XIV NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS
refused to marry a German prince, and then, in order to avoid a
tribal war, drowned herself in the Vistula. A popular patriotic
tale in the late nineteenth century.
Muzeum Narodowe (Warsaw).Plate V Kazimierz Sichulski (1879-1942), painter and caricaturist from
Lwow. This sketch of Jozef Pitsudski places the Marshal in the
company of Stanczyk, the court jester of Sigismund I, and of Piotr
Skarga, the confessor of Sigismund III—both of them severe crit-
ics of their compatriots.
Biblioteka Narodowa (Warsaw).
Plate VI L. Wintorowski, Taczanki naprzod! (Gun-carriages ahead!)—an
incident from the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 where a detachment
of the 13th Krechowiecki Uhlans cuts down a Bolshevik artillery
unit. (The tachanka was a horse-drawn heavy machine-gun bat-
tery.)
Sikorski Museum (London).
E. Mesjasz, Bitwa pod Mokrq (The Battle of River Mokra)—an
eye-witness reconstruction of a fierce frontier action near
Czestochowa on 1 September 1939 when the dismounted
Volhynian Cavalry Brigade repulsed the 4th Panzer Division with
the loss of twenty tanks.
Sikorski Museum (London).
Plate VII W. Siwek, Entry to Block II, Auschwitz, 1943. A naive sketch of
the infamous punishment and experimentation block of the Nazi
death-camp at Auschwitz (Oswiecim).
Sikorski Museum (London).
Long Live the Government of National Unity—a photograph
despite appearances. Bydgoszcz, June 1945—a political rally in
support of the coalition government (TRJN). Platform speakers
in Polish uniforms surrounded by the flags of Great Britain and
the USA, and by portraits of Mikolajczyk and Bierut.
Plate VIII Aleksander Kobzdej (1920-72), Podaj cegle (Pass the brick,
1952). An evocation of postwar Reconstruction in the obligatory
Socialist Realist style of the early 1950s.
Muzeum Narodowe (Warsaw).
Vlastimil Hofman (1881-1970), symbolist painter associated with
the Academy of Fine Arts (ASP) in Cracow. Spowiedz (Confession)
contrasts the simple devotion of the Polish peasant in the timeless
countryside with the ambivalent attitudes of the Church.
Muzeum Narodowe (Warsaw).