Wacław Kostek-Biernacki

Wacław Biernacki was born on 28 September 1884 in Lublin, then in the Russian-held part of partitioned Poland. He started his gymnasium there, but already in 1895 he was briefly arrested by the Okhrana for taking part in an anti-Russian demonstration. Around that time he started cooperating for the – illegal in Russia – Polish Socialist Party and the Polish National League, initially mostly as a leaflet courier. In 1902, at the age of 18, he organised a city-wide riot against forcing the school pupils to sing the Russian national anthem, for which he was finally dismissed from his school and forced to leave Lublin. He crossed the border with Galicia, where he settled in Brzeżany and finally passed his matura exam.

His parents sponsored his further education in Lwów (modern L'viv, Ukraine, then a predominantly Polish city and the capital of Galicia). In 1903 he joined the medical faculty of the John Casimir University and at the same time started studies at the Imperial Polytechnical Academy. There he met some of the main politicians of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) who were at that time residing in relatively peaceful Galicia, including PPS's chief Józef Piłsudski. Under their influence Biernacki became actively involved in party's underground activities in all three partitions. By 1905 he devoted himself solely to party activities and abandoned his university career without a diploma. Within the structures of the Combat Organization of the Polish Socialist Party he adopted a nom-de-guerre of Kostek (diminutive of the given name of Konstanty), which he later added to his surname.

For his actions against Russian authorities, many of which were bordering modern terrorism, Kostek-Biernacki was frequently arrested by tsarist authorities, but he was never caught red-handed and was usually released soon afterwards. Among the most notable of his actions was an armed train robbery in Sławków and numerous assaults on tsarist officials in Warsaw. He was arrested in Piotrków in 1906, and again in Warsaw in 1907. Released, he returned to his duties within the PPS in Dąbrowa Górnicza, Radom, Warsaw and Lublin. In 1907 he was yet again arrested and imprisoned in the heavy prison at the Lublin Castle. However, already on 25 May 1907 he staged a successful escape together with 20 other political prisoners.

Constantly risking arrest and life imprisonment or forced resettlement to Siberia (a common penalty in Russia until the mid-20th century), he once again fled to Galicia, this time settling in Kraków, where he requested political asylum. Under pressure from Russian diplomats the authorities of Austria-Hungary refused and Kostek-Biernacki had to flee to France, where he joined the French Foreign Legion. Already in 1908 he was dispatched to Algeria, where he took part in fights against the natives in the vicinity of Sidi Bel Abbès. However, the following year he restored contacts with Walery Sławek, his former colleague and collaborator from the PPS. The latter helped him defect the Foreign Legion and return to Poland.

During the May Coup d'État Wacław Kostek-Biernacki remained neutral, supporting neither Piłsudski nor the government. The press and the National Democrats opposing Piłsudski speculated, that Kostek-Biernacki might have been involved in the disappearance of Gen. Włodzimierz Ostoja-Zagórski, which however was never proven. In any case, around that time Wacław Kostek-Biernacki was made the military area commander of Brześć Litewski, first informally and then since 1930– officially. While neutral during the coup d'état, he was strongly supportive of the Sanacja movement and his former commander Józef Piłsudski himself. The new authorities of Poland did not forget about his merits either and in 1930 he was promoted to the rank of pułkownik (Colonel). During that period he also authored numerous memoirs and monographs on the activities of the PPS and its Combat Organisation, some of which remained best-sellers for most of the 1920s and 1930s.

Already in the Autumn of that year the Brest Fortress under Kostek-Biernacki's command became infamous in Poland as a political prison, where a number of leftist politicians had been incarcerated prior to Sejm elections, in what became known as the Brest trial and the Brest elections. According to various accounts, the fortress' commanding officer was particularly brutal against the incarcerated politicians, forcing them to do tedious and humiliating tasks, beating them and even staging executions without actually shooting them. While his actions resulted in complete pacification of anti-Pilsudskiite opposition, he himself became particularly infamous and often presented in the press as a man without honour and Piłsudski's bull-terrier. He was disliked by the officer corps and even the Sanacja politicians, whom he personally supported. In the end he was discharged from the army and demobilised.

This however did not end his political career as already on 1 July 1931 he had been made the voivode (governor) of the Nowogródek voivodeship, and the following year he became the voivode of Polesie voivodeship. He was seen as a tough man for a tough task, as at that time the region experienced constant attacks from Communist activists and Soviet spies, as well as acts of violence by the Ukrainian terrorist groups. As a voivode he supervised the creation and daily operations of another infamous political prison, the Bereza Kartuska prison. At the same time he also successfully petitioned the government for aid for the poorest region of Poland and started a tedious task of meliorating the Polesie Marshes, the least-populated area of Poland back then. He was also the chief initiator of creation of the Brześć Litewski-Pińsk road, the most modern road built in Poland between the wars.

Wacław Kostek-Biernacki remained the voivode of Polesie until the outbreak of World War II in the effect of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. On 2 September 1939 the president of Poland Ignacy Mościcki appointed him as Chief Civilian Commissioner (CCO), a wartime position at the rank of minister; a CCO was supposed to govern most of public administration on territories forming part of military operational area.[4] His work as a CCO during the Invasion of Poland was short-lived and climaxed in a series of decrees issued around 10 September 1939; the most important of them militarised the police. Already on 17 September the Soviet Union fulfilled its pacts with Nazi Germany and attacked Poland from the rear. The following day the entire Polish government with Kostek-Biernacki was forced to cross the Romanian border. There, under pressure from France, they were interned for the duration of hostilities.

Wacław Kostek-Biernacki spent the entire period of World War II in Romanian captivity. In the autumn of 1945 the then-ruling Communists of Romania handed him over to the newly imposed communist government of Poland. He was immediately arrested and imprisoned in the infamous Mokotów Prison. Waiting for his trial he spent 8 years on death row, initially together with a Nazi war criminal Erich Koch. Constantly tortured, he suffered from numerous diseases, but was deprived of any medical assistance or even contact with his family. It was not until 10 April 1953 that his show trial finally started. He was charged with "fascisation of life in Poland", actions against the "revolutionary movement" and "denationalisation of Belarusians and Ukrainians". The show trial lasted four days and sentenced him to capital punishment, later changed to 10 years in prison. His health however deteriorated rapidly, and on 9 November 1955 he was released from prison – 10 years to the day after his arrest.

Wacław Kostek-Biernacki, once a Colonel of the Polish Army and one of the highest-ranking officials of Poland's administration spent the rest of his days in poverty, searching for his son Leszek Biernacki, whom he met for the last time in 1939. Unknowingly to him his son, a member of the Home Army, perished in a skirmish with the Germans in 1943. Kostek-Biernacki died in Warsaw on 25 May 1957 and was buried in a parochial cemetery in Grójec.