BY JACK KOMPERDA
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIAN HILL

Prospect Heights resident Joseph Policht collects registration money during the first day of the Polish language and cultural school he helped establish at St. Stanislaus Bishop & Martyr in Chicago.

KWIKOW, Poland - Joseph Policht could not have imagined the surprise waiting for him last year at the fire station in his hometown.

As he walked into the station's newly remodeled upstairs banquet hall, dozens of former neighbors stood and gave him a hero's welcome.

Balloons hung from the ceiling, sausage and beer overflowed from plates and cups, and, for the first time at the station, everyone was able to use indoor bathrooms.

For nearly three years, Policht led the effort to help pay for a $25,000 overhaul of the firehouse, which quickly was turning into a relic.

While the celebration was welcome after years of planning, it was a brief respite.

Prospect Heights resident Policht knew he had to follow up the firehouse project with work on a larger Chicago meeting place for a weekend Polish language and culture school.

Like many transplanted Poles, Policht made it his mission to help out in both the homeland and in the city parish that once was the core of his community.

The Kwikow fire station, built in 1968, had no indoor plumbing, cramped living quarters and a kitchen without plates, spoons and forks.

"We needed to upgrade to the 21st century," said Zofia Kozak, Policht's sister who serves as a liaison to the relief group in the small, rural town 30 miles east of Krakow.

And back in a meeting hall in the Chicago neighborhood where Policht first settled, children in 12 different grade levels came every Saturday to learn about their heritage in one of a half-dozen makeshift classrooms.

Blackboards were rolled into offices or halls to instruct as many as three different grades at once.

"How do you teach classes like this?" Policht said. "It doesn't make sense."

Bothered by the chaotic environment, Policht rented an old convent in his parish, Chicago's St. Stanislaus Bishop & Martyr Catholic Church.

Now he had to convince the Polish community, which largely had moved out of the neighborhood over the past decade, that sending children to the school still made sense.

Much of the social life of early Polish settlements centered on the church, said the Rev. John Nowak of the Congregation of the Resurrection.

By 1928, 43 Polish-language Catholic churches were built in Chicago, mostly through donations from working-class immigrants.

The churches were not simply places to worship and pray. Their leaders also ran schools, credit unions and social clubs.

Many of these original church clubs evolved into relief groups, sending money to Poland and lobbying to free the occupied country when it was wiped off the map for 123 years by Russia, Prussia and Austria.

Efforts to help the homeland grew as the Polish population did in the United States. About $170 million in food, supplies and money was sent abroad during both world wars.

Six-year-old Adam Cygan of Chicago stands alongside his Hispanic classmates as they graduate from kindergarten at St. Stanislaus' elementary school. The Chicago school, which closed this past spring, long taught children of Polish immigrants.

By the mid-1980s, about $600 million was being sent annually between family members, a sum then equal to one-tenth of Poland's entire foreign export earnings.

"It was kind of a natural behavior," said Donald Pienkos, author of "For Your Efforts Through Ours: Polish American Efforts on Poland's Behalf, 1863-1991."

"Many of these people had close relatives," he said. "They were aware and concerned about the situation."

Today, experts estimate at least $200 million in money and supplies is sent from the United States to Poland each year, mostly between individual family members.

For nearly 87 years, Policht's organization, the Society to Save Kwikow, existed largely to benefit people in his native Polish village.

While the group has sent only $120,000 since its inception, it has been enough to help pay for the installation of gas, water and electric utility systems in the town of nearly 250 people. It also funded construction of a church rectory and the renovation of the firehouse.

"I've tried my best," he said, "to add in my own bricks to each building project."

Kwikow now has the modern conveniences of gas, electricity and cars, but little else has changed since Policht relocated to Chicago in 1971, or even since the first immigrants from the region reached Chicago nearly a century before.

Horse-drawn carriages still pull hay bales along roads. Farmers place canisters of milk outside barns to sell to dairy distributors. And children in the surrounding township of 10,000 often make mile-long commutes on foot to school.

During the 1880s, overpopulation in the Austrian-occupied territory created a mass shortage of jobs that started a stream of immigration to Chicago that continues to this day, local officials said.

In a less-than 40-year period starting in 1873, immigrants from the region helped boost the number of Poles in Chicago tenfold, to 210,000.

And of the nearly 250 people who live in Kwikow now, local officials estimate an equal number also reside in the Chicago area.

"People have either been to the United States, live there now, or are planning to go there," said Marian Zalewski, president of Szczurowa Township which includes Kwikow.

In the township, most of the villages still are composed of small farms. Narrow plots are scattered along the countryside, the result of generations of dividing land among heirs.

Nearly 90 percent of villagers survive on tiny harvests of grain, beets and potatoes, government subsidies and money earned abroad or sent home by family living in the United States, Zalewski said.

For Policht, the choice to leave was simple.

When his wife's family received their green cards, he followed.

Once in the United States, they sponsored him and helped him get his own green card. He found a job as a baker, scrimped and bought his own bakery eight years later.

Now 61, he recently sold his business and devotes his free time to helping both St. Stanislaus and Kwikow.

For Kozak, Policht's sister, the money earned from just two years of working in Chicago-area fast-food restaurants was enough to build a two-story, red-brick home in Kwikow.

Kozak followed Policht shortly after he arrived in Chicago. Posing as a tourist, she worked 10-hour days at a fried chicken stand.

But unable to get permission to stay, Kozak returned to Poland with her earnings and now serves as treasurer for her brother's group.

The evergreen bushes and red roses on her delicately manicured front lawn are evidence of a lifestyle she never could have afforded without working in America.

She blushes when asked about the satellite TV dish attached to the second-floor balcony, a luxury not usually seen in her village.

"It's for my children," she admitted.

On the side of Kozak's home, a large yellow utility box is marked "GAZ."

Before 1994, villagers burned peat or coal in ovens to heat their homes. But a $6,000 donation from the relief group helped install gas lines to every village home.

The group also helped pay for telephone lines and water mains to each home.

Policht's group recently chipped in $6,500 with other relief groups within the township to aid an area church.

With two vicars set to move in at the end of the month, the pastor of St. Bartholomew the Apostle Catholic Church in Szczurowa turned to the Chicago groups to help finish construction of a new rectory.

As for the renovated fire station, a picture of members of the Society to Save Kwikow takes a prominent position on a wall near the banquet hall's stage as a thank-you for their efforts.

"Thank God for the initiative of these members," Zalewski said, "because I don't know how we could do half the projects in this area."

Last year, Policht began a Polish Saturday school, even as most of the immigrants in his old city neighborhood continued to move to suburbs like Mount Prospect and Des Plaines.

This year, the school enrolled 86 students, 15 of them traveling from the suburbs.

The number of suburban students nearly doubled from the previous year, a result of the trend of Polish families moving out of Chicago.

"People at our end-of-year ceremonies were amazed to see children born here who speak and sing Polish so beautifully," Policht said.

They come back because of past church connections or because of their relationships with Policht and other members.

Matthew Kurnat makes the hourlong trip every weekend from Huntley to Elzbieta Adamczyk's second-grade class.

Until earlier this year, the 7-year-old spent much of his youth living just blocks away from the parish.

Adamczyk hands him a piece of white paper and asks him to draw something he did this past summer.

"I'm going to draw myself playing my PS2," Kurnat says in English, referring to his Sony PlayStation.

"You need a gun," another student suggests, as Kurnat starts furiously scribbling.

"Mow po polsku," Adamczyk reminds the children. "Speak in Polish."

But it's too late. As the recess bell rings, the kids chatter in English as they scamper down the hallway and outside where salsa music is heard blaring from a car across the street.

Salsa is the musical style of choice in this neighborhood now. These days, there are few signs of any Polish community around St. Stanislaus.

The church is located in the Belmont-Cragin neighborhood, about 11 miles northwest of the Loop, and is bordered roughly by Belmont and Armitage avenues to the north and south, and Cicero and Narragansett avenues to the east and west.

According to church records, Polish settlers helped build the neighborhood around St. Stanislaus. A commercial area eventually formed along the main thoroughfare. And farmland gradually gave way to development.

Now, the remaining Polish immigrants largely occupy the northern part of the neighborhood near Belmont and Central avenues.

A package shipping company and clothing store are among the few remaining Polish-owned establishments along Fullerton Avenue, the main road near the church.

Replacing them are a Hispanic social service agency, travel bureaus offering deals to Mexico and a host of taco stands and corner groceries.

The Hispanic population in the neighborhood has exploded in growth over the past two decades, from about 6 percent of the total in 1980 to nearly two-thirds now, according to census figures.

Neighborhood leaders say gentrification in established Hispanic communities such as Pilsen and Logan Square has pushed Hispanics westward into the neighborhood.

Many of the Polish parishioners who attend Sunday Mass come from the suburbs. And the numbers are dwindling, according to the Archdiocese of Chicago.

Still, Policht returns week after week to St. Stanislaus. In addition to his work at the Polish school, he volunteers his time as a lector and is planning to open a day-care facility catering to Polish immigrants.

The efforts on behalf of his Chicago church and his Polish village are done for one simple reason: to ensure that the next generation of Poles has the best possible opportunities.

"This is a new life in a new world for me," Policht said. "I have this need to create something in America for the good of Poland and my family."