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Silesia—Stranger/Not Stranger. Creating Regional Identity
The magazine SMI was established two years after WWII had been terminated.
Life in that period was far from quiet and stable, in Poland and in the whole of
Europe. Post-war changes of state borders caused a large-scale migration of people.
The Regained Territories were left by inhabitants of (primarily) German origin”
and resettled by Poles from the eastern regions of the Second Polish Republic,
which had become incorporated into the Soviet Union. Today it is difficult to
imagine the human drama of that period of having to leave one’s homeland. For
many resettled people there was a feeling of abandoning the place their ances¬
tors had lived for generations.° They experienced the feeling of being uprooted,
deprived of everything what was known and understandable to them. Land that
would become their new ‘Little Motherland” belonged only recently to another
people, to another state. The new settlers came to live in cities, villages and houses
built by other people. Their surroundings appeared to be alien for them. They took
over—not by free will but having been forced to by the tragic consequence of the
war—houses and households where the traces of their previous owners were still
visible. Without doubt, it deepened feelings of alienation. Moreover, people were
afraid that the state borders established after WWII were provisional.* This feel¬
ing was augmented by the increasing claims to the Regained Territories.’ In such
circumstances was SMI created. Here is a fragment of the Editorial credo from the
first number of the magazine:
> There have been cases of migration of the Silesian people. Their regional peculiarity (dialects or cus¬
toms) was often perceived as foreign, that is, German. Their situation was complicated even more by the
war. Western and northern regions of pre-war Poland had been incorporated into the II Reich, other
regions became the so-called General Government, controlled by Germany. In consequence, people who
found themselves in the III Reich were forced to sign the German Nationality List (Deutsche Volksliste,
the DVL), and, in consequence, become subjects of conscription to the German army. After the war the
feeling prevailed that the self (that is Polish) and other people should be clearly distinguished and that
Poland should get rid of those who had backed Germany. However, misunderstanding regional specifics
and various fates of people in the wartime often led to oversimplified perception of the native Silesians as
Germans (cf. Kaczmarek 2004, also Rozmowa z profesorem Ryszardem Kaczmarkiem 2010).
° Various questions of people’s dislocation, repatriation and settling on the Regained Territories, hereby
only mentioned, were presented in 2005 in the issue of the Institute of the National Memory, entitled
“The Polish Wild West’ (Polski dziki zachéd 2005).
? ‘Little Motherland’ is a literal translation of the Polish term Mata Ojczyzna. Close to the German Hei¬
mat, it refers to a place towards which one has a strong feeling of belonging, and (usually) a deep-rooted
fondness. Most commonly (yet not necessarily) this is one’s native region, filled with its particular tradi¬
tions, landscape, dialect, and so on. It is usually defined by personal emotional ties (cf. Wierzbicka 1999:
450-489; Kossakowska-Jarosz 2003: 35).
The western border of Poland was recognised by the German Democratic Republic on July 6, 1950,
and by the German Federal Republic on December 7, 1970. United Germany recognised the border in
the Polish-German Treaty of November 14, 1990.
° Their reflections are also visible in the magazine used in this study (cf. Slgsk. Miesigcznik Iustrowany
1946, nos 3-4: 32-34; no. 7: 1; nos 8-9: 1).
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