“A life in place of my son”. Celina Iwaszkiewicz’s farewell letters

Abstract

The article presents the biography of Celina Iwaszkiewicz, a woman whose death was immortalised by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz in a brief digression in Podróże do Polski [Travels to Poland]. The events of 1944 have been reconstructed on the basis of Celina’s surviving suicide notes, family correspondence with Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, and other archival documents. With the permission of Jolanta Iwaszkiewicz, the publication of her great-grandmother’s farewell letters forms an integral part of the article. This exceptionally intimate form of personal document is a record of life during the occupation of Lublin and the voice of a representative of the 19^th–20^th-century borderland intelligentsia.