Monthly Archives: November 2025

by | 19 November 2025 · 11:45 pm

RLS as Amateur Emigrant

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 272-273:

As Louis relates in his book about the voyage, The Amateur Emigrant, he engaged a second-class cabin for ₤8, ₤2 more than passengers in steerage paid, which meant that he was furnished with bedding and had a private room with a table to write on. Still, it was only a little enclave in the midst of steerage. Located near the machinery that powered the ship, the steerage was crowded, malodorous, and poorly ventilated.

Alfred Stieglitz’s classic photograph (fig. 38), taken on the Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1907, makes it clear that steerage passengers got up on deck whenever they could. Still higher up, the wealthy ladies and gentlemen are literally looking down on them.

In Edinburgh Louis had been accustomed to mix with working-class people in a rather touristic way, but now he was one of them, although paying for second class did qualify him as technically a gentleman. “In the steerage there are males and females; in the second cabin ladies and gentlemen. For some time after I came aboard I thought I was only a male, but in the course of a voyage of discovery between decks I came on a brass plate, and learned that I was still a gentleman. Nobody knew it, of course. I was lost in the crowd of males and females, and rigorously confined to the same quarter of the deck.”

The description “steamship” may conjure up images of a mighty vessel like the Queen Mary, but the Devonia was low-slung and modest in size, a vessel of thirty-five hundred tons (the Queen Mary was eighty-one thousand). There were just 256 passengers. Nicholas Rankin had the inspiration of tracking down the original passenger list in the New York Public Library. Fifty-one people were in the first-class saloon and identified as clerks, divines, and nil—not unemployed, but too rich to need employment. Twenty-two were in the second-class cabin: 15 Scots including Louis, 6 Scandinavians, and an Irishman. The remaining 183 were in steerage. They were Scottish, Irish, German, Scandinavian, and a Russian. Thirty occupations were listed, including brewer, carpenter, lawyer, marble cutter, and silk weaver.

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Filed under Britain, democracy, literature, migration, travel, U.S.

by | 18 November 2025 · 5:09 am

Polish Heweliusz Series on Netflix

My latest weekly update from Culture.pl includes a profile of a new and interesting Polish film series: Heweliusz: Netflix Revisits Poland’s Most Tragic Ferry Disaster. During our recent pilgrimage to Gdansk, we stayed in a nice hotel on Heweliusz Street not far from Gdansk Main train station. Here are some excerpts from the story on Culture.pl.

Jan Holoubek’s blockbuster is more than just a solid piece of good entertainment. In this Netflix series the story of the greatest maritime disaster in post-war Poland becomes a tale of the victims of the transformation and the brutal verdicts of history.
…
It was 5:12 a.m. on January 14, 1993, when the rail-truck ferry Jan Heweliusz, operating between Świnoujście [= Ger. Swinemünde] and Ystad, capsized in the stormy winds. A few minutes earlier, Captain Andrzej Ułasiewicz had broadcast a ‘Mayday! Mayday!’ message, calling for help from all nearby vessels. He had 36 passengers and 29 crew members on board, all of whom found themselves in the water at a temperature of 2 degrees Celsius during a raging storm, force 12 on the Beaufort scale. Ułasiewicz didn’t even try to save himself – he remained on the bridge until the end, trying to relay information to rescue units – German, Danish, and Polish. When the waters receded, he was named as the main culprit in the Heweliusz tragedy, whose story is now told in Jan Holoubek’s series.
…

From its inception, the MF Jan Heweliusz was considered an exceptionally unlucky vessel. Launched in 1977 at the Norwegian Trosvik shipyard, it sailed under the Polish flag for the next 16 years, experiencing around 30 different breakdowns during that time. Its history of adventures was so rich that Swedish sailors dubbed it ‘Jan Haverelius,’ or ‘Accident John.’

The Polish ferry capsized twice while in port (hence why one of the series’ characters explicitly calls it ‘a f…cking roly-poly toy’), its engines failed, and its ballast system malfunctioned. The Heweliusz also collided with a fishing boat.

…

However two other failures proved crucial to the tragic events of January 14, 1993. The first was damage to the ferry a few days before the sinking. While docking at the Swedish port, the vessel struck the quay, bending the gate securing the ferry’s entrance, allowing water to enter. The shipowners, Euroafrica company, a subsidiary of Polish Ocean Lines, were aware of the defect but decided not to suspend operation until it was fully repaired. The reason was simple – a vessel sitting in port wouldn’t earn any money, and the company’s management wouldn’t allow it. The crew members themselves were supposed to carry out makeshift repairs, but without the proper equipment and time, they could only partially repair the damage.

…

The second of the ferry’s structural defects proved even more significant and far-reaching. It involved a multi-ton concrete cover on one of the decks. In 1986, during a voyage, a refrigerated truck caught fire on the ferry, spreading to other vehicles and engulfing the vessel’s superstructure on one of the upper decks. The ferry was then renovated at the Hamburg shipyard, and the damaged deck was poured with a layer of concrete. Immediately after the Heweliusz tragedy, attempts were made to argue that the poured concrete weighed ‘only’ 30 tons (a small amount compared to the vessel’s total weight), and that the reconstruction concerned one of the lower decks. However, in reality, the ferry was loaded with more than twice that weight, and the renovation only affected one of the upper decks, significantly affecting the vessel’s stability. Stability, which had already been far from ideal, chiefly due to the wide captain’s cabin on the bridge, which, in hurricane-force winds, turned into a veritable sail. All of this meant the ferry was unable to cope with the severe storm that struck the ship that January night, claiming the lives of 20 sailors and all of the ferry’s passengers.

…

The questions that researchers of the Heweliusz tragedy have been asking themselves for years resonate powerfully, yet at the same time, seemingly incidentally, in Jan Holoubek’s series. Not as a theme in itself, but as a footnote to the story of the people grappling with the consequences of the disaster. Kasper Bajon’s story skillfully transports us across several timelines and between characters examining Heweliusz’s case from different perspectives. Guides through this world include a crew member (Konrad Eleryk) who survived the disaster, plagued by remorse; Captain Ułasiewicz’s widow (Magdalena Różczka), who must defend his memory and care for her teenage daughter; and the truck driver’s wife (Justyna Wasilewska), who lives in the same neighborhood and is left destitute after his death. Finally, there is Captain Piotr Binter (Michał Żurawski), a sailor and friend of Ułasiewicz. As a juror deciding the causes of the disaster, he must choose between loyalty to his deceased friend and his career, which is threatened by the pressures of a political and business alliance.

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Filed under cinema, economics, Germany, industry, labor, Poland, Scandinavia, travel

by | 16 November 2025 · 7:49 am

Pilgrimage to Gdansk, 2025

Last weekend, we took advantage of Poland’s November 11 (= 11 Listopad ‘leaf-fall’ month) Independence Day holidays to make a pilgrimage to Gdansk, where my father and (doctrinally pacifist) Quaker/Mennonite/Church of the Brethren volunteers aboard the S.S. Carroll Victory Liberty ship arrived in 1946 to help deliver horses and chickens to devastated Poland.

My principal mentor in linguistics, Byron W. Bender, who was raised a Mennonite in Pennsylvania and later attended Quaker meetings in Honolulu, also arrived in Gdansk in 1946 on a similar mission aboard another Liberty ship, the S.S. Stephen R. Mallory.

These UNRRA efforts, including the delivery of goats to postwar Okinawa by my dad’s Quaker crony, Herbert Nicholson, a prewar missionary to Japan known as “Yagi-no-ojisan” (Uncle Goat) in postwar Japan. During the war years, he helped AJA internees in the U.S. After the UNRRA program ended, its participants founded the Heifer Project, now Heifer International.

The granddaughter of one of these Church of the Brethren volunteers, Peggy Reif Miller, has gathered many stories from other participants and built a very informative website titled Seagoing Cowboys.

I long ago started my Poland album on Flickr with scans of photos from my dad’s trip. Someone gave him a camera to record some of it. We managed to visit and photograph several sites he took photos of. Here are links to a few of his photos and our photos of the same sites, all much improved in 2025.

Oliwa Cathedral in 2025 vs. 1946. We managed to arrive there just in time for the noontime pipe organ concert on what was once the largest pipe organ in Europe. The cathedral was jam-packed.

Gdansk Old Town Hall in 2025 vs. 1946.

Hala Targowa (Market Hall) (under renovation) in 2025 vs. 1946. A string of kebab shops now obscures the old building from across the street.

We took a sleeper train (first class in our own 2-person compartment). It ran from near-midnite to near-dawn in each direction and required long waits in stations with no amenities except floors and benches and restrooms after 9 p.m. Nor was there any lulling clickety-clack, but lots of lurches as we lay down to sleep. That’s another story.

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Filed under Japan, military, NGOs, Poland, religion, travel, U.S., war

by | 15 November 2025 · 6:43 pm

Scottish vs. English Universities, 1867

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 102-104:

In November 1867, just as he was turning seventeen, Louis entered the University of Edinburgh as the first step toward a professional career, and his life changed dramatically. It was the same year in which the Stevensons took their lease on Swanston Cottage….

As an undergraduate Louis continued to live at home; there was no residential housing at the university, and students from out of town had to rent lodgings. All the same, he enjoyed plenty of freedom, unlike students at Oxford and Cambridge, who had compulsory chapel and lectures, wore caps and gowns, and were punished if they stayed out after curfew. It’s notable that those were the only two universities in all of England. In Scotland, in addition to Edinburgh, which was the most recently founded, there were also St Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. In an essay some years later Louis celebrated his university’s freedom and urban energy.

The English lad goes to Oxford or Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens, to lead a semi-scenic life, costumed, disciplined and drilled by proctors. Nor is this to be regarded merely as a stage of education; it is a piece of privilege besides, and a step that separates him further from the bulk of his compatriots. At an earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly different experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he has been wandering fancy-free. His college life has little of restraint, and nothing of necessary gentility…. Our tasks ended, we of the North go forth as freemen into the humming, lamplit city. At five o’clock you may see the last of us hiving from the college gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under the green glimmer of the winter sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies in wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again we are the masters of the world.

As a master of the world, Louis declined to do much studying. He found the teaching formal and tedious, and was already accustomed to self-education. Besides, he was supposedly there to learn engineering, which he already knew he disliked. That engineering was taught at all made Edinburgh very different from the English universities, where the curriculum was heavily classical and mathematical. At Cambridge Isaac Newton, one of the greatest physicists of all time, had been a professor of mathematics, not physics.

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by | 14 November 2025 · 9:34 pm

Where RLS Learnt Lallans

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 82-84:

Louis picked up much of his Lallans from a shepherd named John Todd, known as “Lang John” for his height, with whom he would tramp for hours in the hills while the sheep were grazing. “My friend the shepherd,” he said later, “speaks broad Scotch of the broadest, and often enough employs words that I do not understand myself.” Louis recalled Todd in an essay entitled “Pastoral”: “He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face.”

But it was Todd’s eloquence that captivated Louis. “He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch I ever heard, and this vocabulary he would handle like a master. I might count him with the best talkers, only that talking Scotch and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing, at least, but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you.” Many of Louis’s original readers would have recognized a famous phrase that Samuel Johnson composed in Latin for his friend Oliver Goldsmith, Nihil tetegit quod non ornavit: “He touched nothing that he did not adorn.” The allusion is a beautiful tribute to the old shepherd, ranking his skill in language on a level with a writer of great distinction.

It was Todd, Louis said, who taught him to appreciate the spirit of the hills.

He it was that made it live for me, as the artist can make all things live. It was through him the simple strategy of massing sheep upon a snowy evening, with its attendant scampering of earnest, shaggy aides-de-camp, was an affair that I never wearied of seeing, and that I never weary of recalling to mind: the shadow of the night darkening on the hills, inscrutable black blots of snow shower moving here and there like night already come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black dogs upon the snow, a bitter air that took you by the throat, unearthly harpings of the wind along the moors; and for centerpiece to all these features and influences, John winding up the brae [slope], keeping his captain’s eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a spasm of bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker. It is thus that I still see him in my mind’s eye, perched on a hump of the declivity not far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish, his great voice taking hold upon the hills and echoing terror to the lowlands; I, meanwhile, standing somewhat back, until the fit should be over, and, with a pinch of snuff, my friend relapse into his easy, even conversation.

Though the shepherd’s casual talk might be “easy,” it was direct and to the point. In another essay Louis contrasted it with the conversational style in England, where “the contact of mind with mind [is] evaded as with terror. A Scottish peasant will talk more liberally out of his own experience. He will not put you by with conversational counters and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one interested in life and man’s chief end.”

Swanston people remembered that Todd used to say of Louis, “He is an awfu’ laddie for speirin’ questions about a’ thing, an’ whenever you turn your back, awa’ he gangs an’ writes it a’ doon.” A “speirin” questioner is prying and inquisitive. Years later some old-timers told a visitor the same thing. “Stevenson would dae naething but lie aboot the dykes. He wouldna wark. He was aye rinnin’ aboot wi’ lang Todd, amang the hills, getting him to tell a’ the stories he kent.” “Lang Todd” prompts one to wonder if John passed his nickname on to Long John Silver in Treasure Island.

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by | 6 November 2025 · 10:03 pm

Escaping Russia to Riga, 1921

From Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921, by Janusz Cisek (McFarland, 2025), Kindle Loc. 2673ff.

The last prison that Cooper was in was Vladykino. Here with two Polish officers he decided to escape. This time he succeeded. In a way he was forced to escape by his Polish counterparts. In his report filed after reaching Warsaw, he wrote that the two Polish prisoners managed to brake into the prison office in order to forge a few documents for the escape. At this point there was no return. Cooper was very well aware that not only the two direct perpetrators might be shot dead on the spot. He, after all, was considered to be a dangerous anti-revolutionary and enemy of the people. The escape must have happened at the beginning of March, 1921.

Since Cooper himself did not know Russian, he pretended to be mute, and on the long march from Moscow to the Latvian border, Lt. Stanisław Sokołowski and Corporal Stanisław Zalewski facilitated everything for him. They marched in the direction of Wielkie Łuki with Latvia as their general destination, which was then, as through the entire inter-war period, the most efficient crossing point between the workers’ paradise and the outside world. It was through this very border that Boris Savinkov, the famous terrorist, returned to Russia, lured by the mirage of the great anti–Bolshevik conspiracy. Food was obtained by exchanging the clothes they had received in the Amcross packages. The escapees brushed with arrest several times. They were, after all, moving across completely unknown territory with neither a compass nor a map. Cooper recalled that he spent one night up to his neck in water. In any case in an expedition covering over 800 kilometers, the sympathy, or at least indifference, of the local population had to play a crucial role. The last five days of the route to the border was on foot through mud and swamps. At the last minute, a smuggler they had engaged tried to betray the escapees by refusing to lead them across the border. Only threatened with death did he decide to fulfill his part of the contract. The border was crossed at 2:00 A.M. on April 23, 1921. “We came to ‘Amcross’ in rags and without shoes, hungry and completely fatigued,” as Cooper wrote in his first dispatch from Riga.

The shoes were payment for the smuggler who had led them across the border. Cooper would not have been himself if he had not immediately expressed his gratitude to Amcross and brought attention to the need for better care of the American prisoners still held by the Bolsheviks. He wrote about this a few weeks later, to Hoover among others, including a few practical hints. He brought attention to the still existing legal avenues of action by Western charitable organizations in Russia, he stressed the attitude of the two Polish officers and the local population. As an eyewitness, he was also a credible source of information about the conditions prevailing under the communist rule in Russia: “Cooper, a prisoner in Russia, states that Russia is full of propaganda against United States, France and Great Britain; people are told that these countries are responsible for all trouble in Russia. German influence is strong and popular.” In another report he confirmed the level of control by the new regime. “Absolute control of Bolsheviks, either they will stay in control or anarchy.” This experience of the nature of the communist system, gained through direct contact with the iron hand of terror, remained with Cooper throughout his life. He became an unrelenting opponent of the system, and he intended to write a book about his experiences. However he never fully realized his intention. The only fragments were included in his book Things Men Die For. It is worth mentioning here the durability of the anti–American propaganda, whose influence is present even in contemporary academic works. Simonenko, already mentioned in these pages, states in an article about the Kościuszko Squadron that after the signing of the Polish-Bolshevik peace in Riga, Cooper was most ordinarily released from prison and arrived to Poland without any problems. He does not say, however, why he had to overcome the boundless Russian territory in rags and on foot, nor why he crossed the border illegally.

…

Meanwhile, the Polish authorities and the squadron airmen awaited the miraculous rescue of their comrade. His journey from Riga to Warsaw began on April 29, his train reached the capital on May 3, the day celebrated by Poles as Constitution Day. As a witness to the event recalled, “he received a great ovation.” It so happened that this was the first time that Constitution Day had been celebrated without a major war being waged, although the borders had not yet been officially recognized by the Conference of Ambassadors. It is true that in Silesia the third uprising had broken out against the Germans, but Poland was not officially involved in that conflict. Help was provided to the insurgents unofficially using paramilitary organizations such as the Polish Military Organization. Thus, the 3rd of May in 1921 was celebrated solemnly and in an atmosphere of peace, as the new constitution was declared in March and a peace treaty was signed with Russia.

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Filed under Baltics, language, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, U.S., USSR, war

by | 6 November 2025 · 8:41 am

Pilot Captured by Bolsheviks, 1920

From Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921, by Janusz Cisek (McFarland, 2025), Kindle Loc. 2636ff.

The Bolshevik Cavalry immediately captured him and took him to the HQ of the 2nd Brigade of the 6th Division of Budenny’s Konarmia [‘Horse Army’]. Peasants who managed to see the events gave an exact description of the airman’s appearance, and on the basis of this, Fauntleroy identified Cooper.

As it happened, the plane was damaged during the landing and Cooper himself lost consciousness. When he came round, he found himself surrounded by Budenny’s cavalrymen. At that moment, the wounds and burns he had suffered in action in September 1918 were his succor. One of the basic Bolshevik practices towards prisoners and people of the captured areas was to seek out the “representatives of the Bourgeousie.” One of the most popular tests of class membership was an analysis of their hands. The so-called “white hands” signified a man who had never done any manual work and therefore was an “enemy of the people.” However, Cooper’s hands were burnt. His second lucky break was his army discharge underwear, which he had on that day. The underwear was stamped with the name of the previous owner, who was Corporal Frank Mosher. Both lucky events allowed Cooper to maintain that he was in reality a corporal of that name who had been enlisted into the Polish Armed Forces. Of course, the Bolsheviks did not entirely believe that story, because even within their ranks the names of the American pilots were known. Apart from that, Cooper had some incriminating documents in his pocket, such as notes addressed to Fauntleroy and, even worse, his memo to Col. Castle regarding the importance of the air force. Its content was unambiguous. Cooper wrote that through their participation in the war, the airmen of the squadron were gaining experience of the role of the air force in a war of maneuvers in geographically wide-open country. This experience, he noted, could have significance in the event of a revival of the war with Mexico. He also summarized his thoughts on the subject of the air force combat effectiveness against the infantry and cavalry. They were certainly not commensurate with even the most sharp-witted corporal.

Cooper was transported to the Division HQ, where he was interrogated by the komdyw, or Division Commander, Timoszenko, who was later to become a Soviet Marshal. They tempted him with the proposition of service as an instructor of the Bolshevik Air Force, but he consistently refused. Even a five-day visit to the Bolshevik Air Squadron did not help to change his mind. Early in his captivity, Cooper attempted to escape. Unfortunately after two days he was caught and imprisoned with a heavy guard. He found himself in Moscow, where in all he spent as much as ten months in various penal facilities. Prison food rations consisted of barely half a pound of black bread per day—and not always. Years later, he recalled his experiences in a reply to a letter from Capt. Marek Mażyński, a Polish airman of 303rd Squadron who in the first years of World War II was also a Soviet prisoner. The men compared notes on prison conditions in the 1920s and the 1940s. Cooper wrote:

For a week in Moscow, nobody had a bite of eat—nothing. One of the prisons I was in was fairly good. The second one was just about as you describe. The third was rougher and tougher than any you describe; there was a good reason for this as my imprisonment was during the starvation period of 1920–1921, where for one week in January (as I have already said) there was absolutely no food in Moscow. Not only had the transportation broke down, but this was the first time the peasants refused to give food to the city workers…. Nothing is more terrible than the breaking of the human spirit by torture, starvation, and the sadistic questioning by “Cheka.” I want to say that in the toughest prison I was in, where men died every night from lack of food and typhus, there were two prisoners who kept other prisoners from complete disintegration. One of the men had lost all his teeth while working in the coal mines of Siberia; he was a 30-year-old baker who had only one tooth. He was from Łódź, Poland. The other man was a man who spoke only a little Polish. This, of course, was me. I take no credit, but credit only the tough training I had at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.

The prisoners’ situation was saved by food parcels from “Amcross” and one of the English charitable organizations. The living conditions in jail were also severe for other reasons. Cooper recalled gaining permission from the prison authorities to hold prayers in the presence of a priest on Christmas Eve. It was an evening when companions in misery were people of differing confessions and nationalities, including prisoners related to the richest American families. On that day they were joined in prayer, although not all of them were believers. The prisoners’ prayers cemented the Bolsheviks’ hatred towards them as representatives of the social order that they had vowed to destroy.

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by | 5 November 2025 · 12:22 pm

Piłsudski vs. Bolsheviks, 1920

From Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921, by Janusz Cisek (McFarland, 2025), Kindle Loc. 2230ff.

Neither personnel nor materiel reinforcements arrived during the general battle waged near Warsaw, nor was there any aid for Lwów, which was facing its own battle of life and death. At the very beginning of August 1920, when the Bolsheviks occupied the Brest fortress, the road to Warsaw seemed to be wide open and defenseless. The fall of the Polish capital appeared to be inevitable. Foreign missions, with a few exceptions, began to evacuate from Warsaw, the world press began to write about the fall of Poland. On August 11 the Universal News Service reported from Washington that the Secretary of State recommended the U.S. legation move to Grudziądz. Other sources confirmed the information.

Piłsudski took full responsibility for the preparation of a counteroffensive. At first his plan depended on a concentration of forces under the cover of the fortress at Brest. When the fortress fell on August 1, his plan had to be completely rethought. The French advisor to the Polish General Staff, General Maxime Weygand, opted for a concentration of forces around Warsaw and a linear defense along the natural lines. Waygand envisiged only a limited counterattack. Rozwadowski, who from July 22 was the Chief of General Staff, proposed a counterattack with a force concentrated near Garwolin. None of these plans gained full recognition by the Commander in Chief. It was on August 6 that Piłsudski prepared the basic idea of his maneuver. It established a broad pincer movement from the south, striking the Bolsheviks’ left wing engaged near Warsaw and closing off their retreat path to the east. Piłsudski simultaneously issued an order dividing the armed forces into three fronts: the Northern, Central, and Southern. The 7th Squadron was assigned to the Southern Front in the area bordered by the line between Włodzimierz Wołyński, Hrubieszów, and Zamość, all the way to the Romanian border. At the same time, the Marshal recommended a concentration of troops in the vicinity of Puławy, under the cover of the Wieprz River, south of Warsaw. This was to be established from the 1st and the 3rd Infantry Division Legions, the 21st Mountain Division, the 14th Wielkopolska Infantry Division and other smaller units. These units had been delegated to carry out the main strike. The key to success was that designated units were to swiftly isolate themselves from the Southern Front, while at the same time effectively defending their right wing in order to prevent Bolshevik units operating in the Lwów area from taking part in battle. The next crucial element for the success of operation was to maintain the complete secrecy of the plan and to guarantee maximum surprise by attacking at the very moment of the full engagement of the enemy near Warsaw. Piłsudski personally led a counteroffensive in the morning hours of August 16 on the Wieprz River. His presence among the units, as Gen. Maxime Weygand wrote, transformed morale, which had been shaken after a retreat lasting a few weeks. The Bolsheviks were completely surprised; they did not expect the Polish armed forces to be ready for a greater offensive. Their defeat was more complete because the day before Piłsudski’s counterattack, the 5th Army under the command of Gen. Władysław Sikorski gained a local success in action north of Warsaw along the Vistula. On August 18 the Poles’ success was already evident. The Bolshevik Mozyr Group, which approached Warsaw from the southeast, was smashed, as was the 16th Army, which attacked Warsaw from Mińsk Mazowiecki and Radzymin.

By August 25 the Bolsheviks had lost 25,000 killed and wounded, with 66,000 taken prisoner and over 231 artillery pieces, 1,023 machine guns, and a huge amount of military equipment captured. The 3rd, 4th, 15th, and 16th Bolshevik Armies found themselves in a panic retreat. The battle was swiftly baptized as the 18th decisive battle in world history. It was already clear that Piłsudski had halted the Bolshevik advance into the heart of Europe.

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by | 3 November 2025 · 7:02 am

Ubiquitous Street Signs in Poland

Zapraszamy lit. ‘We invite’ (= ‘Welcome’) is on nearly every storefront, but I haven’t seen it on welcome mats. One also sees Dziękujemy ‘we thank you’.

Among the most common prohibitive streetsigns are: Zakas Parkowanie ‘No parking’. Many streets have paid (Płatny) parking zones with one interactive Parkomat meter per zone. Blue signs with P mark the beginning, and often specify whether parking is parallel, angled, or perpendicular to the sidewalk. The ends of paid parking zones are marked with blue signs reading Koniec ‘end’.

Many shops and restaurants also display Zakas Palenia ‘no smoking’. Lots of Poles smoke or vape and you often encounter groups of people standing around outside taking smoke breaks (in the cold) before going back inside. It took me a while to figure out that the Papierosy advertised at many stores are ‘cigarettes’. What gave it away for me were signs advertising e-papierosy.

Lifts are labeled Winda (sg.) or Windy (pl.). Ground floors (parter) are numbered 0, and basements are numbered -1. Each upper floor is a piętro and the newly upgraded elevator in our building announces piętro zero at the ground floor and piętro minus jeden in the basement where the recycling bins are.

Our rather nice building also has signs that warn residents not to park their rowery ‘bicycles’, hulajnogi ‘scooters’, or deskorolki ‘skateboards’ in the hallways. Hulajnogi elektryczne are as much a danger to pedestrians on Polish sidewalks as they are everywhere else.

Poles have a reputation for being heavy drinkers, and all manner of liquor is readily available even on Sundays in the ubiquitous Żabka convenience shops, but we have been surprised to see so many varieties of very tasty beers and wines (and even hard liquor) on storeshelves and in restaurants that are labeled bezalkoholowe (0,0%).

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