ABSTRACT
I witnessed masses of Jewish people being herded toward ghettoes. On the way the weak, the invalid, the sick, were killed ruthlessly. And then, many times, I myself and my close family and friends have been in immediate danger of death. The juxtaposition of inhuman forces and inhuman humans with those who were sensitive, capable of sacrifi ce, courageous, gave a vivid panorama of a scale of values from the lowest to the highest . . . From the events of those times came an unappeased need to deepen the attitude toward the death of others and toward my own, toward injustice and social cataclysms, toward the discrimination between truth and falsehood in human attitudes and behavior. (Dabrowski, 1975, pp. 233-234)
Kazimierz Dabrowski was born on September 1, 1902, on an agricultural estate his father Antoni administered in Klarów, near the city of Lublin in the
eastern part of Poland that had been overtaken by Russia. Beginning in 1792, Poland underwent successive partitions by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Lublin region became part of the Kingdom of Poland ruled by the tsar. In July 1915, in a fi erce battle several kilometers from Lublin, the Austro-Hungarian army defeated the Russians (Cieslak, Gawarecki, & Stankowa, 1976). Without doubt this was the battle Dabrowski witnessed as a boy. Three years later, the three empires had collapsed, and Poland was reborn as a sovereign state.
