Ignace Jan Paderewski was born in the Russian third of Poland, on November 6, 1860. His mother died when he was a baby, so his father’s imprisonment was a doubly cruel blow. The boy and his older sister, Antonina, were very close. Like all Polish children, they had been brought up on heroic tales of their country’s former glory, and their childhood games always centered around the melancholy struggle for freedom. The boy, dressed in a Polish uniform of red and white paper, would charge madly about the house on a hobby horse, smiting his country’s enemies with a wooden sword. By the time he was six or seven these games had taken on a reality for him that no one suspected. Young as he was, he determined that when he grew up he would fight for his country, not with a wooden sword but with whatever weapons God would give him. Gradually he took it into his head that only by becoming someone special could he ever hope to help his people and his country to freedom. Soon after Jan Paderewski’s release from prison, he moved his family to the little town of Sudylkow, where the boy grew up. By the time he was three, Ignace’s family realized that he had an unusual talent for music. His father, determined to give every possible advantage to his children, brought a music teacher to the house to give them piano lessons. The teacher was a violinist at heart and he could not do much for the children except teach them the names of the notes and set them to playing dreadful duets, arranged from popular operatic arias. As a student Ignace was rather lazy, but he had a natural gift for languages and a great love for reading the history of his country. When he was ten years old, his sympathetic tutor gave him a book that described the great battle of Grünwald in which the Poles had defeated the greedy German Knights of the Cross and driven them from Poland. As the boy read the stirring account over and over, he was struck by an inspiration. The battle had been fought in 1410. This meant that its five hundredth anniversary was only forty years away—in 1910. “When I grow up,” young Ignace promised himself, “I’m going to be rich and famous enough to build a great monument in honor of the anniversary of the battle of Grünwald!” It was one of those odd fancies that overtake sensitive children. He kept it to himself to avoid unnecessary laughter at his expense.