The ‘Micia’ mentioned in this excerpt is Maria Potocka née Tarnowska (1904-1985) – the sister of Jan Tarnowski (1900-1966), who was a close friend of Józef Czapski and a collector of his paintings. She is rarely mentioned in Czapski’s biography, even though she played an essential role in it.
In 1990, the Russian scholar Natalia S. Lebedeva discovered correspondence from the beginning of 1940 between the Belgian diplomat Ferdinand du Chastel and Joachim von Plessen, chargé d’affaires of the Embassy of the Third Reich in Rome. The material concerned Józef Czapski’s release from the USSR camp (at the time, Hitler was still an ally of Stalin). The ultimate response from the Third Reich diplomacy was negative – they were unable to intervene. In the Russian archives, however, on the list of imprisoned Polish officers, there is a note next to Czapski’s name that the Embassy of the Third Reich had claimed him.
We don’t entirely know if this is what kept Czapski from certain death at Katyń – but it’s quite possible. At age 94, Czapski found out, in a letter from Lebedeva, about the embassy’s intervention. His response: ‘How strange, for after all, I had no ties to them’. In the letter which Lebedeva had read, du Chastel, in requesting the intervention, refers to the efforts of a ‘Countess Palacka’. Speculation has multiplied as to which of the great families linked to the Czapskis could have had ties with the secretive and influential countess – but a search through the Almanach de Gotha and armorials of Count Palacki’s family would be in vain. This was obviously the diplomat's mistake, as this certainly concerned Maria Potocka instead.
After 1939, Maria Potocka and her husband Artur Potocki (1899-1941) found themselves in Yugoslavia (and later, Croatia) – where Potocka was charged, on behalf of the Polish Legation, with helping refugees. The Polish Legation was closely tied to the Belgian Legation; Ferdinand du Chastel was himself Belgian. Potocka was known for her many efforts on behalf of Polish prisoners, and in 1942, she met with Pope Pius XII and Count Ciano, Italian Foreign Minister in the government of his father-in-law, Benito Mussolini, on the matter. But she never did find out that her intervention with the Belgian diplomats had saved Czapski’s life.
After leaving the Soviet Union, Czapski, seeing the world in a new light, began to fill his diary with drawings. He was looking at the world now not as a soldier, but as a painter. True to his painterly intuition, he created notes and drawings from the ‘theatre of the everyday’, sketching officers playing card games, fancy Arab garments and the landscapes he encountered along the way.