The week Poland showed up

A note before we start

This is the first one, and I had a gentler start planned. Then on Saturday 7 November a man opened fire on Kraków's Main Square.

I wasn't in Poland. I was on holiday in Morocco when a friend called to tell me. My first reaction was a prayer, and many Muslims in Europe will know it: please, don't let it be a Muslim. My second thought was my flight home, and what my return to Poland would be like. Those were rough days.

What I watched over the next few days is what this issue is about: a week when Poland showed up. You also get the two stories I promised on Instagram, the university that had to keep moving and the Muslim cavalry who walked away from Poland and came back.

Main story

What Poland does when it's hurt

Just after 3 p.m. on Saturday 7 November 2026, a 24-year-old man drove onto Kraków's Main Square and started shooting from his car. Six people were killed: four Poles, a British man and an Austrian woman. More than a dozen were wounded, four of them carriage drivers who work the square every day. The city went into mourning until 11 November.

Within hours my comments were full of people fighting over who he "really" was. The record is short. He was a Polish citizen, he died in hospital on 9 November, and prosecutors say they have no evidence yet of what drove him.

What I want you to remember is what happened next.

The closest patrol was two young officers, senior constables Jakub Kulik and Artur Morański, with handguns against a rifle. Both were shot, and they stopped him anyway. Both later woke up in hospital.

That same evening the journalist Krzysztof Stanowski opened a fundraiser for them. When he closed it on 10 November it stood at more than 7 million złoty (about €1.6 million) from over 100,000 people. Then he asked everyone to give to the other victims instead.

And there were the people who ran towards it. Iwona Kościelna, a nurse from the hospital in Jarocin, was in a shop on the square when the shots came. She did CPR and put a line into the arm of a young woman shot in the stomach, while her own daughter kept calling her phone. She has turned down every interview since. Six Dublin Civil Defence volunteers on a city break did the same until the ambulances came.

Confidential File · No. 1

The university that kept moving

For 123 years, from 1795 to 1918, Poland wasn't on the map. In the Russian part, which included Warsaw, Polish was pushed out of the classroom and no university would take a woman.

So Warsaw women taught each other in secret. In 1885 a young teacher called Jadwiga Szczawińska pulled the scattered study circles into one organisation. Classes met in private flats, and the address kept changing so the tsarist police couldn't pin it down. People called it Uniwersytet Latający, the Flying University.

It was a real school: about five years of study, ten hours a week. Roughly 5,000 people passed through it in twenty years, among them Janusz Korczak, the doctor who later walked into Treblinka with the orphans he refused to leave.

One student was a young governess named Maria Skłodowska. She left for Paris, became Marie Curie, and in 1898 named the element she discovered polonium, after a country that officially no longer existed.

Seventy years later, dissidents in communist Poland gave secret lectures in private flats. They called them the Flying University too.

Read the full File: The Flying University →

Confidential File · No. 2

The rebel leader was killed by his own men

Poland has had Muslim soldiers for more than 600 years. The Lipka Tatars settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 14th century, kept their faith, and served as light cavalry with a reputation for loyalty.

In 1672 that loyalty broke. Their pay was years overdue and their privileges were being chipped away. When the Ottoman Empire invaded, two to three thousand Lipka riders went over to the Sultan. Their leader, Aleksander Kryczyński, was rewarded with the fortress town of Bar, in today's Ukraine.

It soured quickly. The land was poor and wrecked by war, and the ordinary riders got almost nothing. In 1673 his own men seized him in Bar and killed him.

Jan Sobieski took Bar back in 1674 and, instead of punishing the defectors, let them return to service. As king he had their privileges restored in 1679 and paid their back wages in land. One returned rebel, Samuel Mirza Krzeczowski, received the village of Kruszyniany, which still has its wooden mosque.

In 1683 Lipka Tatars rode with Sobieski to save Vienna, a sprig of straw in their helmets so nobody mistook them for the Crimean Tatars on the Ottoman side. A month later, at Párkány, the king was nearly killed in a rout. Polish tradition says Krzeczowski's riders cut down the men closing in on him, though some accounts credit a courtier.

Either way, a man who had once ridden away from Poland helped keep its king alive.

Read the full File: The Lipka rebellion →

What you told me

I asked new readers one question: what's your Poland? A few answers stayed with me.

F. wrote from Ankara. Their way into Poland was Marie Curie, and the part that stuck was Curie naming her discovery after a country that had been wiped off the map. In their words, "such a beautiful act."

W. left Poland for Ireland at nineteen and has lived in Scotland since 2014. That's twenty years of carrying the place around with you.

Under my Independence Day post, a British-Polish follower thanked her granddad, who fought for Poland. A follower of Turkish origin thanked the Ottomans for never accepting that Poland had been erased. And under the Kraków posts, while everyone argued, one of you just wrote down the nurse's name. That's how I found Iwona's story.

One Polish phrase

Łączymy się w bólu

wah-CHIH-my sheh f BOO-loo · "we are joined in pain"

You'll see it under every condolence post in Poland, and it was under every Kraków post. It's a formal phrase, but nobody uses it coldly. It means: you are not grieving alone, we're in this with you.

Your confidential friend,
Kamal Jahid