Kaya Mirecka Ploss

KAYA MIRECKA PLOSS

Kaya Mirecka Ploss, an American of Polish decent, was born in Silesia on September 12, 1924, the daughter of poor parents. Today she is one of the best-known women of Polish descent in America, and one of the best-known American women in Poland.

Kaya’s life is like a drama played out in many acts. It is impossible to capture all of them, for Kaya’s pattern has always been to encounter a challenge, overcome it, and go to the next, never looking backwards and never resting on her laurels.

When Kaya was very young, she and her only brother, children of a Polish Silesian father and a German Silesian mother, witnessed their mother’s death from cancer. Kaya attended school sporadically because she had to care for her sick mother. Soon after their mother died, the Nazi army occupied Poland, and Kaya’s Jewish grandmother, a committed convert to Catholicism, was taken to Auschwitz where she died of pneumonia. Her father was taken to a different camp, and Kaya and her brother, left without family to care for them, were taken to camps for children of mixed blood, called Mischlings. Kaya was detained for almost four years in the camp at Landsberg am Lech in Germany. There she was subjected to many terrors, including abuse and rape, but finally, when the Americans came, she was released.

Because Kaya knew nothing of the fate of her father or brother at that point, she agreed to travel to Italy to serve with Polish troops who were fighting there with the Americans under the leadership of the famous Polish General, Władysław Albert Anders, previously the commander of the Polish Army on the Russian Front. When she arrived in Italy, Kaya, who had a beautiful singing voice, was assigned to the Military Theatre to sing for the Polish soldiers. By the end of 1946, the Polish military units in Italy were transferred to England, and Kaya accompanied them and appeared in the Polish Emigree Theater as an actress and singer. It was there that Kaya was able to resume her education. She finished high school and for five years attended the London University of the Arts, then known as St. Martin’s College of Art, where she studied fashion dress design and costume history. While there, she was sent for an internship in Paris where she worked for Dior and for Yves St. Laurent. While living and working in England, in 1947 she married the well-known Polish actor and stage director, Wieslaw Mirecki, and they had one son, Jerzy, who, alas, died of poliomyelitis at the age of six.

After her education was complete, and as she progressed in the world of fashion design, Kaya returned to her native Poland, following her husband Wieslaw, who had accepted a position at the National Theater in Poland. Part of her motivation was the news that her father, who had survived both Nazi and Communist prison camps, had returned to Poland but was in poor health. Her return permitted Kaya to re-establish contact with both her father and long-lost brother. In 1958 Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Trade proposed that Kaya design elegant but inexpensive clothing for ordinary people – a new concept in a country still rebuilding from a devastating war. Kaya accepted the challenge, which led to the establishment of Poland’s first fashion house, called Moda Polska, which remained Poland’s leading fashion house until its liquidation in 1998.

Kaya was also encountering difficulties with the Communist regime, whose policies she had openly resisted. Thanks to her personal friendships with many renowned Polish theater and film personalities, who had joined Radio Free Europe in Munich in order to resist Poland’s communist regime, government officials attempted to recruit Kaya to infiltrate RFE and spy on her former theater colleagues and friends. She refused and was arrested and detained, and then was fired from her job. Defiant, and determined to do something useful that would not be likely to annoy the authorities, Kaya decided to write a book, The Road Across the Bridge, which won the First Prize for Literature in Poland, and which was serialized and produced throughout Poland on Polish radio. Buoyed by this success, Kaya decided to become a writer, and wrote twelve short stories, many adapted for television. Then she wrote a play called Nightingale Alley. Three large Polish theaters began rehearsing it. Upon its opening in the first theatre, the Communist censors shut the theater after three performances and Kaya was again under arrest by the Communists. At that point, it was clear to Kaya and her husband that she was a marked person. The two conferred and decided that the only way for her to protect him, herself, and to survive, was for them to divorce and for her to leave Poland.

So, in March of 1966, – nearly fifty years ago—Kaya left for the US, where she married Dr. Sidney Ploss, a Sovietologist and professor at Princeton and later Harvard. When he joined the Department of State, he and Kaya moved to Washington, DC, where she has lived ever since. After her marriage, Kaya became the buyer of designer apparel at Saks Fifth Avenue, where she offered fashion advice to socialites and the wives of politicians. She was sent to Paris to purchase designer apparel, and there reunited with Yves Saint Laurent. After some years with Saks, Kaya felt financially secure, and left her employment with Saks to engage with the Polish American community in efforts to promote the cultural and historical knowledge of Poland in America. She became involved with The American Council for Polish Culture, Inc. (ACPC), a national non-profit, charitable, cultural and educational organization that connects affiliated Polish-American cultural and financial organizations throughout the United States. After several years of service to and through the American Council as the co-editor of its Quarterly Polish Heritage and as President of the Washington, DC Chapter, Kaya ran for and became its national President. During those years, she engaged with Lech Walesa and the Solidarity Movement, raising money and offering moral support to the movement. At the end of the Communist era in Poland, Walesa was elected President and specially invited Kaya to be there for his inauguration. Later he bestowed on her “The Officer’s Cross.”

While President of the American Council for Polish Culture, Kaya traveled to every affiliate to raise money to establish the American Center of Polish Culture in Washington, DC. She was successful, and after raising over $700,000, she purchased 2025 O Street, NW, where she presented concerts of Polish music, exhibited Polish Art, and arranged for the sale of Polish arts and crafts in the Center’s Amber Gallery. She instituted a program of inviting inner city children to the Center to introduce them to Polish history and culture, and she started a program of scholarships through which she brought over 200 Polish children to America for visits of two weeks so they could be exposed to democracy and American culture. One of her stops with the children was in Texas to visit Panna Maria, the first Polish Catholic Parish in the United States. Kaya later visited with Pope John Paul II, whom she had known in Poland when he was the Bishop of Krakow, and asked him to establish a Polish Parish in the Washington, DC area. He quickly responded, and designated Our Lady Queen of Poland, located in Silver Spring, MD, as a Polish Parish. In addition, during this period, Kaya arranged a staging at the Kennedy Center of The Jeweler’s Shop, a play written by Pope John Paul II, and she produced three Chopin concerts for the Washington Performing Arts Society.

Shortly after her arrival in the US, the Watergate hearings began, and Kaya was intrigued with the notion of freedom and the power of the American people to question their government openly. She watched every moment of the hearings on television and developed a fuller understanding of the free speech she was going to enjoy in the United States, in stark contrast to the restrictions she so recently encountered in Communist Poland.

During these early days in the United States, Kaya, by sheer happenstance, became involved in the solution of a murder that truly was stranger than fiction. In the spring of 1977, Kaya and her then husband were attempting to sell their Alexandria, VA house, and Kaya met a realtor named Richard Lee Earman. Based on intuition, she questioned him and extracted information that he had been with a young couple, Alan Foreman, 26, and his fiancée, Donna Shoemaker, 25, the night the two were shot after returning home from a nightclub in Washington. After Kaya earned Earman’s trust, the young man confessed to her that one Joseph N. Martin had promised him $15,000 if he would kill the couple. Martin’s motivation was to collect a $56,000 life insurance policy on Foreman’s life. Kaya reported this information to the police and Earman was later prosecuted for the crime and acquitted. Kaya, back in her writing mode, decided to write a book about Earman’s life, and during the course of working on it she met Martin and interviewed him in November 1977. During her first interview with him, she accused him of lying to her about his role in the murders, which angered him. He told Ploss that in fact Earman had called him and told him about the deaths of Foreman and Shoemaker before the bodies were discovered by the police, and that Earman later had “blackmailed” him into not telling that information to the prosecutor, leading to the acquittal of Earman. Martin threatened Kaya’s life if she disclosed what he had told her to the authorities, but Kaya, true to form, again approached the police and the prosecutors, and the information she provided led to the reopening of the murder investigation and eventually to the conviction of Martin and Earman. Kaya has since written Who Will Do the Crying, a book about the murders and her role in the convictions, which became a best-seller in Poland under the title The Woman Who Knew Too Much (Kobieta, ktora wiedziala za duzo).

The real-life drama related to the Foreman/Shoemaker murders led to a great deal of publicity about the Polish immigrant whose extraordinary insight, perspicacity and persistence contributed so heavily to the solving of a double murder investigation. In forcing the unsolved murder back to the forefront, Ms. Ploss fearlessly criticized the handling of the case by the elected prosecutor – demonstrating her understanding of the role of citizens in a democracy to speak out without fear.

In more recent years, Kaya Ploss has been a tireless promoter of tolerance and understanding, particularly with reference to the Holocaust and the relationships between Poles and Jews. She became friends with the late Dr. Jan Karski, the legendary Polish patriot who was imprisoned by the Nazis and whose heroism forced him to leave Poland in order to survive. After he left Poland, he became a major voice in the effort to promote US and British intervention to put a stop to the Holocaust. . Kaya became Karski’s close friend and confidant in his last years and was instrumental in promoting his memory and in obtaining the recognition she felt he deserved. Through those efforts, she became close to Myles Lerman, the first chief executive officer of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, and at his request arranged for Mr. Lerman and his wife to have an audience with Pope John Paul at the Vatican. Following Karski’s death, Kaya became the driving force behind the creation of the Jan Karski Institute for Tolerance and Dialogue in the US and Poland, and through that organization she arranged for recognition of the contributions to freedom and tolerance of a list of heroes including Irena Sendler, who rescued 2,000 children from the ghettos in Poland during WWII; Cuban dissident Dagoberto Valdez, who was able to travel to the U.S. to receive recognition for his heroic work when Kaya was able to a meeting at the Vatican enroute; Susan Pollak who rescued and resettled over 2,000 Ethiopian Jews in Israel; and former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski for his efforts to promote Polish-Jewish tolerance and reconciliation. Her efforts in this regard were supported by Ambassador Ken Edelman, Ambassador Jeanne Kilpatrick, former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Kaya’s efforts were critical in the designation of 2014 as the Jan Karski Year, and in promoting his nomination for receiving posthumously the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

Kaya devoted much energy and attention to supporting Polish young people, in part through bringing more than 200 children to travel to the United States to introduce them to American democracy. In 2006 a very old and beautiful school near her birthplace in Naklo Slaskie was named for her as its patron. The following year she established the Kaya Ploss Silesian Children’s Foundation in Poland to educate and provide other support to poor children, many of them the orphans of Polish miners who perished in mine disasters. Through the Kaya Mirecka School, Kaya promoted values of tolerance and democracy among young Polish school children from their elementary years through high school. To motivate and inspire that school’s children, Kaya’s motto is inscribed in a plaque for all students to read: “Everything is in your own hands.” Kaya often said that one of the most important days in her life was the day she became the patron of her school.

In her later years, Kaya also continued her passion for writing, including a memoir published in Poland under the title Jan Karski: The Man I Told the Truth; Tomorrow When I Wake Up; and in English The Emperor of Madagascar and other Stories, a collection of short stories regarding famous people of Polish descent. Characteristic of her resilience, in September 2014, Kaya celebrated her 90th birthday in Poland by embarking on a ten-day book-signing tour during which she delivered fourteen speeches.

Through her exemplary life and her tireless energy, Kaya contributed enormously to the cause of expanded cultural understanding between her country of birth and the country she so enthusiastically adopted as her own. Her efforts proved inspirational to the many people whose lives she touched, and were recognized through many honors from her country of birth, including “The Commander’s Cross” conferred by President Aleksander Kwasniewski; the “Silver Butterfly” award presented by the “Porozumienie Bez Barier” (Understanding without Borders) Childrens Foundation, established by the First Lady of Poland, Jolanta Kwasniewska; and the “Children’s Smile Award” conferred by the United Nations. To recognize a lifetime of achievement in support of Poland, in 2015 Kaya received Poland’s highest civilian honor, the “Order of Polonia Restituta”.

Hanna Kaya Ploss died peacefully at her residence on July 13, 2023, at the age of 98 following a period of decline. She was cared for lovingly by her caregiver, Grace Nkubana, and her supporting cast of helpers, and with the support of Montgomery Hospice. She leaves behind adoring friends, trusted fiduciaries, and treasured memories. A memorial service will be announced at a later date. May Kaya's remarkable life leave lasting impressions and may her legacy be a blessing, now and forever.

Arrangements entrusted to Thibadeau Mortuary Service, p.a., 301-495-4950, Gaithersburg, MD, www.InterFaithFunerals.com