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“A raging question in Poland has become, ‘How long will it take them to communize us completely?’
“To my mind, however, the question is badly framed. I am convinced that human beings cannot be converted to communism if that conversion is attempted while the country concerned is under Communist rule. Under Communist dictatorship the majority become slaves—but men born in freedom, though they may be coerced, can never be convinced. Communism is an evil which is embraced only by fools and idealists not under the actual heel of such rule.
“The question should be phrased: How long can a nation under Communist rule survive the erosion of its soul?”—Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, Preface
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Stanisław Mikołajczyk (18 July 1901 - 13 December 1966) was a Polish politician. He was Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile during World War II, and later Deputy Prime Minister in post-war Poland until 1947.
Born in Westphalia in western Germany, he returned to his ancestral Poznań in western Poland at age 10. As a teenager he worked in a sugar beet refinery and was active in Polish patriotic organisations. He was 18 when Poland recovered its independence, and in 1920 joined the Polish Army and fought in the Polish-Soviet War. He was discharged after being wounded near Warsaw and returned to inherit his father’s farm near Poznań.
In the 1920s he became active in the Polish People’s Party “Piast” (PSL) and was eventually elected to the Sejm (the Polish Parliament) in 1929. In 1935 he became Vice-Chairman of the executive committee of the PSL, and party President in 1937. He was an active opponent of the authoritarian regime established in Poland after the death of Józef Piłsudski in 1935.
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, he was a private in the Polish army, serving in the defence of Warsaw. After Warsaw’s fall he escaped to Hungary, where he was interned, but soon escaped and made his way to France, where he joined the Polish government in exile as deputy Chairman of the Polish National Council.
In 1941 he was appointed Minister of the Interior and became Prime Minister Sikorski’s Deputy Prime Minister. When Sikorski was killed in a plane crash in July 1943, Mikołajczyk was appointed as his successor and immediately set about reviving the PSL, which soon became by far the largest party in Poland. He resigned in 1944 and returned to Poland to become Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Agriculture, but resigned in 1947 in protest over the electoral fraud by the Communist Party and fled the country.
He emigrated to the United States, where he died in 1966 aged 65.
