God showed the way to hearth and home

On April 10, 2010, Polish President Lech Kaczynski and the Polish delegation traveling with him died in an air crash near Smolensk (Russia). Among the victims was Anna Walentynowicz, the legendary Ukrainian Polish founding mother of Solidarnosc (Solidarity), Poland’s independent self-governing trade union. The Day carried the article “They called her ‘Justice’” (No. 31, Tuesday 8, June 2010) about this heroic ethnic Ukrainian woman. This time I will trace Walentynowicz’s Ukrainian roots.

Anna’s maternal family originates from what is now Cherkasy oblast. After the destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775, part of the Cossacks headed beyond the Danube and ended up under the Turkish sultan. Legend has it that those Sich Cossacks had handfuls of Ukrainian earth wrapped up in cloth and hidden in their choboty boots before they swore allegiance to the sultan; that they added to the formula, “We swear to serve faithfully the ruler of the land upon which we are standing.” That way they secretly kept faithful to their homeland.

A young Cossack of the Pashkovets palanka [Zaporozhian Sich’s administrative unit] didn’t travel beyond the Danube, for reasons best known to himself. It is anyone’s guess whether he returned to his home village (probably located in the vicinity of what is now Tsvitkove, an urban-type populated area in Horodyshche raion, Cherkasy oblast) or to Tsvitne, originally a Kyivan Rus’ settlement, currently in Oleksandrivka raion, Kirovohrad oblast). He might have found a sweetheart in that village and married her. Be that as it may, the Cossack was given the name Pashkovets, and this name opens Anna’s family tree.

The young family begot male twins. Well into their teens, the boys were hired as coachmen by a local landowner who appreciated their physique. The boys were strong and smart, and coachmen played a major role as bodyguards at the time because the landed gentry didn’t trust their serfs. Most importantly, both came from a Cossack family.

Their employer turned out a nasty man, hard to please, always ready with curses and fists for anyone under his command who seemed to displease him. Once occasion, Sava, the older twin brother, had had enough. Driving the coach with the gentleman in it through a forest, he stopped and went about whipping him. The man begged for mercy and promised to treat the twin brothers well. Remarkably, he would keep his promise.

In fact, he showed a more respectable attitude to the twins after they had neutralized a highwayman attack. From then on he would never part with the twins. He took them to his estate in what is now Polivtsi, a village in Hoshcha raion, Rivne oblast.

Sava eventually met his sweetheart in Korostiatyn, a neighboring village. They got married. The landowner rewarded him for his faithful service with a morgen of land [German land measurement unit ranging from 0.5 to 2.5 acres] at the village of Voroniv. The young couple settled there.

The village of Korostiatyn was once hearth and home for Severyn Nalyvaiko’s descendants. Back in 1820, a family in that village begot the father of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the trailblazer of Russia’s space exploration (the man would claim Cossack parentage, namely that of the rebellious Cossack leader, Severyn Nalyvaiko).

Sava Pashkovets’ wife must have come from a Cossack family, a branch of the Nalyvaiko family tree, considering that she told her son Fedir stories about this Cossack leader. In 1869, Fedir Pashkovets’s first son was born and was baptized under the name of Severyn. He would become Anna Walentynowicz’s grandfather. He would tell his children and grandchildren that he was named after their heroic ancestor.

Severyn Pashkovets never went to school because his parents couldn’t afford the tuition. Besides, he had to help with the house chores. Yet the boy’s thirst for knowledge was overwhelming. He learned the meaning of some letters of the Cyrillic alphabet from his neighbor, a man by the name of Hordii who had served in the Russian Navy and could read and write, even if only a little. Severyn used this knowledge to master the rest of the alphabet, reading the captions of the icons hung on the walls at home, guessing the meaning of words, looking at the sacred images. He would spot a sheet of paper with printed text flying across the field, carried by the wind. He would chase it, sprinting for miles, grab it and read it eagerly, because printed matter was a rare occurrence in the countryside at the time. That was how Severyn mastered the [Russian] grammar, by using his talent, so much so that his fellow villagers would ask him for help when they had to draw up a petition or make a statement. Severyn would later help open a [grade] school in the village of Voroniv, where children from that and neighboring villages could attend classes if their parents paid more than reasonable tuition.

People can develop features inherited from kin several generations apart. Assuming that the Pashkovets family has such linkage with Severyn Nalyvaiko, the latter’s spirit was very much alive in every public effort made by Anna Walentynowicz (nee Hanna Liubchyk). Like her possible forefather Severyn (who shook the very foundation of the Polish Kingdom), Anna actually worked to destroy Soviet Poland and reinstate the true national Rzeczpospolita.

Hanna Liubchyk was born August 15, 1929, in Sinne (currently Sadove), a village not far from Korostiatyn. Sinne [originally known as Senno] had been founded amidst the vast hay meadows on both sides of Zolenka, a spring-fed shallow yet fast and full tributary of the river Horyn.

Senno is first mentioned in the 1455 Dictionary of the Old Ukrainian Language, as an area where the Volyn Polissia vernacular was manifest. The village was surrounded by a thick forest and marshlands. (A scenic surrounding where the author was born.)

Miraculously, the area was spared the Golden Horde’s onslaught, but in 1596 a major battle between Nalyvaiko’s men and elite forces of the Polish king, Sigismund III Vasa, took place near the village, in the vicinity of marshlands known as Baranytsia and Marianivka. After the battle, the Cossacks buried their fallen comrades in arms on a hill near Korostiatyn, building high mounds.

Hanna’s mother, Pryska Severyn Liubchyk (nee Pryska Pashkovets), died in September 1939, leaving behind six children. Hanna was the third child, after her half-brother Ivan (by her mother’s first husband Oleksii Sushchuk) and her sister Olha. Being a large family, the Liubchyks suffered a lot during the [World War I], so Hanna, then 12, was hired as a chambermaid by Muntyk Telesnicki, a Pole who worked for the Babyn Sugar Refinery. Hanna worked hard, without pay but with free meals.

What happened next to Hanna/Anna Walentynowicz and how she became a Solidarnosc leader can be found in the abovementioned article “They called her ‘Justice’” by Mykola Pashkovets and Yaroslav Plias.

Anna Walentynowicz didn’t dare establish contact with her relatives in Ukraine, fearing this would cause them harm, considering her opposition activities in Poland. Yet the Pashkovets family did suffer. Anna’s uncle Dmytro (my father) was sentenced to ten years in the camps and his wife and their five small children were exiled to Siberia.

Anna Walentynowicz was arrested three times, and each time her family contacts in Ukraine were checked out.

In 1981, as Solidarnosc was in the making, her father Nazar was summoned to a KGB station. Instead of explaining the reason for his being there, the man was posed one question:

“Where is your daughter Hanna at the moment?”

The old man replied: “She must be at school. Why?” The investigating officer must have figured out that Nazar had two daughters, both named Hanna (with the older one missing, presumed dead, with mass celebrated in church), so his next question was:

“Didn’t you have another daughter by the same name?”

“You mean that one? She’s gone. That Polish gentleman took her with him.”

The KGB officer was insistent: “Does this mean you know nothing about her at the moment?” To which Nazar replied:

“That’s right, but perhaps you know something about her?”

“Nope, sorry. Thanks for your time and cooperation.”

Nazar wasn’t destined to know that Hanna/Anna, one of his eleven children, was very much alive.

Decades later, in 1996, Anna Walentynowicz bent in front of her father’s grave, saying tearfully, “Daddy, please forgive me for not returning and finding you earlier. There were reasons. We were destined to part forever. Thank you for trying to find me. I’m now happy to have met my close and dear ones. God helped me find the way to hearth and home, and have my cherished dream come true, even if 50 years later.”

The top-level Polish delegation was on board a Tupolev TU-154M plane to pay tribute to the victims of the NKVD-engineered Katyn Massacre (April-May 1940) when the plane crashed.

Anna Walentynowicz’s body was less damaged by fire, so it was easily identified by her next of kin. In fact, there was a mystic touch to her date of death — perhaps a warning sign sent down by the Lord. Severyn Nalyvaiko died on April 11, 1597, on the first Friday preceding Easter. Anna Walentynowicz on April 10, 2010, on the morning of the first Saturday after Easter. With all those astronomic deviations over the past 400 years, it seems possible to assume that Severyn Nalyvaiko and Anna Walentynowicz died at the same orbital point, in terms of cosmic dimension and religious conception. She told her relatives that she remembered childhood dreams, before she was brought to Poland, in which she saw an icon portraying a saint. Many years later, she saw this icon in a Gdansk cathedral. It was Saint Patrick. Wasn’t this the first divine warning for a humble soul chosen for making a great achievement? Then what about the second warning? What was it about?

She was 80 and ailing. She had discovered her relatives in Rivne oblast after 53 years, but now she couldn’t visit them as frequently as she wished for reasons of health.

Anna Walentynowicz’s next of kin includes her son Janusz (born 1952), grandson Peter (named for St. Patrick), and granddaughter Kasia. Before boarding the doomed flight, she called the author, saying she would be waiting for him in Gdansk, and that she had lots of things to discuss with him. Our meeting was to take place in late April 2010, but then destiny stepped in.

Margarita Szymczyk-Karnasewicz writes from Cracow: “All who died in that presidential plane crash have paid the highest price for the memory of Katyn. The world wasn’t supposed to learn about Katyn, ever. President Lech Kaczynski of the Republic of Poland was supposed to declare: ‘The families of the victims have been denied the right to publicly mourn their deaths and perpetuate their memory. All evidence of the crimes is hidden under layers of earth, and falsehood was supposed to erase this from human memory.’ He would have also thanked the relatives of the victims, all those others who had kept and protected this memory, handing it down to Polish generations, doing so both in communist and free and independent Poland. He would have expressed gratitude to all and especially to the Katyn families.

“He never did. He died in an air crash. A wreath was discovered in the debris, the one the President meant to place at the Katyn memorial. Russians started visiting the place of the wreath, walking through the Katyn Memorial’s gate. Thousands of Russians from Smolensk and other cities. Most of them knew nothing about Katyn. We in Poland will always remember the Katyn Massacre that took place 70 years ago, as well as the tragedy that occurred on April 10, 2010.”

Based on Mykola PASHKOVETS and Yaroslav PLIAS’S book Severyn Nalyvaiko and Princes Ostrozky