The Polish story of survival in Buffalo after Hitler and Stalin
(Bruce Fisher – Artvoice) Deep in a dark recess in Buffalo’s City Hall is a terrifying piece of art made by the same Polish exile who created the Calasanctius mural. Jozef Slawinski’s hammered-copper bas-relief commemorates the place, the event, the process, the unimaginable suffering that the Poles know as Katyn.
Everybody has heard of Picasso’s Guernica, that terrifying huge canvas at a Madrid museum that portrays the German bombing of a Basque village during the Spanish Civil War. Everybody in the world should know of Slawinski’s abstract piece on the Soviet massacre of more than 16,000 Polish officers, elected officials, nobles, and intellectuals in the Katyn forest during World War II.
Had it not been for the late mayor Jimmy Griffin making a political gesture to Buffalo Poles, then not even Buffalo would know about Katyn.
It’s as if history has been privatized. Just as Slawinski’s Katyn is hidden away in an alcove few visit, the stories of a generation of as many as 20,000 immigrants to Buffalo have never become known beyond the whispered conversations of survivors. On the border between Buffalo and Cheektowaga, there are hundreds of stone monuments to members of the Polish army-in-exile who came to America, specifically to Buffalo, and who lived out the remainder of their lives in the hope of returning to their homeland, but while here created a complex legacy that literally reshaped our collective landscape.
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