“He was a level-headed, calm man. Always. He had never performed any impetuous gestures in his life, so the shock was all the greater. But the phone call from my brother was clear, so I had to reconcile myself to it,” said the brother of Piotr Szczęsny, who immolated himself in front of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw in October. Family and friends recall that he worried about the situation in Poland, but he was never vehement. He had planned his act for a long time.
According to witnesses of the event, a scream was heard, then people ran in the direction of the Palace of Culture and Science, calling for help. “I think that I was witness to the great tragedy of a man who felt he could not attract attention in any other way,” said one of the women who saw Szczęsny immolate himself.
Strange SMS’s
“Dad wrote strange SMS’s that day, to me as well as my brother,” Szczęsny’s daughter recalled. “In an SMS he wrote that I should arrange to come back home together with mom, which puzzled me, because I don’t live with my parents anymore. I didn’t know why I was supposed to come back home with her at all. I wrote back, ‘Why should I come back? Has something happened?’, but I didn’t get a reply. So I called my brother. And it turned out that he had received an SMS to come back home right after work, and that everything is explained in a folder,” she added.
Professor Piotr Petelenz, a colleague of Szczęsny at the Department of Theoretical Chemistry, Jagiellonian University, where Szczęsny began his doctoral studies, admits he was surprised that it was Szczęsny, of all people, who set himself on fire. “The first stereotype that comes to mind in such circumstances is that it must have been somebody mentally unstable. Piotr was not mentally unstable. He was a person, I’d say, one of those with his feet most firmly planted on the ground and the least susceptible to stress and his own moods,” Petelenz said.
Likewise according to Piotr Szczęsny’s brother, Artur. “I thought that Piotr would be the last person who could do such a thing,” he said. “He was a level-headed, calm man. Always warm, ready to help. He had never performed any impetuous gestures in his life, so the shock was all the greater. But the phone call from my brother was clear, so I had to reconcile myself to it,” he added.
“I’m wondering whether I overlooked something,” said Szczęsny’s friend Jacek Królikowski, who was also shocked by the fact that it was Szczęsny who did it. “Did I miss something? Is my level of concern inadequate?” he mused.
Half a year of planning
Piotr Szczęsny wrote a manifesto, copies of which he scattered before he lit himself on fire. It contained 15 points explaining why he was protesting against the Polish government. It took him over half a year to write it.
“You can’t say that something suddenly did him in,” Artur Szczęsny said. “He simply behaved as he did before. Well, perhaps he was starting to take fewer and fewer work assignments, but I would attribute that, too, to the fact that he was very responsible, that he knew that if he wasn’t going to do something, he wouldn’t accept it. And he knew that he was no longer going to do some things, because he had planned his departure beforehand,” his brother explained.
“He thought over what he did. Calmly, for many months. He had everything planned like clockwork, how it would happen. It was not the sudden act of a madman who suddenly got some idea,” his daughter added.
According to Królikowski, Piotr could have been “holding some kind of dialogue” with himself. “He wanted to see if [the political situation] really was as grave as it seemed to him. That’s how I read it, the time he devoted to considering the matter,” Królikowski said.
Anna Hejda, another friend of Szczęsny, recalls him as a multi-faceted person. He had a wife and two kids, several years ago he built a house outside Kraków. “He didn’t speak up much, but when he did speak up in some matter, he often asked questions and usually they were questions that genuinely enabled us to consider what we were doing, our personal motives, and to evaluate the situation well,” Szczęsny’s daughter recalled. “He always asked about the sense. He always asked why do something, why say something to someone. He persuaded you to reflect and he also very often persuaded you to think things over,” Hejda said.
"I love freedom above all"
Szczęsny obtained a master’s degree from the Department of Theoretical Chemistry, Jagiellonian University. He broke off his doctoral studies when he started a family and had to begin supporting them. “Striking intelligence and concomitant erudition. An intellect of that class is rare and could have been expected to accomplish a great deal. I am not a member of Mensa, but he was,” Professor Petelenz recalled.
In his farewell letter, Szczęsny wrote that "I love freedom above all". His brother explained that “Freedom was a holy word for us back in those days [the communist era]. After all, we knew the system in which Poland’s ostensible independence functioned. People who loved freedom were unable to feel at home in that state. At the moment martial law was imposed [in 1981], he got involved in opposition activities on the level of an ordinary citizen. He went to demonstrations, handed out leaflets. Previously, he had been an activist in the Independent Association of Students,” Piotr’s brother said.
When Poland became a free country, Piotr Szczęsny conducted training courses, travelled around the entire country and taught people what rights they had received after the transformation and how they could exercise them. “He tried to make people aware that exerting influence takes effort and that it’s also responsibility,” Hejda said.
What’s happening in Poland sickened him
According to Szczęsny’s family, he found it harder and harder to watch TV over the last two years. “It made him sick, but not along the lines that he acted aggressively or impulsively at the dinner table. It was simply evident that his frame of mind was getting worse, that he was gloomier, that he was speaking less. Sometimes he was physically sickened by it. It was evident that the situation had a very bad effect on him, and it was clear to all of us. But no one suspected that he would be able to go so far and do such a thing. And, on top of that, considering what a violent act was committed by such a gentle man,” Szczęsny’s daughter said.
Anna Hejda said that Szczęsny had not participated in demonstrations, had not gone to marches.“Perhaps he didn’t believe that it would do anything,” she said.
Artur Szczęsny said that his brother bid him farewell before his death, but the letter did not reach him until several days afterwards. He didn’t want to say what Piotr wrote, because it was too personal. “In any case, it was a moving letter, and I wanted to hug him so much while he was still alive,” he said.
“Now, when I read some vile thing written about him, I remember a wonderful saying of his, which he told me to call attention to what I was saying at the moment… ‘What John says about Peter speaks about John, not Peter’,” Hejda recalled. “He also left us a message and we absolutely must consider what we will do with this message. What we will do with everything he wrote and what each of us will do, even the smallest thing, sometimes ordinary and unspectacular, but which will fulfill his testament, showing that we have woke up and understand freedom. For him, it was worth his life,” she said.
Źródło: tvn24.pl/tłumaczenie Intertext.com.pl
Źródło zdjęcia głównego: tvn24