Niezwykła podróż w przeszłość

• Authors: Grzegorz Kardyś

Abstracts

EN

In 1987 I settled in Polkowice. While being there I decided to maintain one of my interests: collecting pre-war postcards of Polkowice. This resulted in publishing the album Polkowice and its Surroundings in Old Postcards in 2009. In the spring of 2010, we established the Society of the Polkowice District, and as its members, we began gathering information about the villages of our commune. We planned to study and describe the history of two-thirds villages every year. On Saturdays and Sundays, during the summer holidays, we went to the elected villages, walked around, took photos and talked to their inhabitants. I must admit that it was not easy. The villagers did not trust my wife and me because we were strangers to them. We asked the village leaders for help, and thanks to them, the people opened their doors to us. At the same time, through correspondence, I looked for former German inhabitants of these areas. Despite serious difficulties, mainly linguistic ones (I do not speak German), I managed to come into contact with some of them. We managed to resolve problems and former inhabitants sent memoirs and rich photographic documentation from the period of their staying in a given village. The village leaders proved to be very helpful, as they collected photos and documents for us. It was also possible to obtain funds, which allowed us to publish a book as well as printing a contemporary postcard of a given village. We decided to give a book with a postcard to each family in a given village. Our gifts were to be handed out by the village leaders. During this period, I met a number of interesting people such as Zenon Wdowik, a former inhabitant of Polkowice, who now lives in Germany; Zbigniew Rajche, the son of the first head of the primary school in Polkowice, who lived in Zielona Góra (unfortunately he is no longer alive); and Stanisław Sobczak, the son of the first district leader of Polkowice, living in Wrocław at present. I made friends with the people mentioned above. They often visited me in Polkowice, and we talked about history. They also gave me interesting and historically valuable materials. Zenon Wdowik is an invaluable translator of the texts from the German language. In 2014 we prepared one of the smallest publications, a book about Biedrzychów. The reason for its small size was the fact that we did not establish any contact with the pre-war inhabitants of the village. Thus while working on this book, I used the available German sources, press articles, archival documents and my own photographic documentation. I must admit that I probably captured the last authentic image of Biedrzychów, because at present, while the S3 dual carriageway is being built, Biedrzychów looks like a lunar landscape. In 2016 we studied and described the last villages, in total there were 17 of them. The publications were given to the families who were interested in these places. In this way I completed the presentation of all the villages in the district of Polkowice. In parallel with the work on the villages mentioned above, I also began gathering materials related to Polkowice. The first results of my work were presented in 2014 in the book Polkowice We do not Know or do not Remember, and in 2017 in the following books: 1945-1990 the History of Polkowice Depicted in Photographs and Public Elementary School in Polkowice (Browarna Street 1945-1969). Due to the limited financial resources, the edition of these books was limited. That is why they were mainly given to the libraries in the town and the people who, providing photographs and documents, contributed to preparing these publications.

Keywords

PL

Towarzystwo Ziemi Polkowickiej; Żuków; Trzebcz; Guzice; Moskorzyn; Pieszkowice; Sobin

• Publisher: Agencja Wydawnicza “PDN”
• Journal: Adhibenda
• Year: 2018
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 249-264

Dates

published

2018

Contributors

author

Grzegorz Kardyś

Identifiers

Biblioteka Nauki

2032889