Grzela, the Voyt’s brother

Grzela, the Voyt’s brother, is a politically engaged villager whose interventions connect Lipce’s immediate economic grievances with wider questions of collective rights, public authority, and Polish-language education. He is neither simply a spokesman for resistance nor a cautious defender of village order: he presses for action against the manor, proposes a negotiated solution to the Podlesie land threat, and rebukes officials who would put Rocho’s teaching at risk. His arguments take shape in meetings and public disputes, where knowledge of the newspaper and of political consequences becomes a form of village leadership.

Identity and public standing

Grzela is identified by his relationship to the Voyt, his brother, but the episodes involving him show that he has an independent political voice. He is addressed as someone who reads books and newspapers and is asked to advise the men on what should be done. That reputation gives him influence in gatherings, although it does not make him unchallenged: other villagers contest his proposals, and he answers his brother with open contempt when he considers the Voyt’s leadership inadequate.

Grzela’s authority is practical rather than official. He speaks in the inn, debates the risks of helping Rocho, and advances a concrete proposal about Podlesie. His standing rests on his ability to interpret events and offer a course of action, not on holding the village office occupied by his brother. The distinction matters in a community where decisions over employment, land, and schooling expose villagers to powers beyond their control.

Forest, work, and collective grievance

The dispute over the manor’s logging joins customary claims to the urgent need for wages. At least twenty hired hands in Lipce are said to be desperate for work; the winter has frozen some villagers’ potatoes, cash is scarce, and the preharvest period threatens to bring still deeper hunger. People had expected that felling at Wolf’s Hollow woodland would provide employment. Instead, the Squire is said to have vowed not to hire any Lipce men after a complaint was lodged against him with the commissioner.

In the surrounding argument, refusal to beg the Squire is paired with insistence that the trees should not be cut until the villagers’ claims are addressed. This gives the protest both an economic and a political charge: the issue is not only who gets paid work, but whether the manor can dispose of the wood while disregarding the people who regard it as theirs. A later public appeal gathers farmers and hired hands around the language of shared injustice, recalling failed court cases and complaints before naming the felling as the final injury. The crowd answers with a surge of anger. Grzela’s place in this political world is marked by that movement from scattered hardship toward a collective claim, even as the evidence does not reduce the whole protest to one man’s leadership.

The cost of such disputes appears in Hanka’s account of the village’s poor. Filipka’s daughter lies weak with hunger in a freezing cottage where the windows are stuffed with straw; the family has sold its quilt and has no potatoes. Florka gives birth while sick and without milk, with fields left fallow because men, including Adam and others, are in prison. Hanka also condemns well-to-do farmers for tending their own food and lending at interest while neglecting poor neighbors. These circumstances frame the question of work and village solidarity that surrounds Grzela’s political activity: collective resistance concerns land and authority, but the people bearing its pressures also face hunger, lost labor, and the absence of help.

Podlesie and negotiated strategy

When the men discuss the possible sale of Podlesie to German settlers, Grzela insists that the sale has not yet happened, though the deed could be signed at any time, perhaps the following Thursday. His emphasis on the short interval turns anxiety into a demand for a decision. The villagers press him for counsel because they regard his reading and knowledge of the newspaper as useful in a situation whose legal and political dimensions are not immediately clear.

Grzela’s proposed answer is negotiation rather than a simple call to seize or defend the land by force. He suggests making peace with the Squire in exchange for one morgen of woodland and asking for four morgen of fields in Podlesie. The proposal surprises and heartens the men. To show that such an arrangement is conceivable, he refers to a village near Płock that, he has read, secured a similar exchange. His plan treats land as something that might be obtained through collective bargaining, while acknowledging the Squire’s power to determine the terms. The villagers’ welcome reveals how scarce land is: the prospect of four morgen of fields appears hopeful precisely because the threat of the settlement has made the community’s vulnerability plain.

Rocho, schooling, and the limits of caution

Grzela also speaks in the debate over whether Rocho should continue teaching children. The Soltys says Rocho taught his sons but warns that officials have begun watching him. A gendarme questioned him at the chancellery and alleged that Rocho was teaching children and distributing Polish books and newspapers. The Soltys fears that the village may suffer because of Rocho, while another elder recalls the punishment peasants endured during an earlier uprising and argues that rebellion against the authorities is not their cause.

Grzela answers this caution with a bitter accusation: he asks whether the Soltys would betray Rocho out of fear. He also attacks his brother, calling him unfit for the Voyt’s office. These exchanges show that Grzela’s insistence on communal responsibility extends beyond land and employment to the protection of a teacher associated with Polish books and newspapers. Yet the danger is tangible, not rhetorical: the officials are already asking questions, and the warning is that Rocho must be careful.

When Rocho emerges from the cottage, crosses himself, and calls the group to set off in God’s name, the peasants follow him down the middle of the road, with women and children behind them. The scene places Grzela’s argument within a wider act of communal movement. His importance lies in pressing the village not to confuse prudence with abandonment: whether the immediate matter is a threatened land sale, the forest, or the teaching of children, he challenges leaders who would let fear settle the question before the people have acted.