Seeking Common ground, 150 march for statue's return
Waving red and white Polish flags and shouting their outrage at the Menino administration, nearly 150 Polish-Americans descended on City Hall Plaza yesterday to demand restoration of ''Partisans," the sculpture of Polish patriots on horseback that the city removed from the Boston Common in January.
The removal of the sculpture from the city's most prominent park was an affront to their community, the protesters said, and to the memory of the Polish Partisans, the underground fighters who battled the Nazis, the Soviet Army, and then the Polish Communists during and after World War II.
''America has forgotten how greatly and almost uniquely Poland suffered, and how it was sold down the river to frankly one of the greatest mass murderers of all time, Stalin," said Billy Szych, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force who was stationed in the Boston area.
Cheering and chanting, ''We demand respect! Bring the statue back!" as bewildered bystanders looked on, the protesters stood on the wind-whipped plaza for nearly an hour, listening to speakers who included the sculpture's Polish-born creator, Andrew Pitynski, and former mayor Ray Flynn, who resisted efforts by Beacon Hill neighbors to remove the statue from the Common in 1984.
''The mayor of Boston shamed the American people internationally," declared Pitynski, who traveled from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., to Boston for yesterday's event. ''The Partisans should return to the Boston Common where they belong, and Mayor Menino should apologize to Americans, Polish-Americans, and the Polish nation."
Flynn noted that history books are filled with the names of Polish-Americans who fought side by side with Americans, as far back as the Revolutionary War.
''The Partisans is just a reminder of who we all are," said Flynn. ''We are all Americans, and we're all proud of our roots. We should never allow anyone or anything to take that proud heritage away from us."
The 3,500-pound aluminum sculpture, which depicts five downtrodden warriors astride emaciated horses, came to Boston on temporary loan in 1983. Originally destined for City Hall Plaza, outgoing Mayor Kevin White feared that it might be interpreted as his administration ''leaving City Hall in defeat," so he quickly sent it to the Common, near the corner of Charles and Beacon streets.
Controversy has dogged the sculpture ever since. Arts officials never officially approved its location and many Beacon Hill neighbors considered it a depressing eyesore that was out of place on the Common, where public art is largely devoted to American history. Sarah Hutt, director of the Boston Art Commission, said safety concerns -- people were climbing on it during public events -- forced the city to finally remove the sculpture from the Common in January.
The MBTA has offered to add the sculpture to its public art collection and display it at a station. General manager Daniel A. Grabauskas said yesterday that last Friday, he signed a letter to the sculpture's California-based owners with a formal offer.
''The process is moving forward, and we're trying to move this forward," Hutt said yesterday.
But Polish-American community leaders who organized yesterday's protest said they wanted to be sure the new location would be equally prominent; some said no place could top the Common.
''There's another Irish monument in front of City Hall. No one is trying to remove it," said Pawel Opustil, 50, a paralegal who lives in South Boston who came to join the protestors yesterday. ''Why don't they respect our monuments?"
The community leaders also said they were angry with Menino for not answering two letters inviting him to meet with them about the sculpture's fate. One woman carried a sign that said, ''Mayor Menino, pick up the phone!"
The event, organized by a loose alliance of Polish-American leaders from Greater Boston, began at the South Boston storage yard where the statue is awaiting its fate.
Participants stuck red and white carnations in the chain-link fence topped with barbed wire around the yard before leaving on a 2-mile march to City Hall.
Pitynski, who created Partisans in 1979, said seeing his statue behind barbed wire felt to him like ''standing on the grave of my parents and my uncle," who were Partisans.
As they made their way across Fort Point Channel and to Downtown Crossing, the marchers, waving flags and signs, passed silently through the Holocaust Memorial on Congress Street before making their way up the brick plaza.
Konrad Biedul, 45, a Polish immigrant from Lexington who works for a computer science company, came with his wife and their two children. He said he had made a point of bringing his American-born children, now 12 and 15, to visit the Partisans from the time they were young to teach them about their history. He was devastated, he said, to hear the city had removed the sculpture.
''Poland could not really defend itself. It was surrounded, people were killed on all fronts, but they were still very proud, fighting to the end," he said. 