Karolina Lanckorońska


Countess Karolina Maria Adelajda Franciszka Ksawera Małgorzata Edina Lanckorońska was a Polish noble, World War II resistance fighter, and historian.
Lanckorońska bequeathed her family's enormous art collection to Poland only after her homeland became free from communism and Soviet domination during the Revolutions of 1989. The Lanckoronski Collection may now for the most part be seen in Warsaw's Royal Castle and Kraków's Wawel Castle.

Life

Karolina Lanckorońska was the daughter of Count Karol Lanckoroński, a Polish nobleman from a Galician family, and his third wife, Countess Margaret Lichnovsky, daughter of Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky.
Reared and educated in Vienna, where she attended university. She lived at her family's palace, the Palais Lanckoroński. After Poland regained independence in 1918, Lanckorońska taught at Lwów University. She earned her PhD in History of Art in 1934, habilitated in 1936 by Poland's Ministry of Education.
Following the invasion of Poland, including Lwów, by the Soviet Red Army along with the attack on Poland by Nazi Germany in September 1939, she witnessed at first hand the terror and atrocities committed by the Soviets and Nazis, which she later described in her War Memoirs.
Lanckorońska was active in the Polish resistance and was arrested, interrogated, tortured, tried and sentenced to death at Stanisławów prison. During her stay there, the local Gestapo chief Hans Krueger, confessed to her that he had murdered 23 Lwów University professors, a war crime that she made it her mission to publicize. Thanks to her family connections, Lanckorońska was not executed but was instead sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. She somehow survived and, immediately after release in 1945, wrote her war memoirs. After the war, she left Poland and lived in Fribourg, Switzerland, and later, until her death, in Rome.
She did not want her war memoirs published in her lifetime. After much persuasion, however, she consented to publication in Poland, by Znak Publishing of Kraków, in 2001, just a year before her death. The book, whose British version is titled Those Who Trespass against Us: One Woman's War against the Nazis, sold over 50,000 copies in the Polish original and is now selling well in English. The U.S. edition was published in hardback in Spring 2007 by Da Capo Press under the new title, Michelangelo in Ravensbrück.
In 1967 Lanckorońska established the Lanckoroński Foundation, which promotes and supports Polish culture, awarding over a million złotych per annum for scholarships, publication of learned books, research into Polish archives in countries such as Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, and similar projects.
Countess Karolina Lanckorońska died in 2002, aged 104, and is buried at the Campo Verano.

Works