The decimation of Polish Libraries in the Second World War

The fate of Polish libraries and book collections over the centuries is intricately linked with the history of the Polish nation and the Polish state. Following the failed Kościuszko Uprising, on the eve of Poland’s third partition and the collapse of Polish statehood, the Russian Empress Catherine II decided to close down the Załuski Library of the Republic (Biblioteka Rzeczypospolitej Załuskich zwana), the first Polish national library and one of the largest and grandest libraries of eighteenth-century Europe, and move its collection to St Petersburg, where it formed the basis of the National Library of Russia. If anything, this was an augur of things to come. The destruction suffered by the Polish nation and the Polish state during the Second World War did not spare many Polish libraries, whose collections were to a great degree destroyed by shelling and bombing, and also the target of deliberate destruction. The libraries that suffered the most were those located in Warsaw, the centre of academic and cultural life in pre-Second World War Poland. The ashes of manuscripts and early printed books burnt by Nazi soldiers in the Library of the Krasiński Family Entail (Biblioteka Ordynacji Krasińskich) in autumn 1944, contained in an urn which today stands inside the Palace of the Polish Republic, are a potent symbol of the tragic fate suffered by Polish libraries in general.