The People Behind ‘Kultura’: A Community at Maisons-Laffitte
A handful of people, a house outside Paris, and more than half a century of work, often from dawn until late into the night. This was how ‘Kultura’, the most influential Polish émigré journal of the twentieth century, came into being. Behind the legendary figure of Jerzy Giedroyc stood a group of individuals without whom neither the journal nor the Literary Institute would have existed. Among them was a former deportee who became the first Polish woman to pass the notarial examination; a painter who survived Starobelsk and devoted his life to uncovering the truth about the Katyn massacre; and the Editor’s younger brother, who meticulously recorded, year after year, who had come to visit for Christmas and who had passed away. Around them revolved a constellation of writers and intellectuals based in Bern, London and Moscow, held together by hundreds of letters. This is the story of the people who made ‘Kultura’ — and who devoted their lives to it.
The Literary Institute was established in Rome in February 1946, under the auspices of the Polish II Corps, with funds borrowed from the military. By 2010, it had published 637 issues of ‘Kultura’, 171 issues of ‘Zeszyty Historyczne’ and several hundred books. This was the achievement of a remarkably small editorial team and a vast circle of contributors. Many of them never lived in Maisons-Laffitte, while one did not even live to see the journal's founding.
The Absent: Adolf Bocheński
The story of ‘Kultura’ began before the war, in Warsaw. At the time, the young Jerzy Giedroyc was editing ‘Bunt Młodych’, renamed ‘Polityka’ in 1937. The journal attracted a circle of young political commentators, including the Bocheński brothers, the Pruszyński brothers and Wacław Alfred Zbyszewski. They were united by a single question: how could Poland preserve its independence between Germany and Russia?
The most outstanding among them, Adolf Bocheński, had warned of a possible rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow in his book ‘Między Niemcami a Rosją’ (‘Between Germany and Russia’), long before the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. He advocated reconciliation with the Ukrainians and opposed nationalism and antisemitism. He believed that the strength of a state rested on effective institutions and responsible political elites. When war broke out, he concluded that those who wrote about the state should also be prepared to defend it. His wartime journey took him from the September Campaign through Narvik and Tobruk to Monte Cassino. He was killed on 18 July 1944, near Ancona, while defusing a mine. He was 35 years old.
He did not live to see the founding of the Literary Institute, but his intellectual legacy — political realism, an enduring interest in Eastern Europe and a commitment to long-term thinking — became one of the foundations of ‘Kultura’. As Czapski wrote of him, contradicting the familiar saying, ‘there are people who are irreplaceable’.
The Editor: Jerzy Giedroyc
Jerzy Giedroyc was born on 27 July 1906 in Minsk. His father was a pharmacist and a descendant of a Lithuanian princely family, though one without wealth or social standing. His mother was the daughter of one of the city's finest tailors. Jerzy spent much of his childhood battling illness, reading books from his father's library and enduring piano lessons he disliked. In 1917, at the age of eleven, he witnessed the February Revolution in Moscow, before making his way home alone over several weeks through a Russia engulfed in chaos. It was during this journey that he took up smoking. In 1918, the family moved to Warsaw, and in 1920, before completing his secondary education, he volunteered for military service as a telegraph operator.
While studying law, he served as president of the Patria student fraternity. In May 1926, together with his fellow students, he defended Wincenty Witos’s government against Piłsudski’s forces. As he later recalled, the panic and disarray among the governing elite cured him of his faith in parliamentarism. He subsequently embarked on a career as a civil servant in various ministries and co-founded the Club of Mischievous Pups (Klub Złośliwych Szczeniaków), an informal circle of young ministerial secretaries more concerned with ideas than with securing positions. He was also active in the Myśl Mocarstwowa movement, which challenged the National Democrats’ vision of an ethnically defined nation-state by advocating the Jagiellonian ideal of a multi-ethnic Commonwealth. It was here that the roots of ‘Kultura’s’ later engagement with Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Belarusian affairs can be traced. One of his articles in ‘Polityka’ reportedly even put him at risk of internment in Bereza Kartuska.
The war took him to Bucharest, where, as secretary to Ambassador Roger Raczyński, he helped Polish refugees. Following the closure of the embassy, he continued his work unofficially, gathering intelligence from both German- and Soviet-occupied Poland for the Polish government. As a result of a provocation, he was accused of bribery and trafficking in visas. The charges were dropped only after an investigation lasting several months. He subsequently served as a soldier in besieged Tobruk, an education officer in Iraq, where he met Czapski, and editor of ‘Orzeł Biały’, until he was dismissed over the journal’s excessively liberal editorial stance. During the same period, he lost both his parents, who were killed during the Warsaw Uprising, and his marriage came to a definitive end. Of his former life, only his younger brother remained.
From then on, his life became increasingly intertwined with the history of ‘Kultura’. On his fortieth birthday, in 1946, he attended a briefing with General Anders at half past nine in the morning. In later years, 27 July at Maisons-Laffitte was much like any other day: the typewriter, correspondence and publishing matters. On his birthday in 1954, he was already outlining, in a letter to Czapski, the journal’s first-ever appeal to readers for funds to purchase a house.
He was the first in the household to rise and, for years, prepared breakfast himself. He was also the last to go to bed. His only private space was a small room upstairs, barely a dozen square metres in size. There, he would fall asleep over manuscripts, while cigarettes dropped from his hand left scorch marks on the bedclothes and floor. Looking back on life at Maisons-Laffitte, he described it as a perpetual state of ‘living under canvas’.
His literary sensibility had been shaped by Żeromski. Herling-Grudziński even called him a ‘Żeromszczyk’ — a devotee of Żeromski. The Romantics bored him, but he could scarcely tear himself away from Brzozowski. He read almost as much in Russian as in Polish and admitted to preferring Russian poetry to Polish. He admired Dostoevsky, Babel, Pilniak, Conrad and Hamsun, but could not stand Thomas Mann. In a questionnaire in 1991, he named kołduny (meat-filled dumplings) as his favourite dish, Mosul as his favourite city, John Wayne as his favourite actor, and editing ‘Kultura’ as his favourite pastime. Writing about himself in 1972, he acknowledged that he had an insufferable temperament, but maintained that without it, ‘Kultura’ would either never have come into being or would have been an entirely different journal.
He died on 14 September 2000 at a clinic in Maisons-Laffitte.
The Right Hand: Zofia Hertz
It was often said that Giedroyc was the brains behind Maisons-Laffitte, while Zofia Hertz was its driving force. She was known as ‘the Editor’s right hand’.
She was born Zofia Neuding in Warsaw in 1910. Her parents divorced shortly after her birth. When she was eleven, her mother died, and she went to live on her own in a succession of rented lodgings in Łódź. Financial difficulties forced her to abandon her law studies after just one year. She worked in a notary’s office and, in 1933, became the first woman in Poland to pass the notarial examination. Her achievement was reported in the Łódź newspapers. A change in regulations, however, prevented her from obtaining the professional title. In 1939, she married Zygmunt Hertz.
In 1940, the NKVD arrested them both in Lwów. For fourteen months, they worked felling trees in a Soviet labour camp in the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. In Anders’s Army, she worked as a typist for ‘Orzeł Biały’ in Buzuluk, before joining the editorial staff of ‘Parada’ in Cairo. In the spring of 1943, she met Giedroyc in the Iraqi desert. From that moment on, they worked together for nearly sixty years.
She enjoyed recounting anecdotes from the war. When a change in the Corps’ leadership led to her removal from her post, she was transferred to a soldiers’ savings office near Ancona. There, she completed an entire day’s work in just fifteen minutes and immediately demanded more. She warned the bookkeepers that if she stayed for a month, they would all be out of a job. One of them, noticing that officers greeted her by her first name, asked whether she knew General Anders himself. When she said she did, he accused her of lying: if she really knew Anders, she would hardly be working in a place like that. A similar episode unfolded when she applied for her first visa to London in 1949. An official at the prefecture in Versailles accused her of having misled the authorities. Furious, Zofia explained that she had arrived in France as a soldier in Anders’s Army — and was granted the visa on the spot.
At the Literary Institute, she was secretary, accountant, proofreader, translator and housekeeper, presiding over a household through which thousands of people passed. Proofreading was her greatest torment. The French printers made mistakes in the Polish texts, omitted entire stanzas and damaged the type. Changing printers was out of the question, as no others had either Polish typefaces or linotype operators. During the Christmas holidays of 1973, ten people stayed at the house for days on end, while Christmas lunch for seventeen guests lasted six hours. In a letter to the Miłoszes, she complained that her strength was failing her, while at the same time listing the books that were about to go to press.
She found respite in travelling with her husband. They spent each night in a different place, travelled across Spain at least five times, visited Rhodes, Corsica and Jersey, and toured the United States in the 1970s. Zygmunt’s illness and death brought these journeys to an end.
She had a sharp tongue, could not abide hypocrisy or self-pity, and never hesitated to tell people the truth to their faces. She smoked heavily, but when her doctor told her to give up, she stopped overnight and never took up the habit again, even though Giedroyc continued to smoke in her presence until the end of his life. She never set foot in Poland after 1940, yet remained remarkably well informed about life in the country. For almost thirty years, from 1962 to 1990, she edited the ‘Humor krajowy’ (‘Humour from Poland’) column in ‘Kultura’, collecting some of the sharpest political jokes circulating in communist Poland. She never applied for French citizenship.
After 1989, she suffered many disappointments: the disloyalty of old friends, the disregard shown for the Institute’s achievements, and the lack of funds to sustain its work. Towards the end of her life, an eye condition deprived her of the ability to read. Polish engineers gave her a device that could read texts aloud in a synthetic voice. Following Giedroyc’s death, she took over the running of the Institute and, in October 2000, published the final, 637th issue of ‘Kultura’. She died in June 2003.
The Spirit of the House: Zygmunt Hertz
He was born in Warsaw in 1908 and grew up in Łódź. He studied in Manchester and at the London School of Economics, although he probably graduated from neither institution. He worked as a docker in the port of Gdańsk, and later in his father’s office, where the latter represented the Solvay company. In September 1939, he was ordered to transport artillery guns from the fortress at Brest to Warsaw — an impossible task. Together with his wife, he endured imprisonment in a Soviet labour camp. He subsequently served as an anti-aircraft gunner in Anders’s Army and fought at Monte Cassino. In a letter to Miłosz, he summed up his life with characteristic self-irony: thirty years of comfort, eight strange years, and then the Institute. Writing about his military service, he remarked that he had been afraid of his superiors, while his subordinates had been afraid of him.
At the Literary Institute, he was responsible for administration, dispatching publications, managing subscriptions, the library and press cuttings. He also helped with proofreading. His true role, however, was to bring people together. It was he who welcomed visitors from Poland, particularly the young, helped them secure scholarships and establish contacts, offered encouragement and got them out of difficulties. Konstanty Jeleński called him the Sancho Panza of the household, while Miłosz described him as a ‘buzzing bumblebee’. Giedroyc acknowledged that without Zofia and Zygmunt Hertz, ‘Kultura’ could neither have come into being nor survived. Hertz wrote hundreds of letters to Miłosz, which were published as a separate volume after his death.
Yet he was also a man beset by doubts. He saw himself as having been sidelined, living in a house where Giedroyc made all the decisions. Life at Maisons-Laffitte sometimes felt to him like solitary confinement. He wondered whether, had he and his wife not managed to join Anders’s Army, they might have returned to Poland with Berling’s Army, joined the Communist Party for the sake of a quiet life, and somehow made their way through the years of communist rule. Nevertheless, he regarded the overall balance of his life as positive. He counted among his achievements the publication of good books, a house that had welcomed hundreds of overnight guests, and the launching pad it had provided for Gombrowicz. He never shared these reflections with his wife. Zofia discovered them only while proofreading the book edition of his letters, twelve years after his death.
In 1979, at the age of 71, he was diagnosed with cancer. He worried about his wife, put his affairs in order and fretted over what would become of his collection of objects, which he himself described as an assortment of ‘hideous things’. Until the very end, he continued to receive telephone calls from Andrzejewski, members of the Kisielewski family and Miłosz, while Masses were celebrated for him in Kraków. He was deeply hurt by his falling-out with Andrzej Drawicz, whom he had helped for years. Even so, he resolved that if the Drawicz family ever fell on hard times, he would support them through intermediaries. As farewell gifts, he received drawings from Lebenstein and watercolours from Czapski. He joked that his illness was proving rather profitable.
He died in October 1979. The Literary Institute subsequently established an award in his name, which was presented for twenty years. Today, a square in Łódź bears the names of Zofia and Zygmunt Hertz.
The Foreign Minister: Józef Czapski
He was born in Prague in 1896 into the Czapski and Thun-Hohenstein families. He spent his childhood at the family estate in Przyłuki, in present-day Belarus. He was educated in St Petersburg and served in the Corps of Pages. His pacifist convictions led him to leave his cavalry regiment, but in the winter of 1918–19 he volunteered to travel to Petrograd in search of missing officers from his regiment. It emerged that they had been executed. This experience would be repeated on a far greater scale later in his life. Despite his pacifism, he fought in the Polish–Soviet War.
He studied painting under Józef Pankiewicz and, in 1923, co-founded the Paris Committee, which raised funds to enable young painters to travel to Paris. He used to say that he had gone there with enough money for six months but ended up staying for six years. Later, in Warsaw, he devoted himself to painting and writing about art.
In September 1939, he was taken prisoner by the Soviets. He survived Starobelsk only because he had been transferred to Gryazovets. He was one of approximately 450 officers from the camp who survived. While serving in Anders’s Army, he searched for thousands of his missing fellow officers. ‘Kultura’ began serialising his ‘Na nieludzkiej ziemi’ (‘Inhuman Land’), which identified the Soviets as the perpetrators of the Katyn massacre, in its second issue. The work was published as a book in 1949. Bringing the truth about Katyn to light became his lifelong mission.
As head of the Propaganda Department, he was Giedroyc’s superior, and his friendship with General Anders helped make the establishment of the Literary Institute possible. In 1947, he secured a dilapidated villa in Maisons-Laffitte for the editorial team. Twice he saved the journal from bankruptcy: in 1949, he toured Canada and the United States, giving lectures on the Katyn massacre and raising funds for ‘Kultura’; in 1955, he travelled to South America to encourage the Polish diaspora to take out subscriptions. Fluent in French, German and Russian, he had a remarkable gift for winning people over. It was largely thanks to him that the émigré journal established contacts with André Malraux and James Burnham. Giedroyc called him his foreign minister.
He contributed to ‘Kultura’ from its very first issue, initially under the pseudonym Marek Sienny. He wrote about Katyn, Proust, Cézanne, Solzhenitsyn and his friends. He also produced drawings for the journal: sketches of New York, postcards depicting the editorial house, and portraits of Black, the dog. In 1958, his painting ‘Kawiarnia’ (‘Café’) won ‘Kultura’s’ art prize. He lived in the Institute’s house with his sister Maria until the end of his life. He travelled around the neighbourhood on a moped, which he only gave up in the late 1970s. Zofia Hertz likened him, riding his moped, to Don Quixote on Rocinante. He continued painting well into old age. He died in January 1993, and Giedroyc recorded his death in his diary in just two words. The Polish Sejm designated 2026 the Year of Józef Czapski.
The University That Never Quite Succeeded
One little-known joint undertaking by Giedroyc and Czapski was the Free Europe College. Since 1945, Giedroyc had dreamed of establishing an institution of higher education for young refugees from Central and Eastern Europe, regarding the project as no less important than the journal itself. At Burnham’s invitation, Czapski presented the idea in West Berlin in June 1950, at the inaugural meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. A year later, the college was established in New York before being relocated to Strasbourg.
The American committee funding the college, however, soon sidelined both Poles from the project. The French authorities permitted the admission only of refugees who had already settled in the West. The college educated around a thousand students before abruptly closing in 1958. Giedroyc remained deeply disappointed by its failure for the rest of his life.
The Brother: Henryk Giedroyc
He was sixteen years younger than Jerzy. Their middle brother, Zygmunt, remained in Warsaw, and neither Jerzy nor Henryk ever saw him again, just as they never saw their parents again. In September 1939, Jerzy took his seventeen-year-old brother, still a secondary school pupil, with him to Romania and made sure that he completed his secondary education in Bucharest.
Henryk kept notebooks throughout his life, and it is through them that we can trace his experiences. In December 1939, he recorded in Bucharest that it was one of the happiest days of his life: the first letter from his mother had arrived. For years afterwards, he marked the anniversary of that letter. He spent Christmas Eve 1941 loading petrol in the port of Tobruk, and the following Christmas Eve in Iraq. His entry for that evening mentions drunkenness, a knife fight and tending to the wounded.
After the war, he studied in Turin and worked in an ice cream factory in England. He spent his first Christmas at Maisons-Laffitte in 1947, arriving from London with a suitcase that he had struggled to carry all the way to the house. He joined the team permanently in 1952 and devoted the rest of his post-war life to the administration of the Literary Institute. His meticulous notes on the distribution of ‘Doctor Zhivago’ are preserved in the archives today. He also recorded who had arrived, who had come to lunch, who had fallen ill, and the precise hour at which someone had died.
He was also the household’s photographer, taking portraits of its residents and visitors. An album of his photographs was published on the tenth anniversary of his death. A man of few words and a dry sense of humour, he preferred listening to speaking. He was the only member of this ‘monastic order’ to have a private life of his own — and to know how to enjoy it. When he decided to marry an Italian woman, Leda Pasquali, Jerzy warned him that ‘marriages never work out for the Giedroycs’. They married in 1966 and spent several happy decades together, holidaying on Formentera every year. Henryk moved to Paris with his wife, but continued to visit the Institute daily, also spending weekends and holidays there. He enjoyed cooking and had a fondness for the latest cameras and telephones.
He was loyal to his brother, but capable of judging him with a clear eye. He used to say that Jerzy was a politician, but that he himself had no need to be one. After his brother’s death, at the age of 81, he took over the running of the Literary Institute, regarding it as a way of repaying his debt to Jerzy. He died at the ‘Kultura’ house on 21 March 2010. For many, that day marked the end of the Maisons-Laffitte story.
A Voice from London: Juliusz Mieroszewski
One of Giedroyc’s closest collaborators never lived in Maisons-Laffitte. He was born in Kraków in 1906 into a landowning family. He spent his childhood in Limanowa, where he was brought up by a German governess. He studied philosophy, law and economics, but completed none of these courses. Before the war, he covered German affairs for ‘Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny’. He was not called up for military service on medical grounds.
On 17 September 1939, he crossed the border with his wife and daughter. In Bucharest, he worked at the Polish embassy, then travelled via Istanbul and Cyprus to the Middle East, where he joined the Carpathian Brigade in Haifa. It was there that he met Giedroyc. He edited military periodicals, including ‘Parada’, which he oversaw from its first issue to its last.
After the war, he settled in London and never left the city again. He wrote for émigré newspapers, the BBC and Radio Free Europe. His first article in ‘Kultura’ appeared in October 1949, and from 1950 onwards he served as its London correspondent. Writing under the pseudonym ‘Londyńczyk’ (‘The Londoner’), he produced a regular chronicle of British affairs and the Polish émigré community. Over time, his articles came to lead successive issues and articulate the journal’s political position. Giedroyc valued his concision, a quality he considered rare in Polish political commentary, and believed that without Mieroszewski, ‘Kultura’ would largely have ceased to exist as a political journal. He regarded Mieroszewski’s most enduring achievement as the ULB concept: the conviction that an independent Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus were essential to Poland’s own freedom, even if this meant relinquishing Polish claims to Vilnius and Lviv. Mieroszewski died in London in June 1976. The editorial team paid tribute to him with the words: ‘With him, a part of Kultura has died.’
Gustaw Herling-Grudziński and the Circle of Contributors
Herling-Grudziński was among the signatories of the journal’s inaugural issue, published in Rome in June 1947. In the autumn of that year, however, while the rest of the editorial team was moving to France, he left for London. He remained a contributor to the journal and a frequent visitor to the house. His ‘Upiory rewolucji’ (‘Spectres of the Revolution’) and ‘Dziennik pisany nocą’ (‘Journal Written at Night’) were published in the ‘Kultura’ Library series. In a photograph from 1986, he is seated in the garden beside Zofia Hertz, while in 1979 he was among those who visited Zygmunt Hertz during his final illness.
The ‘Kultura’ Library series began publishing books in 1953. Its first volume brought together Gombrowicz’s ‘Trans-Atlantyk’ and ‘Ślub’ (‘The Marriage’). Miłosz’s ‘Zniewolony umysł’ (‘The Captive Mind’) appeared that same year. From then on, both writers published all their works through Giedroyc’s Literary Institute. A circle of essayists gathered around the Institute, including Jerzy Stempowski, Stanisław Vincenz, Józef Wittlin and Konstanty Jeleński. Giedroyc was also keen to publish emerging writers, such as Leo Lipski and Zygmunt Haupt. After 1956, writers from Poland began visiting Maisons-Laffitte. Stefan Kisielewski paved the way for these visitors from communist Poland, publishing his novels there from 1967 onwards under the pseudonym Tomasz Staliński.
Contributors Beyond the House
The team at Maisons-Laffitte consisted of only a handful of people, but ‘Kultura’ was also a network of correspondence stretching from Bern to Buenos Aires. Giedroyc recruited writers and kept them close through letters, patience and persistence. A few stories illustrate how this worked.
Jerzy Stempowski: The Sceptic from Bern
The oldest of the Editor’s close collaborators wrote under the pseudonym Paweł Hostowiec. Before the war, he had belonged to the political camp opposed to Giedroyc’s. In 1929, he abandoned a career at the highest levels of government, repelled by the arrogance of Piłsudski’s supporters. The two men only grew close after both had lost the world they had once known. From April 1940, Stempowski lived in Bern. Towards the end of 1945, Czapski, acting on Anders’s instructions, proposed that he undertake a journey to Austria and Germany. The journey gave rise to ‘Dziennik podróży do Austrii i Niemiec’ (‘A Travel Diary from Austria and Germany’), one of the Literary Institute’s earliest books, published in Rome in 1946. It marked the beginning of a collaboration that would last almost a quarter of a century.
Stempowski was not an easy contributor to work with. On learning that the journal was to be published in Paris, he advised Giedroyc to abandon the pretentious title ‘Kultura’ and suggested a whole list of humorous alternatives drawn from proverbs and Mickiewicz. He questioned the Editor’s tactics. In 1950–51, his disagreements with Mieroszewski’s political commentary became so pronounced that he virtually stopped writing for the journal for several years. Poverty also forced him to seek other work: first in a workshop manufacturing abrasive brushes, and later as a translator for the Spanish embassy. He also fell into a deep melancholy and, for more than a year, did not reply to letters.
Giedroyc refused to give up on him. He continued writing despite receiving no replies, sent him books, drew him into new subjects and, finally, in 1955, secured him a scholarship sufficient to cover his monthly living expenses. He regarded Stempowski as the finest stylist writing for the journal and never rejected a single piece he submitted — something he could not even say of Gombrowicz.
Stempowski repaid Giedroyc’s efforts in a way that no one else could. In the autumn of 1955, he arranged a meeting in Bern between Giedroyc and Maria Dąbrowska, who had travelled from Poland. The Editor spent five days and nights in conversation with her. These discussions brought home to him just how far the émigré community had become detached from life in Poland. It was also Stempowski who drafted an invitation to Maisons-Laffitte for the signatories of a regime-sponsored appeal urging Polish émigrés to return to their homeland. The authorities in Warsaw replied that talks could take place only in Poland. After the Polish October of 1956, Stempowski recalled in one of his essays a saying attributed to Szymon Askenazy: ‘Poland is like the orphan of Kazan, with no one to ransom her from captivity.’ Although he had little faith in any form of émigré politics, he acknowledged that the one undertaking in which the émigrés had genuinely succeeded was ‘Kultura’ itself.
Mikhail Heller: The Russian Who Became Adam Kruczek
For twenty-seven years, readers of ‘Kultura’ encountered a monthly column entitled ‘In the Soviet Press’, signed ‘Adam Kruczek’. Few knew who was behind the pseudonym. Mikhail Heller was born in 1922 in Mogilev and graduated in history from Moscow University. He contributed entries to the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia and for many years was no critic of the Soviet system.
In 1952, he was sentenced to fifteen years in a labour camp in Kazakhstan. The reason was absurd: his name appeared on the payroll of an enterprise where he did not actually work, allowing him to devote the time thus gained to research. His seven-year-old son believed that his father had gone away to teach at a school in Kazakhstan. When Heller emerged from the labour camp in 1956, he was a changed man, suffering from tuberculosis and deeply critical of the Soviet state.
Thanks to his wife Eugenia, a Polish Jewish woman from Słonim, the couple were able to move to Poland in 1957. Heller worked for the Polish Press Agency, and Poland, as he himself put it, served as a kind of decompression chamber before entering the West. Following the events of 1968, the Hellers left for Paris, officially for medical treatment. Zygmunt Hertz immediately assured Miłosz that Heller was an exceptional figure, and in March 1969 Giedroyc invited him to write a regular column on Soviet affairs. The result was 267 instalments of ‘In the Soviet Press’ and several dozen other articles.
Heller chose his pseudonym almost on a whim. He borrowed the surname from a trade union activist he had read about in ‘Trybuna Ludu’, and, unable to remember the man’s first name, replaced it with that of the first man. Giedroyc consulted him on everything concerning Russia: letters to Solzhenitsyn, the Russian translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the publication of a Russian edition of ‘Inny świat’ (‘A World Apart’).
Following the publication of ‘Utopia u władzy’ (‘Utopia in Power’), co-written with Aleksandr Nekrich, the Soviet authorities stripped Heller of his citizenship in 1983. The heaviest blow came three years later, when his wife died of cancer. Czapski wrote him a letter urging him to recount their life together: the years in the labour camp, Zhenya’s clandestine visits to him there, and their two escapes. Heller died suddenly in January 1997. In a tribute to him, Giedroyc described him as ‘one of my few friends’
Marek Hłasko: An Escape Arranged by Correspondence
Giedroyc recounted the story of Hłasko’s arrival at Maisons-Laffitte in a letter to a friend in April 1958. The two had been corresponding since the previous summer. In Poland, the authorities had confiscated the writer’s book, withdrawn a scholarship to France that he had already been awarded, and finally conscripted him into the navy for three and a half years. They had, however, forgotten to confiscate his passport. Giedroyc arranged a French visa and sent him an airline ticket purchased under another name.
The Literary Institute published Hłasko’s book, which won the ‘Kultura’ Prize, and contracts with foreign publishers soon followed. Giedroyc stressed that his intention had not been to persuade Hłasko to ‘choose freedom’, but to challenge censorship. He even sent him to the Polish embassy to have his passport extended. The officials dealt with the matter without a word, although they knew that he had deserted and was living at the ‘Kultura’ house. Rather than the legendary rebel, the Editor encountered a distrustful, almost feral young man. He described him as ‘a poor boy who has never had a home’ and believed that he needed to be looked after and guided.
Piotr Rawicz: The One Who Eluded Giedroyc
Not everyone could be won over. Piotr Rawicz arrived in Paris in 1947 and worked for the Polish Press Agency (PAP) until he was dismissed. He eventually became stateless. In 1962, his novel ‘Krew nieba’ (‘Blood from the Sky’), published by Gallimard, caused a literary sensation in France. Giedroyc pursued him for contributions with his characteristic persistence, joking in his letters that he had ‘the makings of a prison warder’. Each time, Rawicz found an excuse: an injured hand, no typewriter, an unfinished manuscript. He never submitted the promised piece, probably for fear of losing the opportunity to travel to Poland. It made no difference: from 1965 onwards, he was on the list of people barred from entering communist Poland. Nevertheless, he remained within the orbit of Maisons-Laffitte. After Rawicz and his partner Anna Jawicz died, Czapski paid tribute to them both in the pages of ‘Kultura’ in 1982.
These four stories illustrate how the writers associated with ‘Kultura’ were not united by a common political outlook. What bound them together was a personal relationship with the Editor, cultivated over years of correspondence, sometimes even against the wishes of those concerned.
A House Full of Guests
The local French residents called the property at 91 avenue de Poissy ‘La maison des Polonais’ (‘The House of the Poles’). The ground floor housed the offices, the upper floor contained the editorial team’s bedrooms, while a separate pavilion provided accommodation for guests. The guest rooms were rarely empty. Giedroyc explained that ‘Kultura’ functioned because it was sustained by a small, close-knit team whose members worked, lived, cleaned and cooked together. Zygmunt Hertz described this community as a secular monastic order or a kibbutz.
The guests were a varied lot. Hłasko, Kisielewski and Andrzejewski were among the most troublesome residents. After his defection to the West, Miłosz engaged in fierce arguments with his hosts and even went so far as to call them fascists. He later apologised for his behaviour in a letter. The Sabbat family, with their four children, slept side by side in sleeping bags. The team welcomed visitors, offered comfort in moments of doubt, protected them from secret police agents and, in the case of Andrzej Stawar, even arranged his funeral. Jeleński, Lebenstein, the Miłoszes, the Hellers, the Kołakowskis and priests from the nearby parish would drop in for the traditional Polish Christmas Eve supper.
Another member of the household was Black, the dog who served as the editorial team’s mascot. Czapski drew a portrait of him to mark the journal’s fifteenth anniversary. Zofia Hertz sent him postcards from her travels, addressed to ‘Monsieur Black’, and in one from 1959 jokingly warned him not to take to the bottle while his owners were away. Miłosz even drew a ‘portrait of Black’s soul’.
The Readers
The final, but indispensable, part of this community was its readership. When the editorial team had to vacate their rented villa in 1954, donations from readers made it possible to purchase the house on avenue de Poissy and pay off the debt within two years. Further contributions established the ‘Kultura’ Fund, which provided assistance to émigrés in need and, later, supported underground publishing in Poland. Between 1977 and 1990, the clandestine publishing movement reprinted more than a thousand of the Institute’s publications. Giedroyc also sent tens of thousands of books and periodicals, as well as printing equipment, to Poland.
Avenue de Poissy 91
Towards the end of her life, Zofia Hertz remarked that so much had once gone on in the house, and now it was empty. For many years, death had seemed to pass the house on avenue de Poissy by. Then, one by one, its inhabitants passed away: Zygmunt Hertz, Maria and Józef Czapski, Jerzy Giedroyc, Zofia Hertz and, finally, Henryk Giedroyc. They left behind a body of work that has earned the Literary Institute its reputation as the most important Polish publishing institution of the second half of the twentieth century. Its archives were inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.
This essay draws on the rich historical and archival materials made available through the ‘Kultura’ Paris website, which preserve the stories, voices and legacy of the Maisons-Laffitte community.