Małgorzata Głuchowska’s Letter to Prime Minister 14 November 2012

Małgorzata Głuchowska
[…]
Zielona Góra

Donald Tusk
Premier RP
Al. Ujazdowskie 1/3
00-583 Warszawa

Zielona Góra, 14 November 2012

Dear Prime Minister,

 

Both the context of the entire situation, as well as behavior of functionaries at different rungs of state hierarchy indicate, that I am persecuted for political reasons. I am a descendant of true Polish elites. My grandmother was a teacher before WWII and my grandfather was a graduate of the Wilno conservatory. He was imprisoned by the Soviet Union in Kozelsk during WWII and by the Communist secret police after the war.

The recent series of provocations started in September 2011 with the attack of my subordinate piano teacher, who is a protege of the regional inspector of the Ministry of Culture and was continued by representatives of much higher levels of the state apparatus.

I was attacked both as head of the piano section and as head of the school’s Parents Council.

I proved, that the school director paid for insurance of school buildings and school property from parents council fund without parents knowledge and without permission of parents council members. Costs of property insurance in a civilized country are covered by owner. The school is run by the Ministry of Culture. The same ministry decided to cover this up. At the same time the ministry functionaries decided to cover up the extreme bullying and harassment in an artistic institution, for which the Ministry acts as legal owner.

The school insurance was only the tip of the iceberg. Dereliction of duty of an enormous proportion became evident at about the same time.

Manufacturing of two kinds of documentation began on orders of Ministry of Culture regional inspector Krystyna Karcz.  These were documents needed to pretend that school functioned in accordance with the law. These were documents that should have been already in existence for at least several years. Documentation was backdated. This activity of inspector Karcz was continued by other Ministry of Culture inspectors. Similarly, current documents such as minutes of various meetings and minutes of pedagogical council meetings were being falsified. Letters slandering me were fabricated as well.

On the basis of this falsified documentation were formulated reports of two “inspections” conducted by Ministry of Culture inspectors, which tried to invalidate my arguments, alleging instead a personal conflict between me and the school director.

In those cases, in which document fabrication was unsuccessful, the Ministry of Culture representative professor Wiktor Jędrzejec pretended he did not understand the charges I had made. This applied, for example, to the school director using the Master title in reference to a school employee who did not possess the relevant education and empowering that person to carry out actions, to which she was certified. Vaguely formulated ministerial ordinances were interpreted in extremely divergent ways. The Ministry stated, that there is nothing wrong with introducing new educational programs in the middle of the school year, before mid-year auditions, in contradiction of Article 22a of the educational system act. Unsigned and undated school documents were deemed as legally binding. When I was describing examples of my victimization between January and March 2012, professor Jędrzejec repeated like a mantra, that inspection conducted in December 2011 did not confirm my being destroyed.

Having reached the limits of my endurance, I went to the local prosecutor office. I delivered my deposition twice, relating facts supported by material evidence. The first hearing was uneventful, although some disconcerting signals were evident: the prosecutor tried to persuade me to change my testimony. The hearing with the second prosecutor, who took the matter over from the first one, was a very traumatic experience, whose aim was obviously to discourage me from further contacts with the prosecutor office. The prosecutor was arrogant and hostile. He kept interrupting my story, trying to prevent me from formulating orderly, rational and clear sentences. He treated me as if I was the villain and not the person seeking justice and informing about violations of law. Eventually prosecutor Paweł Sawicki falsified my testimony. He “investigated” the matter under charges that I had not made. He completely ignored the bullying campaign conducted against me in my workplace. In February 2012 he closed the matter deciding not to open any proceedings.

When on 6 March 2012 I personally delivered an extensive documentation to the Ministry of Culture in Warsaw, I was immediately fired from the position of head of the piano section. To this day I have not received any justification for the firing. The absence of such justification violates article 39a of the Education System Act in a most obvious way.

I spoke to eight different lawyers. They all said I stood no chance of winning against the authorities, while at the same time I would most probably be fired from the school altogether.

In September and October 2012, I sent the Minister of Culture Bogdan Zdrojewski additional proofs of lies and falsifications of people engaged in this extraordinary matter. The documents implicated the participation of prof. Wiktor Jędrzejec from the Department of Artistic Schools and Cultural Education of the Ministry of Culture.

My correspondence addressed to the Minister for direct personal delivery was sent back to me unopened.

I am including my two last letters to the Ministry, dated 7 September 2012 and 5 October 2012.

Prof. Wiktor Jędrzejec responded to both of them in a letter of 8 October 2012, mailed from Warsaw on 17 October 2012, in the following way:

It is aimless to try to investigate the matters which wyou specified in attachments 1, 2, and 3 to your letter of 7 September 2012, to which you already received replies in letters mentioned in point 4 above. These replies were based on the findings of two investigative proceedings, carried out by the inspectors of the Ministry on 19-20 December 2011 and on 3-4 April 2012. Thus, in accordance with the article 239 paragraph 1 of the Code of Administrative Procedure, the Department of Artistic Schools and Cultural Education upholds the replies given in earlier letters to you (see letter of 8 October 2012 DEK/3917/12).

The yellow postal card which serves as the confirmation of delivery contained no name of the sender of this ministerial letter. That side of the card remained empty. I am mentioning this because during the previous year the correspondence between me and the Ministry encountered several problems. One of the letters sent to me by the regional inspector of the Ministry in Zielona Góra in December 2011 took nine days to arrive to Zielona Góra (i.e. it took nine days for the letter to travel several hundred meters).

Falsification of documents continues to this day. Illegal acts, falsehoods, lies cannot be hidden by simply putting documents into an archive and closing the school year. Quite obviously the Ministry inspections were not meant to change anything in the Zielona Góra state music school but to provide an excuse for delivery of both social and mental death to me.

I am still forced by the director to break the law under the threat of being fired.

As a result of psychological violence my health suffered very significantly. I used to be a specimen of a healthy human being, but since October 2011 I was not able to survive a day without sedatives. I was constantly in touch with the doctors who tried to identify the reason for this radical collapse. I breathed with difficulty. I had uncontrolled bouts of coughing that prevented me from normal functioning and communicating with people around me. Detailed cardiological and laryngological tests proved that deteriorated health was caused by the nervous breakdown. Since the persecution and bullying continued, despite the fact that I informed about it the Ministry inspectors, department directors at the Ministry, and the psychiatric pills were not enough, the primary care physician suggested a visit to a psychiatrist. An advice of a supposedly leading specialist was limited to a cynical statement, that this is what you usually get “when you stand up against those in power”. He prescribed psychotropic pills which quickly lead to addiction. I will never forget the time when I was getting up in the morning with tears in my eyes, dreaming of this bestiality to end. I persevered thanks to my family’s support. If I were a single person, I would certainly not be among the living anymore.

So, what do you say to this, Mr. Prime Minister? In whose name, on whose orders the manhunt for Małgorzata Głuchowska was issued? I ask you for a full detailed reply.

My experience backed up by material proofs and extensive documentation enable me to formulate the following statement: The effort of the authorities on different levels of the state ladder is focused on proving that the persecuted person has no argument, that the perpetrators are right. This state apparatus confirms and upholds all the illegal acts at the lower rungs of the hierarchy. Each little cog of this evil machinery remains in place, happily doing what is expected of him/her. The victim is treated as an outlaw. The criminal apparatus, hiding under the cover of state authorities conducts a regular manhunt for any citizen who was brave enough to try to use laws theoretically guaranteed by the constitution and other legal acts.

This same state apparatus suddenly becomes incompetent when state constitution, law, decency and common sense should be applied, when human dignity and human rights must be respected. At that very moment this apparatus suddenly becomes extremely powerless and unable to carry out even the most obvious and simple actions. Clearly it is not legal acts and not the constitution that form the axis, around which the activity of this apparatus is organized.

My case is representative for a wider phenomenon, which is a planned extermination of the Polish elites. This process is based on the following elements,

(1) systematic blocking of careers of ambitious independent individuals, talented and willing to engage in social activities,

(2) theft of intellectual property,

(3) provocation, slander, smear aimed at destroying emotional stability and public image of the attacked persons,

(4) liquidation of the social capital possessed by such person by all available means. These activities follow carefully designed scenarios.

This specific know-how of liquidating individuals was developed under the Communist dictatorship. For example, in the German Democratic Republic the Stasi secret police ran carefully prepared and scripted campaigns against opponents of the dictatorship, aiming at destroying their psyche and destroying them as social beings. The program was called Die Zersetzung. The Polish Communist regime used similar methods.

The writer Stanisław Mackiewicz described in his book Russian Minds in Fetters (Myśl w obcęgach, 1929) the process of liquidating people designated by the Bolsheviks as outcasts (so-called lishentsi) in the Soviet Union. Similar phenomena and similar methods are at the core of the criminal activities with which we are dealing in Poland today.

The aim is still the same. To liquidate anyone, who is says “no” to the breaking of the most elementary constitutional rights and rules of common decency by the authorities. I can testify in front of parliamentary commissions to tell the story of my fight for truth and teacher’s dignity, while being at the same time an ordinary woman, wife and mother. Let us look closely at the methods that transformed a happy, lively woman into a wrecked human being in the period of several months. I have plenty to speak about. I hope that neither you nor the Sejm (i.e. Polish “parliament”) will evade the problem presented here.

My good name and my reputation are among my most precious possessions and I insist on explaining this whole shameful provocation. This should be done also in the interest of the entire country, because my case is not the only one.

I expect from you, Mr. Prime Minister, an answer to this letter. During the whole year of my fight for dignity and truth no one from the Ministry of Culture expressed even the slightest inkling for a direct contact with me. Minister Zdrojewski is silent. In response to my letters to the Prime Minister I received a reply in a typical bureaucratese that “the letter was handed over to an appropriate office for a review and reponse”. Mr. Prime Minister, I already have gone all the way through the lower instances. I already know extremely well how the Polish state non-functions. I am writing to you personally, so that you do not hand over the letter to some other office. Letters addressed to the Prime Minister are letters addressed exactly to the Prime Minister, not to someone in one of the ministries. I would not try to absorb the attention of your office, if the state apparatus had been doing its job. However, because I was persecuted, and the very same state apparatus fully approved this, including the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, my letters to you should not be sent back to the Ministry of Culture. You are the addressee of this letter, Mr. Prime Minister. I hope you will not refrain from answering my letter.

Yours sincerely,

Małgorzata Głuchowska

Piano teacher of the 1st and the 2nd level State School of Music in Zielona Góra

Polish version