After Poland’s annexation of the Zaolzie region in October, the border shifted yet again - only for eleven months.
When, on September 1, 1939, German columns crossed the Olza River, Cieszyn was a city without clear belonging: torn between loyalties, languages, and passports. Within days, everyone found themselves “under the Reich.”

Poles and the War: The Cieszyn Borderland, 1939–1945

When German tanks rolled across the bridges over the Olza on September 1, 1939, the city fell into a political vacuum.
The Polish administration fled in haste, and a new power arrived almost instantly.
Testimonies of that first day of war - preserved today in the Książnica Cieszyńska (Cieszyn Library) - convey both confusion and terror.
One account reads:

“It was Friday, the first of September… the siren at the ‘Franciszek’ mine wailed, planes came from the north, explosions in the city.”

The German army entered without much resistance. Machine guns were set up on the bridges; local Germans - neighbours just yesterday - donned brown armbands with swastikas.
In many villages appeared slogans: “Wir sind wieder da” – “We are here again.”

The new order came not with the army but with administration.
Soon, the German system of registration was introduced; the use of the Polish language was banned in schools and churches; and property confiscations began.
Already in October 1939, the first groups of Polish teachers, priests, and community leaders were deported to Dachau and Buchenwald.
For local Poles, war meant not a front line but everyday moral choices - how to greet someone, what language to use in a shop, whether to sign the Volksliste.

In the memories of witnesses, those days tasted of chaos and fear.

“I saw my neighbour - the one who shared our supper yesterday - today in a uniform, with a revolver,” recalled a woman from Karviná years later.

The streets seemed calm, but fear hid behind that calmness.
Children instinctively ducked at the sound of planes; men spoke in whispers; women stopped singing in Polish while working.

In Karviná, Orlová, and Třinec, portraits of the Führer and plaques reading “Nur für Deutsche” appeared quickly.
Polish and Czech signs vanished; former clerks and teachers were “reassigned” to manual labour or forced work in the mines.
Street names changed overnight - Piłsudski Street became Adolf-Hitler-Strasse, Mickiewicz Street became Hindenburgstrasse.

But the plaques were not the essence of the change.
The real tragedy lay in the breaking of human bonds - family, neighbourly, linguistic.
A Pole from the Czech side, a Silesian with a German surname, an Evangelical next to a Catholic - everyone had to redefine who they were.

Many historians believe that it was precisely here, in Cieszyn and Karviná, that the Germans first tested the mechanism of the Deutsche Volksliste - the “German Nationality List.”
On paper, it seemed a bureaucratic formality; in reality, it was a test of loyalty.
Signing it meant access to food rations and employment. Refusing meant losing everything.
As recorded in a post-war chronicle:

“Over sixty percent of citizens held Volksliste documents… by the end of the war the number reached eighty.”

New Orders

Power arrived swiftly and without hesitation.
On September 3, 1939, the Nazi flag was raised over the Cieszyn town hall, and the first decrees were read through megaphones:
a ban on gatherings, a curfew, a registration requirement.

Yet the Olza River did not cease to be a border.
From a state frontier, it became an internal division line between two German administrations.
The left bank, including Cieszyn, Karviná, and Orlová, was incorporated into the Regierungsbezirk Kattowitz of Upper Silesia (Reichsgau Oberschlesien);
the right bank, with Fryštát and Třinec, fell under the jurisdiction of Opava, within the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

In practice, the two banks of the river shared only one thing - the trauma of occupation.
A year earlier the Olza had divided two states; now it separated two faces of the same German power - equally brutal, yet differently organized.

Posters soon appeared on the walls calling residents to register.
For people who had lived for generations in a bilingual world, this call sounded like a trap.
Each person had to declare a nationality - and prove it.
In the former town hall, on Main Street, new offices called Volksliststelle were established, run by NSDAP officials, often local Germans.
People brought baptism certificates, school records, even old family letters to prove German descent.
Anyone whose surname ended in -ek, -ski, or -icz was automatically viewed with suspicion.

Here began the action known as the Deutsche Volksliste - the German Nationality List - which in Cieszyn Silesia took on a particularly tragic dimension.
It divided residents into four categories of Reich citizenship:

• Group I – Germans “by blood and language,” loyal to the Third Reich.
• Group II – Volksdeutsche from families partially Polonized.
• Group III – the so-called “Silesian” group: Poles and Silesians considered “fit for Germanization.”
• Group IV – persons of “German origin” who required “national education” - in practice, forced assimilation.

The colour of the documents matched these categories: red, blue, green, and grey.
Group III - the so-called green category - granted German citizenship “on probation, for ten years.”
It was a kind of social experiment: loyalty was to be measured in time.

In reality, the Volksliste became a tool of blackmail.
It determined food rations, employment in the mines, the right to travel - even the fate of children.
Refusing to sign meant losing ration cards; in many cases, it meant deportation or a concentration camp.
By 1940, the first Polenlager - camps for Poles deemed undesirable - were created.
The largest were in Piotrowice and Nowy Bohumín, smaller ones in Stonava, Dąbrowa, and Gołkowice.
Into the wooden barracks were sent women and children - often only because someone in an office had written beside their name “Polnisch gesinnt” - “of Polish persuasion.”

The Everyday Geography of Power

In Cieszyn, Třinec, and Karviná, a new, daily topography of authority emerged.
Party-appointed mayors, school inspectors from Berlin, portraits of the Führer in every classroom, and on the streets - propaganda banners proclaiming the “German Silesia.”

The German language became mandatory in all schools.
Children were taught to sing “Heil dir im Siegerkranz” and a new version of the national anthem.
Polish textbooks were burned, and religious instruction in Polish was labelled anti-state activity.

The use of Polish was also forbidden in public spaces.
In the chronicles of the Evangelical parish in Cieszyn, one entry reads:

“Polish sermons ceased. Prayers were whispered, so that the official sitting in the first pew would not hear.”

In Catholic churches, the situation was the same.
Masses were celebrated in German even for congregations that understood not a single word.

At the same time, a mass Germanization of surnames began.
Wawrzyniec became Lorenz, Kowalski turned into Schmidtke, and Zając into Hase.
The new documents issued by offices in Opava were not just passes to survival - they were acts of erasure of personal and national identity.

Yet, despite the terror, resistance persisted.
Poles maintained secret contacts, created networks of mutual aid, and passed on information through letters written in Cyrillic or Czech to mislead the censors.
Some young people joined Polish underground organizations that coordinated with the resistance movement on both sides of the Olza River.

Against the background of occupation, another, more intimate tragedy unfolded.
Cieszyn Silesia was a mosaic of mixed families, where one brother might be on one side and a cousin on the other.
Some signed the Volksliste to save their children or avoid deportation; others - out of conviction or opportunism.
After the war, these decisions became sources of guilt, resentment, and family conflict - wounds that lasted for decades.

Repression and Fear

In September 1939, German forces in Karviná brutally beat to death Dr. Wacław Olszak, the city’s former mayor and a well-known Polish physician.
Shortly afterward, in a forest near the “Barbara” mine in Karviná-Doly, they executed a group of local Poles - one of the first mass killings of the occupation in Cieszyn Silesia.

In 1941, the first public execution of Polish resistance members took place on the main square in Cieszyn.
According to witnesses, before the verdict was read, one of the condemned shouted:

“Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła!” – “Poland has not yet perished!”
The crowd stood silent.
In the air, only the clock from the tower could be heard striking.

On August 6, 1944, the village of Životice (Żywocice) became the scene of one of the most tragic massacres in Cieszyn Silesia.
In retaliation for a partisan attack, German gendarmes executed 36 inhabitants of the village and its surroundings - mostly Poles.
The bodies were thrown into a common grave in Orlová, and after the war reburied in their home village.

For ordinary people, daily life was reduced to mere survival.
Bread, coal, and Red Cross parcels - everything depended on German stamps and signatures.
Anyone who lacked “race and name” had no future.

In 1943, a Cieszyn schoolteacher wrote in a small notebook hidden inside a clock casing:

“When I walk down the street and hear children praying in German, I feel as if the world has ended.
But when on Sunday, outside the church, an old woman whispers ‘Hail Mary’ in Polish, I know we still exist.”

Stalag Teschen

In the very heart of Cieszyn there existed a place with an entirely different rhythm and smell: wooden barracks, barbed wire, guard towers, a camp kitchen, a field hospital, a punishment cell.
The town had once possessed a park. The Germans turned it into Stalag Teschen - one of hundreds of prisoner-of-war camps scattered across Europe.

The name “Stalag VIII D Teschen” appeared for the first time in 1940.
At the beginning it served as a transit camp for French and British soldiers captured after the fall of France.
Later came transports from Yugoslavia, Italy, the Soviet Union, and finally Poland.

In the corrugated-iron barracks - some of them remnants from the Austro-Hungarian period of the First World War - men from four continents were packed together.
According to German reports, between 1942 and 1944 more than 10 000 prisoners were held there at one time, and as many as 50 000 may have passed through its gates in total.

Life in the camp followed the rigid regulations of the Wehrmacht.
Every day had the same rhythm:
wake-up at 5 a.m., roll call, a bowl of turnip soup, work, roll call again, lights out.
Meals were symbolic - a slice of bread, a litre of bitter barley coffee, a thin stew of kale or grains.
The Red Cross sent parcels, but many vanished en route or were confiscated by German guards.

Despite hunger and filth, the prisoners tried to preserve the last traces of human dignity: they built makeshift altars out of planks, wrote poems, learned foreign languages.

A British Red Cross inspection report from 1943 noted:

“Conditions in Stalag Teschen are harsh, yet compared with the Eastern Front they are bearable.
Cold water only, three men share a bunk, the kitchen lacks fuel.
Among the inmates are many Poles, Frenchmen and Italians.
Discipline is strict.”

“Bearable” in practice meant only “not immediately fatal.”
Around the camp spread a network of Arbeitskommandos - labour detachments subordinated to the stalag.
They covered the whole region: the Karviná and Dąbrowa coal mines, the Třinec steelworks, the Wędrynia metallurgical plant, sawmills in Bystrzyca, and farms near Fryštát.
Archival records list codes such as Arbeitskommando 161/II Karwin, 167/II Dombrau, 174/II Trzynietz - in reality, slave-labour outposts where prisoners lived under minimal supervision but in conditions of extreme exhaustion.

The Soviet POWs suffered the worst fate.
Under Hitler’s 1941 order they were excluded from Geneva Convention protection.
To the Germans they were not “prisoners of war” but Ostarbeiter - raw material from the East.
Hundreds perished in Cieszyn and Karviná - of hunger, disease, exhaustion.
Mass graves were later discovered in forests between Třinec and Wędrynia, and on the outskirts of Karviná-Staré Město.

Even amid terror, a kind of spiritual life persisted.
Prisoners from France and Poland secretly held masses, carved crosses on boards, sang psalms.
Among them were artists and teachers who conducted clandestine lessons, teaching younger inmates history and geography.
In 1944, they even staged a small theatre performance - made of paper scraps and leftover paints - a play about freedom.

That same year, Stalag Teschen was reorganized as a subsidiary camp of Stalag VIII B Lamsdorf (Łambinowice).
The Germans began transferring part of the prisoners westward.
What remained in Cieszyn was only a skeleton: storehouses, the infirmary, the barracks - all preparing for the last act of the war: the evacuation that would turn into a death march.

The March That Never Ended

By January 1945, the Eastern Front was already near.
From the direction of Bielsko, the thunder of artillery could be heard.
On the night of January 21–22, the camp commandant received an order to evacuate all prisoners on foot toward Żagań and Thuringia.
Thus began the death marches - the most tragic episode of the war’s end.

From Cieszyn, Karviná, Dąbrowa, Třinec, Fryštát and other places, some 65,000 prisoners set out through snow and frost, in columns of several hundred, escorted by armed guards.
Each man carried a few slices of bread, a little soup, and the hope that he would not freeze to death.
The routes led across Zaolzie, Opava, and Nysa, all the way to Olomouc and the Saxon border.
Witnesses recalled that the columns stretched for kilometres, and along the roadsides lay the bodies of those who fell.

A French prisoner, Pierre Marceau, left this account:

“The snow was hard as steel. Whoever fell, stayed. A shot, then silence.
Then we marched on again.
After two days, I no longer knew where I was - I thought only of not collapsing.”

Some prisoners were halted in the forests around Karviná and Stonava.
Dozens died on the way; their bodies were buried in makeshift graves at the cemetery in Dąbrowa and along the road to Orlová.
After the war, villagers exhumed these graves and marked them with wooden crosses inscribed “Unknown Soldier.”

In April 1945, when Soviet troops entered Cieszyn, they found photographs and documents among the ruins of the camp.
One picture shows a group of soldiers sitting in the snow, with barracks and barbed wire in the background.
On the back someone had written in pencil: “Teschen, Februar 1945, letzte Tage” - Cieszyn, February 1945, the last days.

Traces of the Camp

After the war, Stalag Teschen disappeared - both physically and symbolically.
The barracks were dismantled, the ground ploughed over, and the park returned to its original function.
For decades, no one spoke of it.
Only in the 1980s, thanks to the efforts of local historians from the Museum of Český Těšín, was the site systematically investigated.

Today, a black granite monument in the Masaryk Park (Masarykovy sady) reminds visitors that during the war this was a place of imprisonment and death.
Its inscription reads:

“In memory of the prisoners of war who suffered and died in Stalag Teschen during the years 1939–1945.”

War Memorials in Cieszyn Silesia

The earliest post-war memorials appeared already in the 1940s and 1950s.
In Karviná, on the site of the former mining district, rose a monumental statue to the soldiers who fell fighting fascism: two men - one supporting the other, the second collapsing into his comrade’s arms.
A simple gesture, yet filled with strength.

Similar memorials were erected throughout the region.
Their language was universal: the soldier’s body, the upright flag, the upward thrust of stone.
In Karviná and Piotrowice, their political overtones have long faded; what remains is a record of emotion - grief, struggle, compassion.
In these compositions one can sense the influence of the Czech sculptural school of the 1950s, especially Otakar Švec (author of the long-destroyed Stalin monument in Prague) and Josef Malejsek.
Everything here is synthetic and rhythmic: silhouettes caught between vertical and diagonal, the cold of granite softened by the folds of drapery.

During the 1960s and 1970s, new forms appeared - black granite plaques inscribed with the names of the dead, often in two languages: Czech and Polish.
In Dąbrowa, Mosty near Jablunkov, and Albrechtice, one can read simple inscriptions:
“To the victims of the occupation 1939–1945” or “Obětem fašismu.”

This was a different kind of memory - specific, personal, without pathos.
Each stone became a private epitaph.
Many bore additional phrases like “Čest jejich památce” or “Již nikdy válku” - “Never again war.”
Such words sound like a moral commentary on the twentieth century and a reminder that war here was not abstract history, but a local experience - it touched miners, teachers, workers, and doctors.
In Karviná, near schools and mines, plaques still list those who “died for our freedom.”

After 1968, the language of sculpture in Czechoslovakia changed dramatically.
The monument to the victims of World War II in Český Těšín, with its concrete obelisk and metal reliefs, belongs to another era.
Here, war is not a battle - it is the drama of the body.
Prisoners stand in silence, bent backward in gestures of death.
The reliefs - probably the work of Czech sculptor Štěpán Mikula - combine the force of raw realism with the expression of existential pain.

One panel shows three men side by side - concentration camp prisoners in striped uniforms, their hands hanging limply.
Another depicts a figure arched backward, frozen in the instant before dying.
The concrete obelisk serves as the composition’s spine; the cast-iron panels, its heart.

The monument was created at a time when art in Czechoslovakia was beginning to break away from the obligatory heroism of socialist realism.
By the 1960s, a new language of post-war modernism was emerging - austere, emotional, close to existentialism and to the “new sculpture” of the West.
In this sense, Cieszyn is exceptional: here, form and content are balanced.
The vertical concrete mass recalls a tower or a cross, yet remains free of religious symbols.
The reliefs are as harsh as memory itself - memory that refuses to be beautified.

A similar austerity can be felt in Piotrowice near Karviná: a plain stone pillar engraved with the names of fallen airmen.
The form is reduced to the minimum, and for that reason extraordinarily powerful.
Such works carry the spirit of post-war modernism - the roughness of material, the distrust of pomp.
Stone, concrete, and metal become metaphors: memory no longer shouts - it endures.

Životice

The monument in Životice (Žywocice) was born from tragedy - the massacre of August 6, 1944, when German gendarmes murdered 36 villagers, Poles, Czechs, and Silesians alike.
It was not a battle but an act of revenge for a partisan action - brutal, immediate, without trial.
The victims’ bodies were thrown into a mass grave in Karviná.
In its aftermath, Životice was called “the Silesian Lidice.”

After the war, a monument was built that spoke not of heroism but of grief.
On a stone stage stands a woman with a child in her arms, leaning over the body of a fallen man.
Her face is turned upward, toward the light - as if seeking a meaning that can no longer be found.
At her feet lies the dead - a limp body sinking softly into stone.

The sandstone sculpture, created in the 1950s by a Czech artist (its authorship attributed to Václav Fröhlich or to a workshop in Ostrava-Poruba), is one of the purest examples of Czech moral socialist realism: devoid of pomp, yet endowed with immense emotional force.

Behind it rises a monumental granite wall engraved with the victims’ names - each one in the same script, without hierarchy:
Józef, Franciszek, Henryk, Antonín.
The stone itself speaks the language of equality in death.

The Životice monument is a metaphor in sculpture.
It does not depict war, but its consequence - orphanhood, mourning, speechlessness.
The woman is not an allegory of the nation, but a mother, a neighbour, someone from the village.
In this way, the work transcends the style of socialist realism, combining heroism with everyday humanity.
It has more in common with Xawery Dunikowski’s “Mourning Mother” in Poland than with typical post-war Czech monuments.

In 1984, beside the sculpture, the “Památník životické tragédie” (Životice Tragedy Memorial Museum) was established, later becoming a branch of the Museum of Těšín Region.
Today, the site serves educational, commemorative, and reflective purposes.
Inside, visitors can see photographs of the victims, fragments of documents, and letters preserved by their families.
Together they form a living memory - not merely monumental, but enduring.

The Landscape of Memory

Yet the greatest number of monuments stands not in town squares, but in cemeteries.
In Albrechtice, Havířov, Karviná, Stonava - everywhere one finds simple stone stelae bearing names, often surrounded by cypresses or thujas, carefully tended by local communities.
Some commemorate residents murdered in concentration camps, others - partisans, teachers, priests.
Each town and village expresses remembrance in its own tone: religious, civic, or local.

The most moving are those monuments that show no scene at all - only names.
They are the silence after all the sculptures.

Over time, the meaning of these monuments has changed.
In the 1950s, people spoke of the “struggle against fascism”;
in the 1960s, of “martyrdom”;
by the 1990s, of “the memory of victims.”

After 1989, some monuments were stripped of ideological symbols, others relocated or restored.
In Karviná, Životice, and Cieszyn, however, they have survived almost unchanged.
Today they serve not only as documents of art history, but also as records of moral history - testimonies of how nations have told themselves the story of their own past.

From the monumental compositions of stone and bronze to the modest cemetery plaques, these works together form a shared topography of remembrance.
Cieszyn Silesia is a landscape of sculptures that have become part of everyday life -
a region where memory does not merely stand on pedestals, but grows into the rhythm of ordinary days.