Polish Museum, Rapperswil

[1] Except for two hiatuses (1927–36, 1952–75), the Museum has existed to the present day—an outpost of Polish culture in Switzerland, a country which, over the past two centuries, has given refuge to generations of Poles.

The Żeromskis and Oktawia's daughter by a previous marriage, Henryka ("Henia"), lived in Rapperswil, in the garret of a three-story house at Bahnhofstrasse 28, owned by a Frau Fäh.

It had been erected by Count Plater, largely at his own expense, in 1868 (two years before the museum's opening) on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bar Confederation, to commemorate Poland's then-century-long struggle for independence.

Librarian Stefan Żeromski clashed with the Museum's curator at the time, Rużycki de Rozenwerth, a loner and eccentric whom the novelist would immortalize in his novel Homeless People as the administrator of Cisy (The Yews), Krzywosąd.

Zygmunt Wasilewski, the Museum's first-hired librarian (1892), who worked there for a year or two with Żeromski (with whom he had attended school in Kielce), later recalled: "We waded through memoirs, émigré brochures, ephemeral periodicals.

And there was plenty of it all, sometimes in triplicate, for the collections had arisen from a pooling of libraries left by the more prosperous 1831 émigrés (Władysław Plater, Krystyn Ostrowski, L[eonard] Chodźko, etc.

After Chodźko's death, the library acquired the archives of émigré organisations and committees, the papers of institutions and associations from the period of the Great Emigration, as well as contemporary printed matter, engravings and maps.

In 1883 the library received Count Plater's archives, valuable sources relating to the January 1863 Uprising and Polish post-Uprising immigrants to Switzerland.

[10] A notable object that survived was Tadeusz Kościuszko's heart, which now reposes in a chapel at Warsaw's Royal Castle, rebuilt in the 1970s from its deliberate destruction in World War II.

The library's memorabilia cover several centuries and include items associated with Tadeusz Kościuszko, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Władysław Reymont and Jan Nowak-Jeziorański.

In late 2014 it was reported that, within two years, Swiss authorities will be evicting the Polish Museum from its 12th-century home, the Rapperswil Castle overlooking Lake Zürich.

[13] It was then agreed, after a belated intervention by the Polish government which bought the new site on the lakeside, that the collection will be moving in the next two years, to the former Schwanen Hotel.