The Strange Odyssey of Poland's National Treasures, 1939-1961 by Gordon Swoger

Author:Gordon Swoger [Swoger, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781550025156
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Published: 2004-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Political Manoeuvring

How had the actual removal of the Polish treasures from the Hôtel-Dieu been carried out? There was no public disclosure about this clandestine operation until 1961, when the last of the treasures were finally leaving Quebec City. At that time Walter Duchesnay, who had served for many years as Premier Duplessis’s chauffeur and bodyguard, was interviewed concerning his involvement with the Polish treasures.

Duchesnay had been called into Duplessis’s office on February 25, 1948, and was instructed by the premier to get the Polish treasures out of the Hôtel-Dieu before 4:00 p.m. — the deadline given to Mother St. Henri by Dr. Bielski, the chargé d’affaires of the Warsaw Polish government. Duchesnay counted on the fact that many vehicles moved in and out of the Hôtel-Dieu daily, bringing supplies for the hospital. He worked that day with eight constables from the Quebec Provincial Police. Their task was not an easy one: each case that needed to be moved weighed between 250 and 300 pounds, and twenty-four of these cases had to be shoved through a window in the convent’s crypt and then pulled through four-foot-deep snowdrifts to a small alley where the moving vans waited. The plan worked well and the trucks moved out just before the deadline without arousing the suspicion of the RCMP, who were keeping watch over the hospital. The trucks then proceeded across the city to the Provincial Museum, on the edge of the Plains of Abraham. There they had to wait for several hours until the museum employees had finished their work for the day and departed. During the evening the cases were unloaded and taken to a vault in the basement, where they were to be stored under lock and key and guarded by two pairs of Quebec Provincial Police constables, each of whom worked a twelve-hour shift.200

The situation at the Provincial Museum in Quebec City after the arrival of the Polish treasures was ably described by a locally based reporter who visited the museum on March 4, the day after Duplessis’s surprising disclosure of the removal of the Polish treasures. P.C. Dubois wrote:

An armed guard of Provincial Police stands watch night and day at the Provincial Museum here, I found today on a visit to the massive grey stone building overlooking the historic Plains of Abraham.…

Visitors roam at will through the museum’s departments on three floors during visiting hours. But two officers guard the door leading to the basement’s steel vaults and 36 [sic] chests containing $1,000,000 in Polish art spirited into the building from a cloistered convent here in the night of February 25.…

Men on the night shift — which changed when the museum’s doors closed at 5:00 p.m. — could be prompted into saying only that before the dispute over ownership of the treasures is finally settled, they’ll know something about art. The long hours are spent looking over the works on view.

The two men on the day shift would not even comment on whether or not they were at all interested in art.

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