational problems.”131 The tensions did not prove serious enough to threaten the activities of KNAPP. The Piłsudskiites who took upon themselves the ideological side of these activities, acknowledged the influence and resources of their Polish-American collaborators, Maksymilian Węgrzynek and Frank Januszewski. They were careful to stress the American character and methods accepted by the organization. The first manifesto of KNAPP, published in October 1942, denounced any affiliation with Polish or American political parties, underlined the organization’s ideological independence, and called for the general participation of all Polish Americans. KNAPP never became the mass apolitical organization envisioned by its founders. More than ten years after KNAPP’s inception, Jędrzejewicz saw three main reasons for this failure, all of them directly or indirectly connected to the group’s relationship with Polonia. First and foremost, he claimed, the inadequate political proficiency of American Polonia prompted numerous emotional but uncoordinated manifestations, which carried no political significance during the war. Second, the charitable actions of Rada were perceived by many as sufficiently fulfilling Polonia’s duties towards the old country. The third reason was based on the assumption that the Polish government in exile and not American Polonia should be responsible for Polish politics. In this situation, KNAPP attracted mainly older activists with roots in independence actions on behalf of Poland during World War I.132
In the cultural realm, many Polish Americans supported the activities of the Piłsudski Institute and PIASA through financial contributions and voluntary work. Neither organization, however, ever developed a mass Polonian membership, and, at least throughout the 1940s and 1950s, they remained largely the domain of Polish exiles and later generations of educated Polish Americans. The complicated nature of the relationship between Polonia and the exiles also can be observed in the example of Tygodnik Polski and its editor, Jan Lechoń. In its first issue, published on January 10, 1943, Tygodnik proclaimed friendly relations with American Polonia to be one of its primary goals. The editorial read: “The one-year-old acquaintance of writers from Poland with their compatriots from America, both through
