Karolina Lanckorońska | |
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Lanckorońska as a child, with her father
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Born |
Buchberg am Kamp (), Gars am Kamp, Austria-Hungary |
11 August 1898
Died | 25 August 2002 Rome, Italy |
(aged 104)
Nationality | Polish |
Occupation | Countess, educator |
Known for | Anti-Nazi resistance, historian |
Countess Karolina Maria Adelajda Franciszka Ksawera Małgorzata Edina Lanckorońska (Gars am Kamp, Lower Austria, 11 August 1898 — 25 August 2002, Rome, Italy) was a Polish noble, World War II resistance fighter, postwar historian as well as art historian. A patriot in her life, Lanckorońska bequeathed her family's enormous art collection to her beloved Poland only after her homeland became free from communism and Soviet domination during the Revolutions of 1989. The Lanckoronski Collection may now for the most part be seen in Warsaw's Royal Castle and Kraków's Wawel Castle.
Karolina Lanckorońska was the daughter of Count Karol Lanckoroński, a Polish nobleman from a Galician family, and his third wife, Countess Margaret Lichnovsky, daughter of Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky. Karolina was reared and attended university in Vienna (capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of which much of partitioned Poland was a part), living at her family's palace, the Palais Lanckoroński. After Poland regained independence in 1918, Lanckorońska taught at Lwów University. She received her Ph.D. in History of Art in 1934, habilitated in 1936 by Poland's Ministry of Education. Following the invasion of Poland, including Lwów, by the Soviet Red Army along with the attack on Poland by Nazi Germany in September 1939, she witnessed at first hand the terror and atrocities committed by the Soviets and Nazis, which she later described in her War Memoirs.