An issue of Polska magazine devoted to the Czech part of Cieszyn Silesia. The question of the merger of Silesia with Poland is mentioned, as well as issues related to the establishment of borders on the Olza River. The figures of priests and artists important for the region are recalled. The text is interspersed with illustrations and portraits of people in folk costumes, prominent figures from the region's history, and photographs of such objects as:

Steam Bakery in Łazy
Central Association in Silesia.
Polish Departmental School of the H. Sienkiewicz Mother School in Jablunkov.
Faculty School
Ochronka Macierzy Szkolnej in Karviná. A. Osuchowski in Český Těšín.
Matice Szkolna House in Orlová. Polish Household School in Orlová

Source: "Poland", Warsaw 1936, R: 2, no. 41, after: Jagiellonian Digital Library.

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A modernised reading of the text

If you stand on top of the Piastowska Tower in Cieszyn and look down into the valley - your heart will ache. At the foot of the Castle Hill flows the sacred Olše River, sung about by Silesian poets, which by the decision of the Council of Ambassadors on 28 July 1920 became the border of the divided Cieszyn Silesia. From here, the human gaze encompasses a huge patch of orphaned Silesian land. To the south, it reaches the fog-blue Silesian Beskids, while to the west it wanders over hills and valleys, finally reaching the smoky horizon of the Karviná basin. And as far as the eye can see, it is all Polish land, with Polish peasants and workers on it.

For a long time Silesia waited for the moment of reunification with Poland. That it did not become Germanised or Czechised, despite centuries of separation from Polish influence, despite German officials and the Czech clergy, despite the lack of Polish nobility, who became Germanised and died out, is only due to the Polish books, which travelled from Poland to Silesia from time immemorial. These were devotional books, first printings by Rey, Kochanowski, Gdacjusz, Dąbrowski, Fr Wujek, Radziwiłł, Leopolita, and later devotional cancionals, all written in the beautiful Old Polish language.

They were the reason why Silesians did not lose their Polish language, their only link with Poland. It was customary for these books to be read aloud in Silesian homes, in the presence of all household members, in both Evangelical and Catholic homes, and they strengthened the Polish language in Silesia, without succumbing to the destructive influences of Czech and German. Until 1848, the year of the Spring of Nations, a Silesian was not exactly aware that he was part of the Polish nation. For those devotional books told him nothing about Poland, only about the salvation of his soul. It was only then that the story of his national revival took a turn.

Great men appeared, such as Stalmach, Cieńciała, Father Świeży, Father Michejda, Father Londzin and many, many others who undertook the stubborn but effective work of making the Silesian national consciousness. They were helped by books by Kaczkowski, Kraszewski, Orzeszkowa, Konopnicka and, above all, Sienkiewicz with his 'Trilogy'. And if today we are puzzled by this phenomenon, unusual in the history of other nations, of the national rebirth of a people almost forgotten by all, condemned solely to their own strength, we will find an explanation for this phenomenon in the miraculous power that the Polish book had for the Silesian.

It was the book - with the invaluable "Trilogy" at the forefront - that made the Silesian feel Polish, that made him fight so hard for the Polish cause in his native land, that he joined the Polish Legions to sacrifice his young life for the Poland of his dreams, and that he then bloodily defended Silesia when the Czech army began to occupy it in 1919. Not all of Silesia became part of Poland. It was divided by the Olše River, and on that side of the Olše River about 150,000 Polish people remained. Polish society on the other side of the Olza River, despite the destruction of Polish education by the Czech authorities, in spite of the simultaneous expansion of Czech education in purely Polish communities, in spite of the deprivation of Polish citizenship and work rights, in spite of the persecution of Polish books and the local Polish press, in spite of the fact that Polish parishes were staffed with Czech priests and in spite of the colonisation of Polish land and the economic ruination of everything Polish, did not lose heart, but fought fiercely for its rights as a free citizen and Pole in the Czechoslovak republic.

The struggle is extremely difficult. For everything has conspired against it: capital, the Czech clergy, economic terror, bribery, the Czech press and the chauvinism of the Czech population in Silesia and Moravia, supported in its actions by the Czech administrative and governmental authorities. The most acrimonious fight is over the Polish child. Where they cannot be bought from their parents for a Czech school, economic terror is successfully used by expelling them from work, transferring them to the Czech Republic, if they are employees in government institutions, and bypassing them when giving them work in clearing state forests and building roads. As a result, there are cases in which in municipalities where there are only a few Czech children, children of officials or gendarmes, schools are built - palaces for several hundred children.

This is because the authorities are convinced that sooner or later these schools will be filled, because sooner or later Polish parents will be forced to take their children out of Polish schools and give them to Czech schools. The Czechs do this in a sophisticated way. A Pole is fired from his job and told that he will be taken back to work if he sends his child to a Czech school. Such a worker will last a month, two, three. But when misery finally invades the home, when the children begin to cry from hunger, the despairing father sees no other choice but to take his child away from the Polish school and bring him to a Czech one.

With this method, Czech schools quickly fill up with our children and Polish schools become empty. In addition, Czech supervisors in the Třeštín ironworks and mines force Silesian workers to join Czech trade and cultural unions, again at the price of postponing to the future the threat of being deprived of work. By force of fact, such a worker must enrol his child in a Czech school. The Czechs claim that what they are doing is merely a national revindication, that all Silesians are polonised Moravians. This is just a thickly sewn theory, which honest Czech historians even deny, as, among others, the eminent Czech historian Adamus did in Moravian Ostrava. In order to Czechise the Polish population in Silesia more effectively, Czechs use renegades like the notorious Kożdoń and Smyczek, editors of Polish periodicals written in the Czech spirit.

These are the magazines "Nasz lud" and "Nasz Ślązak". While Kożdoń still maintains a certain restraint here, promoting only the so-called Silesian separatism on the territory of the Czechoslovak republic, but which, in its essence, promotes the Czechisation of the Polish population, Smyczek in Jablunkov, editing his "Ślązak" in hideous Polish, even fights everything that is Polish, telling his readers that they are only polonised Moravians and not Polish Silesians. Incidentally, it should be noted that this gossip magazine is the organ of the Czech agrarian party. The Czech authorities' persecution of the Polish press in Silesia on the Olše River will go down in history.

The record in terms of confiscations has been won by the only daily Polish organ, Dziennik Polski, which is confiscated even for reprinting articles taken entirely and literally from the Czech press. If you consider that the Czechs like to boast of their democratism, the methods they use against the Polish press put this democratism in a very dark light. The Czech authorities apply ruthless confiscation even to those Czech periodicals which outrage against the methods of denationalization of Silesians. Books and magazines for Polish youth, if they mention Poland and Polish affairs, albeit completely devoid of any political features, have been eliminated from public libraries and school lending libraries. Polish songs of a national character may not be sung in public, Polish plays of a national character may not be performed on stage.

Polish inscriptions on crosses in churches and on the Stations of the Passion in churches have been repainted, all Polish place names have beenczechised, although often such a desecration does not correspond to the spirit of the Polish language. For example, the old Polish name of the most Polish village Karviná, derived from the word karw (i.e. ox; a place where oxen used to graze), has been changed by the Czechs to Karvinna, which has nothing to do with the original etymology of the name. Czech official statistics state that the number of Poles in Silesia beyond the Olše River in 1921 was 110,138, although an attempted Polish calculation put the number at 163,300.

Ten years later, in 1931, a census showed that there were only around 80,000 Poles beyond the Olše! This rapid shrinkage of the Polish element is easily explained if one considers the methods used by the Czech commissioners during the census. Here, in all of Silesia beyond the Olše River, special census sheets were in force, in which, in addition to the Polish nationality column, there were also such columns as Silesian-Polish, Silesian-Silesian, Silesian-Czechoslovak and Czechoslovak. The census commissioners used all means to persuade the Polish population to write in one of the last four boxes.

Approximately 80,000 Poles signed in under the headings Pole or Pole-Silesian. The other 80,000 succumbed to the census commissioners' sophistical arguments that the people registering were not Poles because they lived in Poland, but Silesians because they lived in Silesia, or Silesian-Silesians, or Silesian-Czechoslovakians, or Czechoslovakians because they lived in the Czechoslovak republic. As a result, they were then all counted as Czech nationals. As a result of such Machiavellian construction of census sheets and census methods, the Czechs managed to "enlarge" their possessions by half of the local Polish population, which resulted in a series of political and administrative regulations to the detriment of the Polish element.How do our compatriots behind the Olše River defend themselves?

The largest national institution in which Silesians, regardless of their religion, are concentrated is the Educational Society in Czechoslovakia. It maintains a number of schools and day-care centres, courses and further education colleges, and above all it supports the only Polish secondary school in Orlová, which was founded in 1909 by the Educational Society with the help of the Folk High School Society in Krakow. Since then it has fulfilled its very useful task, and hundreds of pupils who have come out of the school today occupy prominent positions in social and national life at home and abroad. This grammar school is the pride and joy of Silesians beyond the Olše River. And in this connection we should admire the generosity of the starving worker, miner or Silesian peasant, who literally skimped on food, and donated the pennies he saved to his Educational Society and the Orlov Gymnasium.

The entire national and cultural life beyond the Olše river is concentrated in the Educational Society. Numerous circles, in every village in Silesia, some of them even several, choir sections, self-education circles, sports circles, folk theatre sections, music sections, hiking sections, scouting sections, libraries and reading rooms - all this constitutes a powerful, concentrated effort of Polishness beyond the Olza, defending itself from ultimate destruction. And what is most characteristic about this struggle is that it is led by the workers and peasants themselves, with the participation of a small local Polish intelligentsia, also descended from peasants and workers. This intelligentsia - as mentioned - is small in number, as it consists of only a handful of Polish teachers, a few priests, doctors and one lawyer.

That is all. Incidentally, it should also be noted that all state and industrial offices are closed to the local Polish intelligentsia, and the small number of them employed in state offices have been relocated deep into Bohemia. Therefore, peasants and workers run choirs, amateur theatres, organise performances, academies, devote their free time to ideological, disinterested work, and this work in every section shows a high, very high cultural and ideological level. In singing choirs not only a teacher, but also a worker performs, a worker conducts, in theatrical performances a worker also directs, and the level of their performances is so high that it meets with recognition not only at home, but also abroad, among spheres with high cultural requirements.

And it was right that one prominent national activist in Poland said, when he found himself among the Silesians beyond the Olza River:

"Whoever wishes to become Polish should come to you!".

The feeling of Polishness entered the blood and soul of Polish workers and peasants beyond the Olza, and formed a strong bond, which united all of them in spite of differences in political convictions and religious differences. And their great selflessness and idealism, which must move and enthral everyone if you come to observe their lives - it is their great love of Polishness that guarantees us that this orphan patch of Polish land is a powerful bulwark against the destructive power of the enemy.

When Maria Konopnicka wrote her "Rota" in Wisła, at the request of Father Londzina, she never imagined that its singing by Poles beyond the Olza River would be a political crime severely punished by the Czech authorities. And she may also not have guessed that just beyond the Olza River her "Rota" would be the most essential content of every Silesian's life. The words:

"We will not give up the earth from whence our family, we will not let speech be despised!".

- is today the motto and call of the Polish Silesian beyond the Olza River.