by George Weigel
TWO WEEKS BEFORE Veterans Day, 88-year-old World War II vet and fisherman Curtis Dagley of Gloucester, Mass., was decorated by the Republic of Poland. The great, late-Gothic sculptor Wit Stwosz (known in German as Veit Stoss) was smiling, from what I trust is his current station at the Throne of Grace. And therein lies a tale.
The colossal wooden altarpiece that Stwosz carved in Kraków for the Basilica of the Assumption of Our Lady, the Mariacki, is one of the great feats of decorative art in Christian history. More than 40-feet high and some 36-feet wide, the altarpiece is a gigantic triptych, the centerpiece of which is the Dormition of the Virgin in the presence of the Apostles. The two flanking panels depict numerous scenes from the Bible, including the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Resurrection, the Ascension and the Descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Because the biblical figures (some of which are 12-feet tall) were modeled on the burghers, tradesmen, waitresses and housewives that Stwosz met during his mid-15th century labors in Kraków, the altarpiece is a marvelous evocation of what the Creed means by the “communion of saints.”
Just before the German invasion of September 1939, the altarpiece was disassembled and the main wooden figures taken to the cathedral in Sandomierz for safekeeping. But Nazi looters were determined to take Stwosz’s composition to Nuremberg, his native city, and got their way in 1941 when the altarpiece was removed to Nuremberg Castle and hidden in its basement. Discovered by the U.S. Army detachments known to moviegoers as the “Monuments Men,” the Stwosz altarpiece was returned to Kraków on a 30-car train in April-May 1946, escorted by American GIs.
Enter Curtis Dagley.
The 18-year old Gloucesterman was a buck private at the time, assigned to guard duty on the train bringing recovered art treasures back to Poland. But tensions were high in Kraków, where the newly installed Polish communist regime was not, to put it gently, popular. The regime planned a large May Day “workers’ celebration” on May 1; it was quickly followed by an anti-communist demonstration on May 3 in which 800 protesting students were arrested and 30 wounded. (The role played in that demonstration by a then-obscure seminarian named Karol Wojtyła – later to be known as Pope St. John Paul II – likely had something to do with Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha’s decision to send the seminarian to Rome for graduate studies immediately after his ordination in November 1946.)
So congenitally nasty regime officials and their secret police goons were in an even more petulant frame of mind than usual on May 5, when the altarpiece was officially and ceremonially returned. Perhaps to underscore their unhappiness, they claimed that an American soldier had shot two Polish militiamen. Private Dagley was charged with this “crime,” handcuffed and held in custody, even after another GI admitted to randomly firing his pistol and accidentally wounding one Pole the previous night. The falsely charged Private Dagley’s commanding officer made the imprudent decision to leave him behind under Polish arrest, thinking that everything would sort out in due course. Thus Dagley spent unnecessary (and certainly unwanted) time as a guest of the ill-named Polish People’s Republic before being returned to American control and mustered out of the Army.
I first learned about this from my friend Agata Wolska, archivist of the Mariacki, who was a great help when I was preparing “City of Saints: A Pilgrimage to John Paul II’s Kraków.” Dr. Wolska, a charming and tenacious scholar, spent a year tracking down the American who helped restore the Stwosz altarpiece to Kraków and was unjustly imprisoned as a result. Her persistence was rewarded when she met Dagley in Gloucester in 2012. Last month’s ceremony, at which Dagley was presented with the Bene Merito medal of the Polish foreign ministry, completed a work of thanksgiving in fidelity to historical truth.
There’s more than a whiff of isolationism in the American air these days. The remarkable, wonderful story of Curtis Dagley and the Poles who remembered him with gratitude 70 years later is a poignant reminder that some still look to the U.S. as a pillar of stability and decency in a very nasty world.
Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
