Tea at Trianon: Stanislawa Leszczyńska

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, February 11, 2019

Stanislawa Leszczyńska

From Aleteia:

Stanislawa Leszczyńska was born in 1896 in Lodz, a city in the center of Poland. She was a wife, mother, and midwife. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Leszczyńska decided she and her family had to help out by joining in the Polish resistance to help provide false documents and food for those in Jewish ghettos. The family’s efforts were discovered by the gestapo and a few years later, Leszczyńska and her daughter — a medical student — were sent to Auschwitz while her sons were sent to other camps to endure hard labor. Her husband and eldest son escaped, but Leszczyńska never saw her husband again; he was killed fighting the Nazis in the Warsaw Uprising a year later in 1944.

At Auschwitz, Leszczyńska reported for duty as a midwife. Although many pregnant women were normally executed on the spot, others continued their pregnancy until delivery. The midwife was sent to work in the maternity ward, which History.com reports was a “set of filthy barracks that was less a place to care for pregnant women than a place to usher them into death.” The women who managed the ward, “Sister” Klara and “Sister” Pfani, had the duty of declaring newborns as stillborn on delivery, before drowning them in buckets in front of the new mothers. As unqualified nurses they could not assist in the deliveries themselves.

When Leszczyńska was told of her duty to ensure the babies were murdered, she categorically refused. She was beaten by Klara but still she did her best to keep the babies and their mothers alive. Before each delivery she would make the sign of the cross and pray. She also provided moments of calm for the mothers with prayers and song — all done very quietly.

Despite her efforts, many babies were killed after their first few hours of life, and some mothers later died due to the abominable sanitary conditions inside the ward. In her two years at Auschwitz, alongside her daughter, Leszczyńska delivered 3,000 babies. She even stood up to the infamous “Angel of Death,” Josef Mengele, when he ordered her to murder the infants. (Read more.)