Two bits of good news reached Warsaw from two extreme corners of Poland. Off in the southwestern borderlands, in Opole, for the first time since World War II, a representative of the German minority became major city official of the provincial capital—elected with the votes of the Polish majority.

Off in the northeastern borderlands, in Białystok, the Orthodox—Belarusians and Catholics—Poles undertook to establish a Christian-Democrat formation above all ethnic and religious differences.

This is not earth-shattering news, but for those who know how tough dialogue with the Polish majority can be in regions where minorities live in Poland, how tiring it is to rise above historical resentment and deal with day-to-day relationships between neighbors—Polish citizens of different nationalities, every bit of good news is reason to celebrate.

Post-WWII Poland—once a commonwealth of many nations—emerged practically as a single-nation country. But sensible relations with the few minorities turned out to be too tough a task, in official dealings and interpersonal relations alike.

One could spread the blame for this in various ways, but let’s face it—the Poles as the dominating nation should always try harder.
n The Poles call it Góra Świętej Anny (St. Anna’s Mount), the Germans—Annaberg.

A lonely hill towering over the Silesian fields. To this hill Silesian mothers used to bring their little ones, telling them to pray that Poland return to these lands and believing that a child’s prayer would be answered. Here, in the place where the greatest battle took place in 1921 between the German Freikorps and the Silesian insurgents fighting for the return of Poland, there stands a great monument with the names of dozens of nearby villages and towns from which the men went to join the insurrection and never returned. It is here, in the place where Silesian German pilgrimages travel, that services in German started being celebrated.

Góra Świętej Anny/Annaberg—today Poles and Germans tear this symbol from each other’s hands. At its foot, Silesia regained by Poland after the war was for years the testing ground for hatred resulting from a past that couldn’t be overcome.

On the borderland.
During my ungracious and naïve youth many years ago, in the opposite corner of Poland, I tried very hard to find out who the farmers gathered in an inn within the Polish-Belarusian borderland really were—Poles or Belarusians; they replied calmly “We’re locals, sir.”

The residents of the Białystok region and the Silesians, similarly to the residents of Alsace and Lorraine, are people of the borderlands. On the borderland, the people felt Silesian rather than Polish or German. More than to their great homelands, they were attached to their local hometowns. Out of students of Silesian schools asked about their family land, half mentioned their hometown, 20 percent—Silesia, and less than 5 percent said Poland. Very few mentioned Germany.

The Silesians managed to preserve their ethnic identity for centuries, they did not let successive rulers of this region strip them of their national character, and they also preserved their own separate cultural features in relation to the Poles. These were separate features that the Polish government tried to respect before the war in the Polish part of Silesia, giving the Silesians autonomy and a local Sejm. In the course of historical change, the people of this region in turn had to prove their Polishness or Germanity to different authorities. They did so in order to be able to remain here, because the homeland is what you can see from your backyard.

In 1945 the whole of Silesia returned to Poland. The chance emerged for Poland to regain not just Silesia, but the Silesian people.

At that time the Silesians were not against Poland. On the contrary, many carried an idealized image of Poland in their minds. Unfortunately, the Red Army, which took revenge on the Silesians—considering them to be Germans—by burning whole villages and sending east whatever was fit for the taking, was followed by some equally ruthless plunderers—Polish looters. That was the people’s first contact with the new Poland.

Then came the humiliating ethnic vetting, carried out by officials who came in from the central part of the country, who knew nothing of the borderlands and decided according to criteria known only to themselves who was German and had to go, and who deserved to be called a Pole. Next came a wave of settlers from prewar Poland’s eastern regions now under Russian rule. Two communities with different traditions, customs and levels of civilization came to live next to each other.

Vetted Silesians were forced to take Polish names, fines were imposed for using German, notices and road signs were destroyed. Kitchen containers carrying the dangerous label Salz were shattered. It’s shameful to say this, but not so long ago teaching of German was forbidden in Silesian schools, even though it was one of four foreign languages taught all over the country.

Let’s move diagonally to Poland’s northeastern borderland.
Things didn’t start out too badly.

The head of state and of the armed forces of reborn Poland came to Minsk, taken by the Polish army, on Sept. 19, 1919. Faced by an enthusiastic crowd, Józef Piłsudski promised in eloquent Belarusian: “I shall be proud of Poland, I shall be proud of my soldiers, finally I shall be proud of myself if I am able to give this land the most precious divine gift—the gift of freedom.”

The circumstances were such that Piłsudski failed to carry out his ambitious plans for a federation of the independent states of the Belarusians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians with Poland. The peace treaty signed with the Bolsheviks cut Belarus in two, and the part that went to Poland became a proving ground for Warsaw politicians, where they tested various clumsy methods of ethnic policy. When conventional means ran out, such as province governors in the rank of generals and with special prerogatives, and when counting on the Belarusian “gentleness and quietness” didn’t work out, they turned to radical measures. The Border Protection Corps, accounting for 10 percent of the Polish army before WWII, was formed to “pacify” the region. The Corps tamed Belarus, but it’s doubtful whether it won the local people over to Poland.

There was the labor camp in Bereza through which most Belarusian activists went—regardless of political afilliation, there were pacifications of poor villages, with the tips of Polish officers’ boots. When you remember this, it’s easy to understand something that hurts the Poles to this day—that the Belarusian farmers set up triumphal arches to welcome the Red Army in 1939.

Recent years have not diminished Belarusian resentment.
This is how Sokrat Janowicz, a Belarusian writer from Białystok, describes his compatriots’ state of mind: “A minority’s existence is uncertain everywhere. Someone speaking Polish awakens an irresistible desire in my mother to walk away. She goes to an administration office only when they summon her or she is forced to. As she stands in the hallway before the office, she is ready to cry. Such has been her age-old experience of the administration of the lord Poles.”

If the idea of Poland’s return to Europe is to be fulfilled, the Poles have to learn to live together with their small minorities. The Poles have been attached too long to the idea of a nationally uniform state. This turned out to be an illusion. Today, the Germans are fighting quite successfully for their rights, less so the Belarusians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians. Also waiting for historical redress, mainly in terms of property, is the international Jewish community, even though there are hardly any Jews left in Poland.

Polish officials, politicians and ordinary Poles need to revise their attitude toward minorities living within their country. Their right to cultivate their separateness cannot be waved off with a deprecating smile, as with the Belarusians, or with hostility as in the case of the Germans and Ukrainians, or with stupid brawls over a local church or a village school involving the presidents of Lithuania and Poland.

There’s no other way out: every single desire, even the most improbable or one obviously stemming from materialism, to be recognized as belonging to a minority simply has to be respected.
That is why every, even the weakest, signal like the ones from Opole and Białystok, proving that the wounds and pain of the past are healing, has to be treated with friendliness.

Only then will the Poles be able to take full advantage of the multicultural character of their borderlands.