What happened at Gdów on 26 February 1846?
At Gdów, a village on the Raba southeast of Kraków, an Austrian detachment from Bochnia under Ludwig von Benedek, joined by armed peasants, surprised a column of the Kraków Uprising led by Colonel Jakub Suchorzewski. The insurgents broke at the first shots. Scythemen trapped at the cemetery wall threw down their scythes and begged for mercy, and the peasants killed them. 154 insurgents died and several dozen were taken prisoner.5
At Gdów a Polish rising led by the gentry ran into a peasant revolt against that same gentry. The Austrian soldiers barely had to fight. Many of the insurgents who died that day were killed by Galician peasants, a few days after the start of the Kraków Uprising and fifteen years after the defeat of the November Uprising. For the wider story, see our guide to the military history of Poland.6
The Kraków Uprising
In 1846 Polish conspirators planned a national rising in all three partitions, set for the night of 21 to 22 February. Arrests in the Prussian partition crippled the plan there, and the rising broke out only in the Free City of Kraków, a small autonomous republic under the protection of Austria, Prussia and Russia.7
After brief street fighting the Austrian troops of General Ludwig Collin left Kraków (on 21 February by one account, the next day by another). The insurgents set up a National Government of the Republic of Poland, and Jan Tyssowski was proclaimed dictator.8
The government's manifesto called all Poles to arms and promised the peasants the land they farmed, free of their duties to the landlords. The promise lay in the future, and the countryside of Austrian Galicia had little reason to trust the gentry who made it.9
The Galician slaughter
In western Galicia the peasants did not join the rising. Instead they turned on the manors. From 18 to 20 February, by different accounts, and first of all around Tarnów, bands of peasants attacked manor houses, killed landowners and estate officials, and handed nobles they suspected of conspiracy over to the Austrian authorities. Poles call it the rabacja or the Galician slaughter.10
By the count of Monika Paś of the National Museum in Kraków, the revolt spread from Sanok to Wadowice, lasted until about the middle of March, devastated 430 manors and killed between 1,000 and 2,000 of the Polish landed gentry. An educational text of the Polish Ministry of Education puts the dead at more than 1,000, including about 200 owners or leaseholders of estates and many more estate officials. Some 3,000 people suspected of joining the uprising were arrested.11
Polish historians hold that the Austrian authorities knew of the conspiracy and stirred the peasants against the nobility. Vienna denied it, but in 1846 reports that Austrian officials paid peasants for captured insurgents went round the German and French press, and in the French Chamber of Peers Charles de Montalembert spoke of 1,458 people murdered.12
Wieliczka and the march on Bochnia
The uprising tried to spread from Kraków into Galicia. Jakub Suchorzewski, a native of the Poznań region and a former soldier of the Prussian army, was given the rank of colonel and sent with a detachment of volunteers and krakus cavalry to the salt-mining town of Wieliczka, which had gone over to the uprising.13
In Wieliczka Suchorzewski recruited miners, craftsmen and peasants and armed many of them with scythes fixed upright on poles, the weapon of the Polish scythemen. Told that the Austrian garrison of Bochnia, the next district town to the east, was about to retreat to Tarnów, he set out on 25 February to take Bochnia as easily as he had taken Wieliczka.14
By Józef Wawel-Louis's count in his chronicle of the revolution, published in 1898, about 350 men marched out of Wieliczka: two half-squadrons of krakus horsemen, riflemen and scythemen, most of the infantry being peasants and laborers.15
Benedek at Bochnia
The Austrians had in fact been preparing to leave Bochnia. On 24 February Ludwig von Benedek, an officer of the general command in Lwów sent by the governor of Galicia, Archduke Ferdinand d'Este, to see how far the revolt had spread, arrived in the town. He stopped the retreat and took command of the garrison.16
Benedek's rank in 1846 is given differently. Polish accounts call him a lieutenant colonel (Limanowski a major), the German national biographies a colonel, and the Fondation Napoléon writes that he was a lieutenant colonel promoted to colonel for this campaign.17
He sent word to General Collin to move on Kraków and had the district officials raise the peasants of the surrounding villages. Wawel-Louis, citing two German pamphlets of 1846 and 1847, and Limanowski, citing a study published by the Austrian war archives, both write that the peasants were promised five guldens for every captured insurgent. Limanowski adds a hundredweight of salt.18
Early on 26 February Benedek marched toward Gdów. He took 495 infantry of the Nugent regiment and 172 light horse of the Kaiser regiment by Wawel-Louis's count, or about 500 infantry and more than 170 horse in Limanowski's. Crowds of armed peasants from the villages along the way joined the column.19
26 February: surprise at Gdów
The insurgents reached Gdów that morning. Bands of peasants fled before them, and they captured at least one Austrian light horseman (two, according to Wawel-Louis). The column then settled into the inn and the houses of the village to rest after the march.20
The captured horsemen said that Benedek was on his way from Bochnia. Even so, Suchorzewski rode off with some of his officers to a nearby manor for breakfast. He was not with his men when the Austrians arrived.21
Benedek, who believed the insurgents to be far stronger than they were, sent the peasants with a small party of infantry and light horse round his right to strike the insurgents' left flank and cut off their retreat to Wieliczka, and led his infantry along the highway into the village.22
The first Austrian shots threw the insurgent outposts into flight. With no commander to lead them, the krakus cavalry fled down the road toward Wieliczka, and part of it got away. The riflemen fired only a few shots, then threw down their weapons and ran or hid in lofts and cellars.23
Killing at the cemetery wall
The scythemen, cut off from the road, crowded together at the wall of the village cemetery and surrendered there. The peasants surrounded them, and although the scythemen threw their scythes to the ground and begged for mercy, they were killed. The peasants then searched the village and killed the insurgents they dragged out of houses, barns and cellars.24
The Austrian officers and soldiers tried to stop the killing and pulled wounded insurgents out of the peasants' hands. Wawel-Louis writes that Benedek himself shouted to his men to spare the children. In this way several dozen insurgents were saved and taken prisoner, 59 by Wawel-Louis's count, some of them badly wounded.25
In all, 154 insurgents died, half of them murdered by the peasants by Monika Paś's reckoning. Their mutilated bodies were thrown into three pits on the pasture by the cemetery. The Gdów local history portal of the Pontifical University of John Paul II notes that the peasants of Gdów itself fled to the woods and took no part, and that the killers came from other villages.26
In his official report Benedek stated that his troops had lost no one killed or wounded, and that an officer's horse had been hurt. Suchorzewski never appeared on the battlefield. The Gdów portal says he fled with the column's cash, and according to Wawel-Louis he turned up that summer among the émigrés in Paris, where he was made to account for the money he had received in Wieliczka and returned part of it.27
After Gdów
Benedek marched on and took Wieliczka the same evening, while its insurgent garrison fled to Kraków in panic. Wawel-Louis, quoting a survivor, writes that the prisoners from Gdów were locked in the cellars of the Wieliczka town hall for 48 hours without food and later sent to the prisons in Kraków and Wiśnicz.28
Warned by Benedek, Collin moved on Kraków and took its suburb of Podgórze on 27 February. That same day the democrat Edward Dembowski, who led a religious procession out of Kraków to win over the peasants, was killed when Austrian troops attacked it.29
The uprising lasted only nine days. Tyssowski gave up power, and on 4 March his detachment laid down its arms on the Prussian border. In November 1846 Austria, Prussia and Russia abolished the Free City of Kraków, and its territory was annexed to the Austrian Empire as the Grand Duchy of Kraków.30
Benedek received the Knight's Cross of the Order of Leopold for crushing the insurgents at Gdów and Wieliczka, and the city of Lwów made him an honorary citizen. Twenty years later he commanded the Northern Army defeated by the Prussians at Königgrätz in 1866.31
The mound and the Rachel monument
For decades no cross stood over the mass grave. Wawel-Louis records that around 1848 a small medal was struck in memory of the dead with the words "A sad memory of the battle of Gdów, 26 February 1846". Monika Paś of the National Museum in Kraków describes a bread-paste medallion with the same words in the museum's collection, made by a political prisoner at Bochnia in 1847.32
In 1906 a mound was completed over the graves, now inside the cemetery. On it stands a monument by the sculptor Wojciech Samek, which the municipality calls the Rachel monument after the biblical mother weeping for her children. The Gdów municipality dates the monument to 1906, while Monika Paś writes that it was set up in 1916.33
