Tadeusz Gajcy

Tadeusz Stefan Gajcy (8 February 1922, Warsaw - 16 August 1944, Warsaw) alias Karol Topornicki”, „Roman Oścień”, „Topór”, „Orczyk“ , was a Polish poet, playwright, editor-in-chief of the Sztuka i Naród (Art and Nation) periodical, member of the Confederation of the Nation, soldier of the Home Army.

He was born on 8 February 1922 on Dzika Street in Warsaw.

His ancestors on his father's side came to Poland from Hungary, which is why several forms of the poet's polonized family name exist in documents (Gajc, Gajca, Gaycy, Gajczy).

Tadeusz's parents were Stefan Gajcy and Irena Gajcy, née Zmarzlik.

Gajcy's father was a telegraphist during the Polish-Bolshevik war and after the war, he worked as a locksmith in the Railway Repair Plant in Warsaw's Praga district.

His mother was a midwife in a hospital and had roots in the landed gentry.

In her free time, she carried out social and charitable activities, which won her respect and recognition both at work and among the local population.

His mother's brother Stanislaw Zmarzlik was a very talented dancer who achieved artistic success in Western Europe and the USA under the stage name Stanley Barry.

Tadeusz also had a younger brother called Mieczysław.

They grew up in a classical multigenerational family as his mother's parents also lived at home.

He discovered his talent for poetry already as a child, and he tied his future to poetry.

He attended primary school in Stawki Street, at the same time serving as an altar boy in the Church of St. John of God.

He finished school with a good result, with the best marks in the humanities and the weakest in mathematics.

He then attempted an exam at Tadeusz Czacki Grammar and Secondary School.

Despite a sufficient grade, he was not admitted to this school due to a lack of places.

Eventually, he became a pupil of the Marian Fathers' Middle and High School in Bielany.

The Marian Fathers' School was famous for its rigorousness and for placing a great emphasis on the patriotic and pro-social education of young people.

Some of the teaching staff made no secret of their National Democracy views.

For this reason, despite the official dissociation of the Marian Fathers from politics, the school was a very popular place of education for young people influenced by the national movement.

After the outbreak of the war, the Marian Center in Bielany was the main point of support for the Konfederacja Narodu's [Confederate of Nation] activity in Warsaw.

During the following years of his secondary school education, he achieved increasingly better marks, especially in the humanities.

In the fourth grade, next to Wojciech Jaruzelski, Tadeusz was the best student in the Polish language.

In June 1939, after passing the so-called Little Baccalaureate, he was admitted to the humanities department of the High School.

During this period, he began to write poems, which the author considered worthy of permanent preservation.

His works from this period, as Andrzej Tauber-Ziółkowski underlines, were unusually serious, mature and philosophical for the age of sixteen.

In the summer of 1939, Gajcy submitted several poems to the editors of Prosto z mostu (Straight from the Bridge), the most widely read socio-cultural weekly at the end of the interwar period.

The editor, Stanisław Piasecki, promised to publish them in autumn in a special insert containing debut poems of teenage "verse-poets".

Before others, Gajcy had read the classics of world literature: the works of Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Knut Hamsun, Anton Chekhov, Jarosław Haszek and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Above all, however, he was interested in contemporary poetry, created by Żagarists and Jerzy Liebert, Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, Władysław Sebyła, Wojciech Bąk, Czesław Miłosz, Józef Czechowicz and Józef Łobodowski.

On the day the war broke out, he was supposed to start learning in the first year of secondary school, but instead, as a member of the school's Military Training Troop, he reported to the military authorities with a request to be drafted into the fighting army.

Having received a refusal, and in accordance with a radio announcement by Colonel Roman Umiatowski appealing to men capable of carrying weapons to march East, he left Warsaw.

He reached Włodawa on the Bug river.

He returned to Warsaw after the capitulation of the capital.

He decided to return to education, but unfortunately the teaching staff of the Marian Fathers were temporarily arrested, and then the German authorities decided to teach Poles only at the elementary and vocational school level.

Gajcy therefore began his education in secret classes.

During his studies, he avoided German repression thanks to resistance cells that intercepted a letter written by his friend from the secret classes denouncing them to the Gestapo.

During this period, Gajcy was mostly preoccupied with studying the history of literature.

Professor Edmund Jankowski, a post-war researcher at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, prepared him for his maturity exam.

The professor remembered him as an arrogant, self-confident and Nonchalant young man, but at the same time extremely talented and intelligent.

Gajcy wanted his matriculation exam to be a ticket to underground studies in Polish philology at the University of Warsaw.