A life of serving community

Kazimierz Patalas left Poland in the late 1960s to make a new life for him and his family elsewhere, but he never forgot the lessons he learned as a young man in the country of his birth.

Perhaps no one lesson stuck with him more than the importance of giving back to the community. It was something he first endeavoured to do as a teen in his native Poland and continued to do for many decades after arriving in his adopted home of Winnipeg in 1967.

“He was always trying to do good for the community. I guess that was sort of ingrained in him from Poland,” says son Jacek, one of three children born to Patalas and his wife Józefa.

“Everything you did you kind of did for the community, for making sacrifices. Your life was geared towards or focused on helping society or the community where you live.”

Patalas was born Aug. 24, 1925 in Rakoniewice, a small town located in the west-central region of Poland. He was one of six siblings born to parents Stanislaw and Bronislawa Patalas.

His early life was anything but easy.

Patalas was just 14 when the Second World War began following Germany’s invasion of Poland. Soon after, he was shipped to a labour camp in Germany where he was forced to worked on a farm. Fortunately for him, he met a kindly doctor who ordered that he be sent back to Poland due to a heart condition.

“This good doctor kind of took pity on him and said that he had a heart murmur or something like that and they sent him home. He was quite lucky,” Jacek says.

Soon after returning home, Patalas joined an underground Polish resistance organization known as Szare Szeregi, which means the Grey Column in English.

Like Patalas, most of the young men in the group were part of a local Scouts troop. They would monitor local radio broadcasts and used the information they gleamed from them to make up news flyers they distributed to keep locals up to date on the war. They also organized Polish history classes for young children as most schools were closed at the time.

“It wasn’t really any active fighting, but if they were discovered they would have been arrested and probably killed,” Jacek recalls his dad telling him.

Patalas would eventually resume his education and graduated from a high school in the town of Krotoszyn in 1946. He later attended the University of Wroclaw where he earned a doctorate and became a research scientist in the field of limnology, the study of inland aquatic ecosystems.

It was while attending the University of Wroclaw that Patalas met the young woman who would become his wife. He and Józefa used to meet on the train each morning on the way to school and struck up a friendship.

A romance ensued and in 1951 they were married. They were inseparable until Józefa’s death in 2005.

“They were very, very close. They were actually both biologists. My mother worked with my father in Poland identifying plankton. She still helped him with his work (in Canada), even though she wasn’t working professionally anymore,” Jacek recalls.

“My dad would always say that that’s the most important thing one can do in life is find a good partner. I think he was quite pleased with his.”

One of the most life-changing moments in Patalas’s life occurred in 1967 when he was working as a professor of hydrobiology in Olsztyn, Poland. Canada was set to open its own Freshwater Institute in Winnipeg and began recruiting some of the top research scientists from around the world, including Patalas.

He jumped at the chance to get in on the ground floor of an exciting new opportunity, and as much as it broke his heart to do so, the time had come to leave his beloved Poland.

“He figured that there was really no future for him in Poland to get into a higher position. To get any further, there was a lot of pressure on him to become a (Communist) Party member. You had to be a party member to get any better positions,” Jacek explains, adding his parents had to temporarily renounced their Polish citizenship when they decided to remain in Canada permanently.

Patalas became well-known for his work with the Freshwater Institute and became one of Canada’s leading experts on plankton.

Along with fellow researcher Dave Schindler, he helped create a device known as the Schindler-Patalas plankton trap. The transparent, box-like device is still in use today to collect zooplankton samples at specific depths in lakes and ponds.

He also published an atlas on the distribution of plankton in Canada and how it spread thousands of years ago.

As important as that work was, it was Patalas’s efforts on behalf of the Polish Canadian community that he was perhaps best known for.

In the 1980s he served as the host of Polonika, a public access television show that provided news about what was happening with the Solidarity movement in Poland at the time. As a result, he and Józefa’s home became a haven for visiting Polish luminaries including poet Czeslaw Milosz, who won the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature.

After retiring from the Freshwater Institute, Patalas conducted videotaped interviews with dozens of Polish immigrant veterans living in Winnipeg. Those interviews formed the basis of the book Providence Watching: Journeys from Wartorn Poland to the Canadian Prairies (University of Manitoba Press). He was also a leading figure with the Polish Combatants Association, a local organization dedicated to preserving Polish military history.

Chris Lorenc is a PCA former president and worked with Patalas on various committees over the years. He calls him a valued friend and mentor who was always willing to help someone in need.

“He was always, in every single one of my dealings with him, a very respectful, accommodating and terrific listener who was always willing and able to give sound advice,” Lorenc remembers.

“When I was president of the association, I would always say to him, ‘What do you think?’ He was a very important confidant. I knew that if I went to him and shared a challenge I was having, I would get objective, fair, considered and measured advice upon which I could always rely.”

Considering the nature of his professional career, it should come as no surprise that Patalas was an avid outdoorsman.

Jacek remembers taking canoe trips in Poland with his dad before they left for Canada. Once here, they would often pack up the family’s tent trailer and embark on a road trip to some exotic destination such as the West Coast or the Grand Canyon.

“I think it was from scouting. He was a scout leader when he was 12 or 13 and he became really integrated into going camping in the woods,” Jacek says of his dad’s love of the outdoors.

Education was another important part of his life. So important, in fact, that Jacek estimates his parents provided nearly 300 scholarships to students at the same high school he attended in Krotoszyn.

Patalas died Jan. 16 of this year at the age of 100. Jacek still marvels at what his dad accomplished.

“I’m still in awe of all that he’s done in life. I can’t compare myself because I don’t have that much energy. He did so much.”

fpcity@freepress.com