How the Holy See in Canada Helped Poland Protect its Secrets

Rafal Domisiewicz retrieved the last box of
documents from Rev. Tom Cassidy in May 2006.

From Embassy
By Anca Gurzu

Rev. Tom Cassidy made his way down the stairs to the basement of the centuries-old building in Rockliffe Park that had been home to the embassy of the Holy See in Canada for the past 25 years.

It was 1997, and staff at the Apostolic Nunciature had decided it was time to sort through the mission's archives and get rid of any papers that didn't need to be sent to the Vatican's permanent archival collection in Rome. Rev. Cassidy, English secretary and Canonical counsel at the Nunciature, was given the unenviable task of housekeeper.

Scattered around the basement were old event invitations, advertisements and other papers that one might expect to find in the basement of any diplomatic mission in Ottawa. However, in a chamber adjacent to the boiler room, Rev. Cassidy found four non-descript cardboard boxes on the floor.

"There was nothing from the outside that made them stand out," he recalls. "They weren't the fancy banker boxes, but rather boxes in which you might find canned goods in."

But if nothing stood out from the outside, the inside of the boxes painted a completely different picture. Going through the documents in the boxes, Rev. Cassidy found he could not decipher the foreign language, but his eyes quickly fell on the letterhead imprinted on the papers. It belonged to the Polish diplomatic mission.

It turned out that most of the documents covered the usual diplomatic business: consular affairs, visas, inheritances, Canadian newspaper clippings, cultural information and briefs about disapora communities. But about 10 per cent had a "top secret" stamp on them, he recalls, and another part was marked as confidential.

"I was sitting on the floor with the boxes all around me," says Rev. Cassidy. "I love history. I was excited. I knew there was something there."

The papers he stumbled upon were indeed historical and represented a lost part of pre- and post-Second World War and pre-Cold War diplomatic history in Ottawa. A fifth box was found in 2006 and now Poland is hoping to find a Canadian researcher interested in filling in the gaps of early 20^th-century Canadian-Polish relations.

Protecting secrets

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, prompting the start of the Second World War. For the next six years, Polish diplomats around the world worked for the government-in-exile in London. However, on June 28, 1945, the Soviet Union, whose Red Army had chased the Nazis from the Polish territories, installed a puppet government in Warsaw based on an agreement reached with the US and UK during the Yalta Conference. A week later, Canada and other Western countries officially recognized the legitimacy of the communist provisional government, spurning the London-based government-in-exile.

Intent on saving their country's archives before representatives from the new puppet communist government in Warsaw arrived, Polish diplomats, led by then-Polish diplomat Waclaw Babinski, smuggled all the documents they could out of the mission and turned to the Catholic church to safeguard the files. (The Canadian government eventually allowed Mr. Babinski and his staff to stay in Canada as immigrants.)

At that time, the Vatican's delegation was located on Queen Elizabeth Drive, close to the Bank Street bridge, in an old Victorian house. That house burned down years after the delegation moved its headquarters to the present location in Rockliffe Park in 1962.

"Everything was transferred, including the boxes," Rev. Cassidy explains. "I cannot verify, but I bet by that time nobody knew what they were. There were just boxes in our archives."

Although there are no records of the hand-over taking place, the decision on where to hide the archive was probably not very difficult—not only because Poland and the Catholic Church had had a strong religious and cultural connection dating back centuries. Rafal Domisiewicz, first counsellor in charge of cultural and scientific events at the Polish Embassy in Ottawa, points out that in 1945, the Vatican had not withdrawn recognition from the London-based Polish government-in-exile, and—in fact—was the last foreign government to do so in 1972.

However, Rev. Cassidy also feels that the fact the Vatican's representative in Ottawa at that time, Archbishop Ildebrando Antoniutti, was a staunch anti-communist may have been a key factor in the Poles' decision to hide the documents with the Holy See.

The boxes stuffed with documents from the embassy in Ottawa weren't the only things hidden by pre-communist Polish officials. National treasures that had been rescued from the country before the Nazis invaded and held safely in Britain throughout the course of the war were brought across the Atlantic by ship and hidden in different Catholic churches and monasteries in the region so they wouldn't be taken by the communists. The hiding of the national treasures started even before the Soviet Union installed the puppet government, Mr. Domisiewicz says.

Mr. Babinski, at the request of the British government, submitted an inventory of all his belongings to the British High Commission in April 1946, says Mr. Domisiewicz. That inventory, however, did not satisfy the first Polish communist envoy, Alfred Fiderkiewicz, who arrived in Ottawa in May 1946. In his reports to Warsaw, he wrote about his efforts to recover what he thought to be the missing property of the state by looking for it even in private homes.

This discrepancy between Mr. Babinski's inventory and Mr. Fiderkiewicz's reports of missing state belongings leave both Rev. Cassidy and Mr. Domisiewicz puzzled to this day about when exactly the archive was hidden.

Maybe, they guess, the Ottawa-based Polish diplomats had already hidden the archive by the time the British had asked them for the inventory, explaining why the inventory would be succinct. Or maybe Mr. Babinski decided to submit an incomplete inventory at the request of Polish government-in-exile.

What is clear, however, is that the archives remained safe—and eventually forgotten until Rev. Cassidy's discovery.

Circuitous route home

When Rev. Cassidy realized what he had found in the four boxes in 1997, he was immediately driven by curiosity. Some of the documents were in English, and "I went straight to September 1939," he says.

The sensitive documents contained reporting on communist and fascist activities in Canada, information on the wartime military collaboration and security policy between Canada and Poland, and also files on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which hundreds of Polish Jews tried to fight their Nazi occupiers.

Rev. Cassidy remembers reading about a Polish diplomat's mission to Canada's West Coast in 1941, around the time of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which precipitated the United States's entry into the war. The purpose of the trip was to check on Canada's defences on that coast, he says.

"This was fascinating from a Canadian perspective. His report read 'Defences? What defences?'" Rev. Cassidy recalls. "By the 1990s we all knew that Canada and the US had nothing on the West Coast, we didn't have much of a navy out there."

He says he continued to go through the documents for a few weeks. Eventually, Polish-speaking Rev. Tadeusz Nowak came to the Nunciature from Toronto and spent over a month there cataloguing the documents. When that was done, Rev. Cassidy presented a brief to then-Apostolic nuncio Archbishop Carlo Curis.

"I saw no reason why [the documents] should not be returned," he says. "We were given them to look after until they could be returned [to Poland]."

But after Rev. Cassidy gave his report to his superior, the diplomatic game began.

Archbishop Curis contacted the secretary of state of the Vatican, who then contacted officials in the Polish department of foreign affairs in Warsaw, who said they would like the documents back. Eventually approval came back to the Holy See Embassy in Ottawa. The nuncio then called the Polish ambassador of the time, Bogdan Grzelonski, a historian by training, to tell him the boxes were ready to be picked up.

They were handed back to the original owners in 1998.

"We thought it was all over," Rev. Cassidy says smiling.

And it was—until 2006. That's when the Nunciature decided to go through its library collection and get rid of all the duplicates. And again, Rev. Cassidy went to work.

He remembers columns and columns of books being stacked in an unused mini-apartment in the basement. As they were emptying the bathroom, he noticed a cardboard box on the floor.

"I've seen this before," he remembers thinking. "When I opened it, there it was, more documents. I knew right away what they were."

It was the fifth box.

He then told the Apostolic nuncio of the time, Archbishop Luigi Ventura, of his discovery and that he didn't think it was necessary to go through the entire diplomatic process again.

Mr. Domisiewicz picked up the last box on May 9, 2006. It was 50 centimetres wide, 42 centimetres tall and 23 centimetres deep, according to Mr. Domisiewicz's measurements. The 13 folders in the box contained similar information as the previous ones.

Mr. Domisiewicz, who holds a Bachelor's in history and political science from the University of British Columbia, describes with excitement the day he opened the last box of documents with Rev. Cassidy at the Nunciature.

"We were sitting there and having coffee, and I was telling [Rev. Cassidy] what's in there. I was so excited," he says. "I brought the box back to the embassy and I told the ambassador, and all the staff came around."

Since some of the files were stamped "top secret," Mr. Domisiewicz says he was not sure what to do with them at first.

"Are they supposed to be kept in a secure location at the embassy? Or can we just keep them anywhere? Are they declassified after all these decades?" he asks. "These kinds of questions were running through my mind."

They eventually stored the documents in a safe at the embassy until they were shipped to Poland.

Still, when remembering that last box he took back to the embassy, Mr. Domisiewicz says he was struck by one thing.

"It seems the [hiding] operation might have been done in a rush because the files were just stacked up in dossiers," he says. What is sure, however, is that the Polish Embassy in late 1945 and early 1946 was a "beehive of activity."

"They knew it was coming," he says.

After so many years, the contents of all five boxes are now at the Archives of New Records in Warsaw, Mr. Domisiewicz says, still leaving the exact order of events unclear.

"All the people involved in this kept it to themselves, and then took it to their grave," says Rev. Cassidy.

Mr. Domisiewicz says the documents await a Canadian researcher interested to fill the gaps and further explore the Canada-Polish relations of that time.

There is already one monograph, which tracks those relations during that time period, but it is largely based on Canadian sources. Polish sources would paint a clearer picture, he says.