Countess Karolina Lanckorońska
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Her Illustrious Highness Countess Karolina Maria Adelajda Franciszka Ksawera Małgorzata Edina Lanckorońska (b. August 11, 1898 in Gars am Kamp, Lower Austria - August 25, 2002 in Rome), was a historian and art historian.
She was the daughter of Count Karol Lanckoroński, a Polish nobleman from a Galician family and his 3rd wife Her Serene Highness Princess Margaret von Lichnovsky, daughter of Karl Max, Fürst von Lichnowsky. She was raised and went to university in Vienna (the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of which much of Galicia was then a part), living at her family's city-palace, the Palais Lanckoronski.
After the independence of Poland in 1918, she later went to the University of Lwow to teach. After the invasion of Lwow by the Red Army and of the rest of Poland by the Nazis in 1939, she witnessed first hand the terror and atrocities committed by the Soviets and by the Nazis, which she described later in her War Memoirs. She was active during the war in the Polish resistance and was arrested, interrogated, tortured, tried and sentenced to death. Through her family connections she was not executed but was sent to the notorious Ravensbruck concentration camp for women. She somehow survived and immediately after her release in 1945, wrote her war memoirs. She left Poland after the end of the war and lived in Fribourg, Switzerland and later in Rome until her death..
A patriot all her life, she bequeathed the enormous art collection of her family to her beloved Poland only after her homeland became free from communism and Soviet occupation. The so-called Lanckoronski Collection can for the most part be seen today in the Royal Castle, Warsaw and the Wawel Royal Castle in Kraków.
Karolina Lanckorońska died in 2002 aged 104. She did not want her war memoirs published during her lifetime. After much persuasion, she consented to publication in Poland, by ZNAK Publishing of Kraków, in 2001, just one year before her death. The book, whose English version is entitled "Those who trespass against us: One woman's war against the Nazis", sold more than 50,000 copies in the Polish original and is now selling well in English. The US version to be published by Da Capo Press (Perseus Publishing Group) will appear in hardback in Spring 2007, with the new title "Michelangelo in Ravensbruck". It is a fascinating account by a remarkable woman.
In 1967, she established and funded the Lanckoroński Foundation which promotes and supports Polish culture, awarding over PLN 1 million per annum (USD 330,000) for scholarships, publication of learned books, research into Polish archives in countries such as Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, and similar projects.
[edit] Literature
- Lanckorońska, Karolina. Those Who Trespass Against Us: One Woman's War Against the Nazis. Pimlico. 2006. ISBN 1844134172
- Lanckorońska, Karolina. Mut ist angeboren. Boehlau Verlag, Vienna. 2003. ISBN 3205770862
- Lanckoronska Karolina, "Wspomnienia Wojenne", Znak Publishing, Kraków, Poland, ISBN 8324000771
