Digging deeper into Polish history

Don't get me wrong, Silesia is Polish now...Zawsze!
I love history. I love war films, spy films... everything! but so do most men! Since moving to Poland I have been intrigued by the dynamic nature of the place I live (Silesia). Austrians, Czechs, Germans and Poles have all considered this part of the world; home at one point or another.

It's quite easy to get stuck into the history of Breslau (Wrocław), Schweidnitz or other big towns but I wanted to find out about the small village I live in. Most of the houses here are old German houses and there are even a few eerie reminders, or should I say possessions, of the old German occupants of my house. My proudest possession is a very nice wooden coat hanger with the name of a popular pre-war German tailor in Breslau advertised on it.

Exciting stuff for history buffs. I also wonder how the German relatives must feel about me living in their old family home? Do they care? Not that I think we should give this region back to Germany or anything silly like that (Poland does after all have the biggest claim to the region). From what I can guess however, is that the old German occupants were probably farmers (as I live in a farmhouse) and after using my limited German to search through German history sites and map sites, I managed to find a pre-war map with enough detail to discover the German name for my current Polish village.

If any other expats live in old-German territory and would like to discover a little bit more about their area's history, I recommend these sites:

Pre-war map with loads of detail

BKG
Provinz Scleissen
Wiki

There all in German but it's not to difficult to figure things out (Karte or Landkarte means maps)

Interestingly, When the communist Poland government 'Polonized' the area they generally changed German names into phonetically similar Polish versions, for example.



Liegnitz became Legnica
Waldenburg became Wałbrzyvh
Ohlau - Oława
Oppeln - Opole
Strzelitz - Strzelce

An interesting article can be found here, I bet you didn't know that Poland last changed it's borders in 2002 :)
Why did all the borders change? Well maybe take a look perspective of the East German Government on the territory changes.
So there you have it, dive into Polish history and there is loads of interesting stuff to uncover.


5 comments:

  1. EEEC23 May 2011 at 17:57

    blimey, how well do you speak German?
    I live in Vilnius now and I still find it hard to understand that pre-WW2 this was a Polish city and now it's the capital!

    Thanks for your time researching!

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  2. Jeremy23 May 2011 at 20:10

    An interesting read. The boarder changes still have their ramifications today with PIS using them as a point to divide and conquer the Polish electorate.

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  3. Riddick8627 May 2011 at 10:38

    Thank you very much for the map. I have been looking for something similar to this for a while. I can now finish my history project!

    Thanks!

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  4. Anonymous30 May 2011 at 15:20

    Oblgatory Polish language nitpicking:

    "Silesia is Polish now ... zawsze".

    Zawsze in Polish means forever in both directions - which means silesia was always Polish and will always be, which is nice, but probably not what you wanted to say :)

    So it's better to say "na zawsze" which means "from this point on".

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  5. TeflSecretagent2 June 2011 at 08:21

    Thanks Anon :)

    ReplyDelete

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