I am part of the 2nd generation born in the so-called "Recovered Territories"– formerly German lands that are now part of Poland.
In the spirit of Lower Silesian pride, I'd like to give you an idea of what it means to live surrounded by traces of a foreign population.
🧵
In the spirit of Lower Silesian pride, I'd like to give you an idea of what it means to live surrounded by traces of a foreign population.
🧵
Very briefly: As a result of post-WWII border changes, Germans were forcibly deported from their former eastern territories, and Poles from PL Eastern Borderlands were relocated to the West. For Poles, this shift felt very much like moving into someone else's house. Come and see.
Living in a formerly-German house is probably not that different than living in any other house except that it often comes with surprising discoveries. Here: newspapers, circa 1905, used as a primer for the wallpaper & discovered during the apartment's renovation.
It also means making certain... ahem, "curious discoveries in the attic, like these Nazi-era gas masks...
However, most of the time it just means living surrounded by German objects that pop out of the closets unexpectedly, like these hangers...
...and this combo – growing up Polish among German objects – usually leads to a certain incongruence and misuse or rather, repurposing, like this accounting book I found somewhere around the house and used as my diary growing up...
...or these containers, probably found in the attic once, now holding things that certainly are not coffee, pasta, or rice, but constantly reminding us that they belonged to mysterious former owners.
My childhood was filled with time spent staring at the fire burning in different German stoves that made the houses warm, but recently became defunct and mainly serve as random pieces of furniture (also, too heavy to be thrown out...), keepsakes of the bygone warmth.
There are many other moving, jarring and fascinating traces of the "absent presence" of those who lived here before, so I will be updating this thread as it's impossible to fit this experience in just a few Tweets. But in short – Lower Silesia is an extraordinary place.
Bathroom fixtures were among those items that lasted the longest in use, until the first "serious" apartment renovation. "Warm" could be the first German word I've learned – and actually fully, corporeally understood the meaning of.
Of course, most traces of the past are to be found outside, sometimes they simply emerge from underneath the old paint peeling off the walls...
...or they surprise you mid-hike, as there was never a need to replace parts of the infrastructure that are working and still doing just fine. (here: a German sewer flap, smack in the middle of a trail through the mountains.)
...also, in the most random of places.
But sometimes they simply lurk in the background, you need to have your eyes open and work harder to find them. Who would have thought – snow can be of help!
A letter came from Dresden, more than a century ago, it seems. The envelope is still around but the address doesn’t match. Why is it still here then? I will never know. Filing it in the “questions unanswered” pile.
Be it Jewish tombs in Poland, Polish in the Eastern Borderlands or, like in this case, German in the Polish “Recovered Territories”, one thing is equal. There’s nothing sadder than the sight of an abandoned, nameless and an overgrown grave.
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