Triumph through adversity Frankenstein Summative Evaluation 2.2 - Jan Czajkowski

 

Triumph through adversity: Personal Reflections spurred by Frankenstein Novel 

    I want to argue that there are two aspects related to the theme of triumph through adversity present in "Frankenstein." The first deals with the part of Dr. Frankenstein's life until the moment of creation of his Monster. The second is related to the story of the Creature itself.

    

PART I: JAN HANASZ

    Let us focus on Victor Frankenstein's story first. As many scientists do, he made many sacrifices in his single-minded pursuit of creating life. For a fleeting moment when his Creature moves and exhibits signs of life, he triumphs.

    The adversities that Dr. Frankenstein encountered and the sacrifices he had to make can be related to the sacrifices made by many modern scientists in pursuit of their research. It brings to mind the life of my granduncle Jan Hanasz, so much so that I would like to exploit these parallels later. As a dedicated scientist, Victor gives up on healthy social interactions and the simple joys of life. "Two years passed in this manner, during which I paid no visit to Geneva, but was engaged, heart and soul, in the pursuit of some discoveries which I hoped to make." (Page 50)

    Like many scientists before and after him, he postponed his marriage. It is evidenced by Elizabeth's letter in Chapter 22, which revealed that the union between her and Victor had been long delayed. Their marriage was supposed to happen years ago, but Frankenstein decided to dedicate his life to science. Only after the murders of Victor's loved ones does Elizabeth reveal her feelings towards the protagonist and they quickly get married. Finally, even if it is not clearly stated in the novel, one can deduce that Dr. Frankenstein suffered financially because of his pursuits. 

    The divide between naturalist and medical doctors did not exist at the time, so having a doctorate in natural philosophy would imply being versed in medicine and the natural sciences. Since we do not see any evidence of Frankenstein practicing his trade, we must assume that he compromised his finances by dedicating all of his attention to research and studies.  To some degree, the above resembles the story of my granduncle Jan Hanasz. 

    Astronomer by trade, Professor Hanasz became somewhat of a legend to my family. In 1980, after many years of hard work, he received his habilitation, and the door to independent research opened widely for him. Unfortunately, within the next two years, he suffered a couple of personal misfortunes: his father in law died in a car accident in which my granduncle was a driver. Even though he was not legally responsible for his death, he felt terrible guilt and went through a bout of depression. Shortly after, his wife suffered a stroke and was hospitalized for more than half a year. 

    In 1982, after the delegalization of the Solidarity trade union of which he was an active member, he started his work as an underground movement leader responsible for, among other things: editing and printing the local illegal solidarity bulletin, organizing and leading a team of radio-electronic specialists. They designed and developed a unique apparatus capable of hacking TV signals of the official state television to broadcast Solidarity messages. For this work, he was arrested, tried, and imprisoned. He spent 15 months in jail. After his release, he continued his underground activities until the official end of the oppressive regime in 1989. 

    Unlike many of his underground Solidarity colleagues, he was not interested in profiting off his legendary past. He went back to being a scientist and continued to be active in research, studying the earth's magnetosphere using satellite probes until 2011 when he retired.

Jan Hanasz

Prison in which Jan Hanasz was jailed

PART II: HELENA HANASZ

    Let us go back to the novel for a moment. Through all of the adversities and cruelties it experiences, Frankenstein's monster is the ultimate survivor. His ability to carry on despite the loneliness,  the loveless childhood, and the rejection of his "father" is awe-inspiring. The creature triumphs by surviving it all and avoiding its own destruction. Some of the passages related to this are genuinely heartbreaking. Through no fault of his own, the Creature looks repulsive. He is painfully aware of this, as well as of the effect it has on people. "I expected this reception," said the daemon. "All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things!" he laments at some point. 

    "There was none among the myriads of men who existed who would pity or assist me, and should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No: from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me, and sent me forth to this insupportable misery." proclaims the Creature in a bout of justified self-pity mixed with anger towards his creator and humanity that rejected him. 

    The Creature survives, which is the only triumph it is allowed in the cold, cruel world of man. When reflecting on the hardships faced by the Frankenstein's Monster, in its attempt to survive, I couldn't help but draw a parallel with the life of my great grandmother Helena Hanasz. She has been a witness to and a surviving victim of modern history's greatest calamities. As she recalled, it all started with the panic caused by Halley's comet in Russia in 1910. In their religious fervour, driven by fear, people would give away their estates to the church and the charities expecting the world's end. In a sense, the world as they knew it did end.  The first World War and the Bolshevik Coup (October Revolution) in 1917 and consecutive Civil War destroyed old Russia.

    My great-grandmother survived this and found a new life and happiness in a resurrected Poland. But the cruel history of this part of the world would not let her enjoy it for too long. She had a first-hand experience of Germany's attack on Poland in 1939, the destruction of the Polish state, and life in occupied Warsaw. She was an eye- witness of German crimes occurring on the capital's streets every day. She witnessed the short-lived Ghetto Uprising. Many years after the war, she continued to recall the screaming victims plunging to their deaths from flaming buildings in April of 1943. She lived through the full ordeal of the Polish Warsaw Uprising resulting in the expulsion of all inhabitants and the city's destruction. After the war, she gained first-hand knowledge of the communist terror apparatus when her husband, Dr. Boleslaw Hanasz, was falsely accused of petty crime and corruption. He was consequently dismissed from his post and suffered a debilitating stroke. She has lost all of her possessions and money three times in her life and was cast down from being a wealthy and popular socialite in metropolitan Poznan to a poor housewife nursing her paralyzed husband without any means to live. Nothing could break her spirit.

Despite their coming from a now undesirable class (Inteligencja), she and her family survived the early years of the communist regime (so-called "Stalinist times") with all of her children receiving a postgraduate university education. 

She was a mother of a successful electrical engineer, astrophysics professor, philharmonic orchestra musician, doctor of medicine, Polish literature teacher, and a geologist. She was very proud of her children and grandchildren. She considered it a triumph that they all received higher education.

My great grandmother was a witness of her time with a very acute sense of the historical importance of what was happening around her. She was devout catholic, attending morning mass every day of her life. From the age of eleven, she kept a diary, which is being preserved and treasured by our family in Poland today. In her memoirs, she focused on her family first; the politics of the day was always filtered and spoken of vaguely, an old habit from times when being too open could incriminate the author in case of arrest.

With the end of the second world war, she outlived Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich that started only twelve years earlier and brought so much misery to her family and her Polish fatherland. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, she witnessed the end of another inhumane totalitarian regime, the same one that deprived her of all of her possessions when it was born.  She survived them both while witnessing and suffering some of the worst cruelties they both brought.

Her family now counts over 120 members who live in Poland, Canada, and Australia. All of her great-grandchildren received higher education. She is remembered, and she lives in us and through us, her descendants, and that is her ultimate victory.

SOURCES: 

[1] HELANA HANASZ MEMOIRS, 

[2] ORAL TESTIMONIES OF JADWIGA CZAJKOWSKA (daughter of Helena, my grandmother) AND ANDRZEJ CZAJKOWSKI (grandson of Helena, my father)

                                                                   Helena Lawicka  circa 1922

  Helena Hanasz and her three eldest children Teresa, Marian, and Jadwiga 1933

                                 Helena Hanasz and her three  younger children: Jadwiga, Jan, Zofia 1936

     Helena and Boleslaw Hanasz and their family

Citizens of Warsaw about to be executed by firing squad, September 1939

Man jumping out of burning building, April 1943

Aerial view of Warsaw, January 1945.

City of Ruins

PART III: NAMELESS HEROES

Reflecting on those who endured all and survived and sometimes prevailed, I feel obliged to mention those who suffered but did not triumph. Not in our earthly sense.   

    Their fate is the fate of millions of nameless victims of atrocities committed on behalf of a better future by fanatics of heartless totalitarian regimes and their conformist followers. Their stories are largely untold. They do not have monuments. They even do not have graves. The only  grave they can hope for  is is the memory of humanity. 

    There are many people who deserve a place in this pantheon of secular martyrs, people whose spirit could not be broken and who suffered insufferable, while staying faithful to their ideals, their vision of simple decency, or simply trying to preserve the tiny bits of humanity and dignity in the face of oppression designed to strip them of both. 

Below are short profiles of three such figures: Teacher, Soldier and Poet.

The Teacher willingly went to death with the children in his care.

The Soldier  volunteered to enter the hell that was Auschwitz. 

The Poet dared to write the truth about the tyrant.

THE TEACHER

Dr. Janusz Korczak (Henryk Goldszmit), 22 July 1878 or 1879 – 7 August 1942.

Korczak's "Our House" 1928

Janusz Korczak, circa 1930s

    He was a popular Polish pedagogue and educator and book-writer,  who led orphanage children from Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka. Korczak was an internationally known educator and pedagogue, author of many children's books as well as a radio host in Polish Radio (“The Old Doctor”). Under his leadership, the orphaned Jewish children formed a type of a children's republic, with parliament, government, court, and newspaper. They had a chance to learn and practice democratic principles and self-government. It was a unique educational experiment, way ahead of its time.

    During the German occupation, Korczak ended up locked in the ghetto with his orphanage. Despite repeated documented offers, he refused to be clandestinely shipped out of the ghetto, since a similar chance to survive was not extended to his children: "How could I abandon my children?" he was remembered saying. Dr. Korczak was last seen marching at the head of the column of his children towards the Umschlagplatz. They were accompanied by a group of orphanage assistants and workers who carried smaller children. Their story ends in the Warsaw ghetto rail station, where they were all loaded to into cars and sent to the extermination camp in Treblinka.

 

People waiting for the train on the Umschlagplatz 

THE SOLDIER 

Witold Pilecki, 3 May 1901 – 25 May 1948

         in Polish Officer Uniform       In concentration camp                post-war prison picture

    He was a Polish Army officer who volunteered to infiltrate Auschwitz as a prisoner and went there to start an underground organization inside the concentration camp.

    In 1940, Pilecki presented a plan to his superiors to enter the German Auschwitz concentration camp at Oświęcim to gather intelligence on the camp from the inside and organize inmate resistance. The reports of the organization he established were the primary source of information from the Auschwitz system of camps. Pilecki spent there two and a half years. In April 1943, together with two other prisoners, he managed to escape. Later that year, Pilecki wrote an extensive report on the camp's daily operations, urging forth underground large scale sabotage or the Allied air bombing of the camp installations to slow down its murderous activities. He fought in the Warsaw uprising.  Like many Polish patriots, he was accused of collaboration with German occupants, sentenced to death in a special exhibition trial and hanged.

THE POET

 

Osip Mandelshtam, 14 January 1891 – 27 December 1938

 

"The most poignant poetic experience of the twentieth century.

 Mandelshtam, like Mozart, has no grave. His grave is the memory of mankind. "

R. Przybylski

NKVD Picture of Mandelshtam 1938 

    Russian poet of a high note. One of the "Acmeists." Imprisoned, jailed, and murdered during the Great Terror. Last seen at the Vtoraya Rechka (Second River) transit camp near Vladivostok,  managed to get a note out to his wife asking for warm clothes; he never received them. He died from cold and hunger.

Osip Mandelshtam's "Stalin Epigram"

 We are living, but can’t feel the land where we stay,

 More than ten steps away you can’t hear what we say.

 But if people would talk on occasion,

 They should mention the Kremlin Caucasian.

 

 His thick fingers are bulky and fat like live-baits,

 And his accurate words are as heavy as weights.

 Cucaracha’s moustaches are screaming,

 And his boot-tops are shining and gleaming.

 

 But around him a crowd of thin-necked henchmen,

 And he plays with the services of these half-men.

 Some are whistling, some meowing, some sniffing,

 He’s alone booming, poking and whiffing.

 

 He is forging his rules and decrees like horseshoes –

 Into groins, into foreheads, in eyes, and eyebrows.

 Like  honey, drops every new death

 On his broad Ossetian chest.

                Translation from Russian by D.Smirnov