Name Michal Weinzieher | ||
Michał Weinzieher (born 1 June 1903 in Będzin, Russian Empire, Polish lands of the Russian Partition; d. April 1944 in Kraków) was a Polish art historian and art critic, museologist, and separately also a writer on constitutional law (known for his studies of the thought of Leon Petrazycki). He also published several pieces of travel reportage from France, England, and the Soviet Union.
Michał Weinzieher was born on 1 June 1903 in the town of Będzin, in the Dąbrowa Basin (Zagłębie Dąbrowskie) of the western Lesser Poland geographical area, about 13 kilometres south-west of Katowice and about 88 km north-west of Kraków. The town counted 30,124 inhabitants in 1901. His father, Dr. Salomon Weinzieher (1869–1943?), a physician and director of a regional hospital, was one of the most distinguished citizens of his town and its province and a member of Parliament (including, for a time, chairman of its Jewish caucus). Weinzieher had also a younger brother, (Jan) Jakub Weinzieher (1908–1940), a physician like his father and a lieutenant (podporucznik) of the Polish Air Force, who would perish in the Katyn Massacre perpetrated by the Soviet secret police. Their father will die in the Holocaust by being deported from the Będzin Ghetto to the Auschwitz concentration camp on 1 August 1943 (other sources indicating he was murdered in the Ghetto).
A teenager during the early period of the Second Polish Republic, Weinzieher fought in the Polish–Soviet War in 1920 as a volunteer in the Polish Army (Wojsko Polskie II RP). He was educated at Warsaw University, his father's alma mater, where he earned a law degree. A frequent contributor to the Nasz Przegląd newspaper, he served as the director of the Jewish Society for the Propagation of the Fine Arts (Żydowskie Towarzystwo Krzewienia Sztuk Pięknych) in Warsaw until 1939, a city where he maintained friendship with the poet Bruno Jasieński. In his art criticism he emphasized the role of ideology and "guiding principles" over "sterile objectivism" and impartiality, including in the organizing of art exhibitions which ought to follow the same principles if they were truthfully to render the profiles of such painters as Picasso and Matisse. Weinzieher took a lively interest in all aspects of life of the Jewish community in the interbellum Poland, participating for example in the organizational activities of the Jewish Sightseeing Society (Żydowskie Towarzystwo Krajoznawcze) and other similar bodies. He was also the director of the Historical Museum in Lwów (Muzeum Historyczne we Lwowie, now within the territory of Ukraine).
During the Second World War, in the early part of 1940, he married the well-known poet Zuzanna Ginczanka in Lwów, then newly occupied by the Soviet Union, where both sought shelter from the Germans. Following Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union of 22 June 1941 and the Nazi occupation of Lwów later the same month, he moved with his wife to Kraków in September 1942, where he disguised his identity by assuming the pseudonym Michał Danilewicz. However, he was eventually arrested by the Gestapo early in 1944, and subsequently perished at their hands. On 6 April 1944 there appeared pasted on the walls of Kraków an announcement issued by the "Summary Court-martial of the Security Police" (Standgericht der Sicherheitspolizei) listing 112 names of people sentenced to death: the first 33 names were those on whom the sentence of death had already been carried out, the rest were those awaiting execution. Michał Weinzieher's name is among the latter. Although the precise date of his death is uncertain, it is known that he had predeceased his wife, who was also murdered by the Nazis several months later.
The surname is sometimes misspelled "Weinziher" in Polish usage.