A radiant trail... Joseph Jarzębowski

Second floor of the museum, Temporary Exhibition Hall

The exhibition opened in April 2023, dedicated to Fr. Joseph Jarzębowski, MIC, the founder of our museum.
 
The spacious buildings of the prestigious College of the Marian Fathers in Bielany, Warsaw, where Fr. Joseph Jarzębowski worked until World War II, no longer exist. Small mementos of those years remain: photos with his mother and alumni, the rules and regulations of the College, books with dedications, a prayer book with pictures of beloved saints, articles in the press about the first exhibitions of national memorabilia.

An orphanage operates today in the hacienda in Santa Rosa, Mexico, where Father Jarzębowski cared for Poles rescued by the Anders Army from Soviet Russia between 1943 and 1949, including nearly 700 orphans. But the memory of Father Jarzębowski has always remained among the residents of this Polish colony and their descendants. The uniqueness of this place is illustrated by the smiling faces in the numerous photographs, the school notebooks of children who survived the gehenna of deportation and the colorful cut-outs they made, referring to Polish folk art.

The estate and palace at Fawley Court in England, which since 1953 served to educate boys from the families of Anders army soldiers and war refugees and for many of them was the most important place to cultivate Polishness, has again become a private country estate. Photos of Polish celebrations show thousands of people for whom Fawley Court, with its Divine Mercy College with boarding school, became a Polish island in Britain. When Fr. Jarzębowski left Fawley Court for London to hear confessions, the longest queue of penitents would line up at his confessional. And when he returned from a retreat preached in Paris, his pupils waited, curious to see what Polish souvenirs the priest had brought back from his trip this time. 

He lived only 67 years, on top of which he suffered from heart disease almost all his life. In 1941, escaping from Soviet-occupied Lithuania, he took with him on a long journey through Siberia and Japan the "Memorial on Divine Mercy" by Father Michael Sopoćko. Back in the United States, together with the Felician Sisters, he published the first pictures with the image of the Merciful Jesus, which found their way into the hands of soldiers.
Wherever he was, wherever fate threw him, he did not forget to save Polonica, always, of course, with a view to expanding the collection of the museum he established at the Bielany School. Later, once he knew he would not return to his homeland, with a view to the museum at the College of Divine Mercy in Fawley Court.