Paderewski in Poznań

On the evening of 26 December 1918 a train carrying Ignacy Jan Paderewski pulled into the station in Poznań. The world-famous pianist, for years the most effective advocate of the Polish cause in the United States, was coming to Polish lands for the first time since the outbreak of war. The German authorities did everything they could to make him bypass the city, and when that failed they ordered the street lamps left unlit. The Poles welcomed him by the light of hundreds of torches.

Paderewski was the representative in America of the Polish National Committee and had great influence with President Wilson. After the armistice he sailed into Liverpool on 23 November and spent several days in London in talks with the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour. The British, alarmed both by the situation in Germany and by the westward march of the Red Army, wanted to see a strong government in Poland with which the Entente could work. In Warsaw Paderewski was to reconcile Roman Dmowski’s Paris Committee with Jędrzej Moraczewski’s government and Józef Piłsudski. He demanded that his route to Warsaw lead through Danzig and Toruń, that is, through lands still formally German. He was accompanied by a semi-official British mission headed by the military attaché, Colonel Harry Wade.

Paderewski, with his wife Helena and his aide-de-camp, Major Zygmunt Iwanowski, sailed from Harwich on the British cruiser HMS Concord. On 23 December the ship called at Copenhagen, and on the morning of 25 December it reached Danzig. Waiting for the guest there were envoys of the Poznań Supreme People’s Council, elected at the beginning of the month by the Provincial Sejm, with Wojciech Korfanty at their head. Paderewski spent the night at the Danziger Hof (PL) hotel, and on the morning of 26 December set off by train for Poznań via Piła. At one station after another Poles greeted him. Berlin, which since 15 December had had no relations with Warsaw, did not want a political demonstration in Poznań and agreed only to a journey straight to Warsaw. At Rogoźno a German officer demanded that the train bypass Poznań. Paderewski and Colonel Wade refused.

Sources give the time of arrival variously, from about 8 p.m. to 9.10 p.m. At the station German officers tried to hand the guest an order to leave the city, but a cordon of the Polish People’s Guard (PL) would not let them through. After speeches of welcome and songs, the procession drove through the jubilant city to the Bazar hotel (PL), built in the 1840s as a centre of Polish life in Poznań. Waiting outside the hotel were the city’s mayor, Jarogniew Drwęski (PL), and members of the Commissariat of the Supreme People’s Council. Paderewski addressed the crowd from the window above the entrance, and later again in a hotel hall, to activists and journalists. He rejoiced at Poland’s rebirth and called for the unity of all Poles, but did not call for a fight.

The Germans were irritated both by the ovation and by the British, American and French flags that the Poles had hung beside the white-and-red ones in honour of the guest and his British companions. Paderewski, aware that he was in the German state and fearing diplomatic complications, then stopped appearing in public. The next day processions of Polish children with little flags made their way to the hotel, while the Germans prepared a demonstration of their own. The tension that had been building in the city for weeks was to explode on the afternoon of 27 December.