Black and white photo of Maria Dąbrowska, a white Polish woman with short 20s style hair with bangs. She looks away.
Content warning for antisemitism, Holocaust, concentration camps
Maria Dąbrowska is one of the most well-known authors in Polish history, writing novels about class and family dynamics within Poland. Throughout her life, she was defined as being a moral authority for her country and time and is admired to this day. This is particularly interesting considering one-third of Poland announced they will become LGBT+ free. Dąbrowska, one of their most famous figures, had numerous relationships with women and men during her life.
Born on October 6, 1889, Maria Dąbrowska grew up in a family that while owning property was by no means wealthy. She would go on to be educated in Switzerland, move around Europe, live in France and England until finally the beginning of World War 1 forced her to pause. It was through her experiences in Western Europe that she built her idea of what Poland should be.
Recognizing that Poland was not as respected as it deserved to be on a global scale, she returned and used her experiences in an attempt to lead Poland in a different direction. She began to be involved in the politics of her country and was fierce in her support of economic reform.
Though many around her at the time were calling for a violent revolution she was always very clear that she thought the best way to move forward was through peaceful means, believing that socialism was the best option for Poland going forward. She worked as a journalist and began writing short stories. Her most defining work by far though was the four-part novel Noce i dnie (Nights and Days) published in 1932 and gaining recognition as one of the defining works in Polish literature.
But it was through one of her articles that much of her own legacy was defined. Anti-semitism was a very present force in Poland at the time, and Jewish students were facing more aggressive discrimination as the 1930s rolled on, leading to the barring of students from lectures and escalating to physical violence, something that Dąbrowska was very firmly against. In reaction to this, she wrote an article shaming the nation for their treatment of Jewish students and publicly supporting changes to the education system to curb the violence.
Her article was praised by many in her community, and because of it, an image of her as a moral leader of Poland began to form; that would be irreparably damaged forty years after her death upon the release of her diaries.
She had noted in her diary:
“I am not and have never been an antisemite.”
That small sentiment does little to dismiss the mountains of antisemitic rhetoric in her journals and growing resentment of all Jewish Polish people.
It is through her journals that a more clear view of her motives comes into view, as it seems her initial public defence of Jewish people had little to do with actual Jewish people. Upon a second look, the work is much more focused on how this antisemitism would make Poland look to the rest of the world, and the frequent antisemitism in her diary only solidifies that point.
As her name became associated with moral virtue, something her continued writing and work to improve Poland would support, her prejudice would fester until she met a Jewish woman named Blumenfeldowa.
Initially, Dąbrowska did not react well to Blumenfeldowa, even claiming that prolonged exposure to the woman would cause her to become an antisemite (something she still denied being). Over time though, a deep affection grew between the two women, and they fell in love.
It seems that Dąbrowska’s antisemitic thoughts were largely contained in her diary, and it was through exposure to Blumenfeldowa and her family that this irrational resentment began to ease. While she was nowhere close to renouncing her discriminatory ideology, she seemed to be learning.
It was in 1941 that Dąbrowska saw Blumenfeldowa for the last time before Blumenfeldowa was sent to the Lwów ghetto where she would die.
The death of Blumenfeldowa devastated Dąbrowska, and the writer fell into a deep depression. It is here that Dąbrowska almost stops writing in her diary entirely, and channels most of her emotions into fiction. Paralleling her own life, one of her characters has a very famous emotional breakdown over the idea of Blumenfeldowa's fate befalling his lover.
While a biased mindset can be disrupted by something as strong as love, love for one person can never cannot pull someone entirely out of their own bigoted worldview. Loving one Jewish person does not erase hatred of all other Jewish people. This is often damaging for the person doing to pulling, and because if that person can no longer be a part of the process, the other will often fall right back into their old ways. This is what happened with Dąbrowska.
While her initial avoidance of addressing the realities of the Holocaust can be understood if not excused due to the trauma of losing the love of her life, her actions afterward cannot.
It becomes interesting now to consider the story of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, a man who Dąbrowska knew and was fairly familiar with, and who reacted to the Holocaust in almost the complete opposite of Dąbrowska. While at the beginning of his career as a writer he was outwardly antisemitic as much as Dąbrowska was inwardly, the Holocaust quickly shoved him out of his destructive worldview, as Dąbrowska pushed further into her own.
A theme within the later half of Iwaszkiewicz’s life was how his faith in the community around him was lost as they ignored the destruction playing out around them. It is hard not to wonder if Dąbrowska was one of the people Iwaszkiewicz dispaired at.
She would go on to spend much of World War 2 ignoring the plight of Jewish Polish people at best and misleadingly praising the economic benefit the genocide was having at worst. In the later years of her life, while she was a part of many organizations that worked to assist Jewish people in remembering and recovering from the horror they had gone through, she grew more and more resentful.
After she met a Jewish doctor who escaped a ghetto and spent the occupation hiding she complained in her journal that:
“There is no way to make them suffer a little with us.”
She began demanding more and more that the narrative of Polish suffering exclude the discussions of Jewish Polish people specifically, and slowly the sheen of moral virtue began to wear even to the outsiders who had once turned to her for guidance. Moving into the Stalinist period she remained vocal, while never upsetting the authorities enough to be censored.
Much of her later work has been less praised then her earlier pieces, and though she entered a relationship with Anna and Jerzy Kowalski, it did not seem like an entirely happy one. She would die in 1965 at the age of 75. Her diaries would be released forty years after her death as she requested.
Throughout her life, Dąbrowska fought for social justice, advocated for the lower class, and made incredible novels that captured life in Poland in a way few other works were ever able to, but for her, this work came at the expense of Polish Jews. Her works are still remembered today, though there are few translations of them, as they are believed to be most poignant in their original Polish. All of this is true just as it is true that she was antisemitic and did not practice the kindness and respect of others she so often preached.
Her whole life and legacy is based on her patriotism and love of her country, but she did not love the whole of Poland. So focused on dividing up the country into different sections she never took the time to be proud of the accomplishments of Jewish Polish people all across the country. She saw the successes of Jewish Polish people to be the failure of all other Polish citizens, and because of this wasted much of the time that could have been spent improving Poland as a whole, as she initially intended, being resentful.
Denouncing any section of a population is only ever going to hurt the whole. Denying queer people in Poland the right to be open and proud is removing the contributions of an entire community from the rest of the country. Denying Jewish people the right to be recognized as just as much a part of Poland as any other citizen, ignores and isolates the people who were a huge part of shaping the country.
[Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material]
Coindre, W. (2019). Dzieci Ojczyzny, a Collection of Short Stories by Maria
Dabrowska, M. (1999). Nights and Days. The Sarmatian Review. Retrieved from http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/499/dabrowska.html
Dabrowska, Maria (1889–1965). Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/dabrowska-maria-1889-1965
Dąbrowska in 1918, and its Reflection in the Noce i dnie Novel Published in 1932-1934.
Perspektywy Kultury, 1(24), pp. 23‑37. Retrieved from https://www.ignatianum.edu.pl/storage/files/January2020/Perspektywy_Kultury_24.pdf#page=23
Folejewski, Z. (1980). Maria Dąbrowska. Contemporary Literary Criticism, 15.
https://wyborcza.pl/1,76842,6096397,Upupiona_przez_Dabrowska.html?disableRedirects=true
Kridl, M. A Survey of Polish Literature and Culture. The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1956.
Maria Dąbrowska. (1998, July 20). Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maria-Dabrowska
Page, J. (2014). A Woman's Strive for Love and Hope in Wartime. East European Film Bulletin, 46. Retrieved from https://eefb.org/retrospectives/jerzy-antczaks-nights-days-noce-i-dnie-1975/
Zakrzewski, P. (2018, March 7). The Women of Polish Independence. Culture.PL. Retrieved from https://culture.pl/en/article/the-women-of-polish-independence