The Lion of Poland
The Story of Paderewski
Ruth Fox Hume
9781465628190
301 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
All evening long the adults in the house had been conversing in agitated whispers, behind closed doors. Now they were asleep—or pretending to be asleep, as he was pretending. The house was unnaturally silent. Suddenly the boy sat up in bed, clutching the blanket around his shoulders and listening with every ounce of concentration he could muster. His ears were unusually sensitive. Surely he had heard a muted laugh in the blackness outside. Yes—and there was another, and then the sound of low-pitched voices, no longer concealed, and finally footsteps running to the house. He leaped out of bed and flung open the window. The house was surrounded by Cossacks. Their leader was pounding on the door. “Jan Paderewski!” he was shouting. “Open it up before we break it down!” The boy could hear the heavy bolt being drawn. By the time he had crept fearfully downstairs it was all over. His father was gone. His sister and his aunt were sobbing in each other’s arms. He ran into the courtyard. “Where is my father? What have you done with him?” he asked one of the soldiers. When the man ignored him, he tugged at his coat and cried, “Where are you taking my father?” A stinging pain shot along his cheek as the Russian whirled and struck at him with a knout. “Let go of my coat, you Polish brat!” the man half snarled and half laughed. He called out some orders to his men, and the troop clattered down the road and out of the boy’s sight. The boy raised his hand to his smarting cheek. The Cossack rope had ripped across it like a firebrand, and the fire had burned itself into his soul. Young Ignace Paderewski was only four years old on the night the Russian soldiers took his father to prison for a year. Jan Paderewski had been accused of plotting the overthrow of his Imperial Majesty, Alexander II, Emperor of all the Russias. What Jan Paderewski had actually done was to allow firearms to be stored in his basement until such time as they might be useful. But besides getting him arrested and imprisoned, they had actually accomplished very little. The revolution of 1863 and 1864 was just one more in a succession of uprisings by which the Polish people struck back at their oppressors. None of these unhappy revolts had ever won back the country’s lost freedom, but they kept alive the fierce pride of the Polish people, a pride that the rulers of three nations had tried for nearly a hundred years to extinguish.
