Bishop Gawlina’s Journey to Russia in the Light of His Chaplain, Fr. Marcin Chrostowski’s Account
Abstract
The aim of this article was to present a hitherto unpublished account of the journey from Great Britain to the USSR undertaken by Military Ordinariate Józef Gawlina. The account was written by a Dominican father, Marcin Chrostowski, who was Bishop Gawlina’s chaplain and accompanied him throughout the journey. The edited text is kept in Fr. Chrostowski’s legacy in the collection of the Archives of the Polish Dominican Province in Krakow. Some minor fragments of it have been published in Fr. Marcin Chrostowski’s biography, but without a critical commentary. The text of the following edition includes an excerpt from the account of the journey from Britain to Tehran; the rest, showing the subsequent stages of the journey, has been exhaustively discussed in the literature and appeared in print, in publications by Fr. Chrostowski, which have recently been reprinted and provided with an insightful commentary by Jerzy Myszor. The description by Fr. Marcin Chrostowski provides an insight into the unknown details of the route itself, the people with whom the ordinate encountered, and – understandably – the conditions in which the two clergymen had to travel. We get a description of a journey by sea on the famous Polish transatlantic ships, Sobieski and Batory. And so it ran from Greenock to Gibraltar, then to Takoradi, by air through Nigeria, French Cameroon, Belgian Congo, Sudan and on to Cairo. From there it was only through Palestine, Jordan and Iraq that the travelers reached Tehran. The description by Fr. Chrostowski brings a lot of new information. It is also much more personal, and it is not devoid of emotional elements or even words of admiration directed at Bishop Gawlina. The Dominican devoted a lot of attention not only to showing the contacts with Polish officers they met along the way, but also did not hide his admiration for the changing and surprising nature he observed from the windows of the plane, traveling over Africa.
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