Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie (1(37).2012/2013)

314

Reminiscences

Maria
Maria Skubiszewska was a beautiful woman. Her noble appearance seemed to reflect the
inner principles guiding her life. To her younger colleagues, she was an older sister. Her at-
titude was stimulating and controlling, which at times produced resistance from young peo-
ple. But she was supportive, primarily from concern for their growth, something that was
often combined with encouragement to work intensively on a doctorate, to build up their
knowledge. Her interest in introducing her protégés to professional secrets did not consist
only of encouragement but translated into practical assistance for many of them, including
this author, to find professional trips to London or Rome.
Maria and Piotr loved the sea. Because of their friendship with Father Janusz Pasierb,
they were able to spend an annual holiday in the mediaeval convent of the Benedictine Sisters
in Żarnowiec in Pomerania. The convent attracted the humanities elites from Krakow and
Warsaw. In her essay “Wakacje w Żarnowcu” published in a volume commemorating Father
Pasierb, Maria wrote beautifully about the unforgettable atmosphere of those sojourns and
the people who created it.14
It would be impossible to pass over Maria’s social and patriotic sensibility. When Solidarity
was born in Poland in August 1980, she immediately became involved in this great movement.
She led the effort to create an institutional committee at the National Museum in Warsaw,
the first in a museum. Already on 2 September 1980 the staff elected her as their delegate to
the National Commission in Gdańsk, and on the very next day she registered the National
Museum in Warsaw Solidarity committee. She resigned from this position on 15 January 1981,
but for some time continued to assist her successor, Professor Włodzimierz Godlewski, and
organized Lech Wałęsa’s visit to the museum on 28 February 1981.
Maria remained closely tied spiritually to Poland during her years in France. In Poitiers,
their new university milieu, where Professor Skubiszewski lectured, Maria and Piotr encour-
aged friends and acquaintances to offer gestures of solidarity and material assistance to the
Poles. Her colleagues at the National Museum began to receive mailings from Frenchmen
they did not know. The memory of touchingly regular parcels containing coffee, tea and other
rarities in those horrible times of political and economic scarcity lives on.
When Maria Skubiszewska retired in June 1994, she said good-bye to her co-workers in
high style, inviting them all, with friends or relatives they wanted to bring along, for a weekend
at her seaside home in Dębki. After the Benedictine Sisters had stopped receiving guests in
their cloister in Żarnowiec and after she and Piotr returned from France, they built a house
on the Baltic, which became their beloved refuge.
Maria died in Warsaw on 13 April 2011.
Hanna Benesz

14 Maria Skubiszewska, “Wakacje w Żarnowcu” [Holidays in Żarnowiec], in Wstępujący na wzgórze.
Wspomnienia o ks. Januszu St. Pasierbie [Walking up the mountain. Reminiscences about Father Janusz S. Pasierb],
Maria Wilczek, ed. (Pelplin: Wydawnictwo Bernardinum, 1996), pp. 110-7.