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| Olsztyn castle, May 2013 |
This past week, I’ve been in Olsztyn, a medium sized town in
the north-east of Poland, doing archival work – shuttling between the contrasting
worlds of a modern business hotel, and the archdiocesan archive across the
road.
This is a town where a lot of people are looking for the
past. Olsztyn – 4 hours north of Warsaw by train, 2 hours south of Gdańsk by
car - was founded in the 14C as Allenstein, within the territory of the
Teutonic Knights. In the mid 15C, the area revolted and came under the
authority of the Polish Crown. Allenstein, with its pretty castle built over a
winding stream, was within the prince-bishopric of Ermland, administered by cathedral
canons including Nicholas Copernicus. From the 18C until 1945 Allenstein was
part of the kingdom of Prussia, and subsequently of post-unification Germany.
In those centuries it acquired grand, red-brick neo-gothic buildings, and
witnessed difficult relations between the local German and Polish populations. By 1945, many of the local Polish population had been killed
or displaced; the German inhabitants of Allenstein who had survived the arrival
of the Red Army were deported en masse, and the area resettled with Poles from
the eastern borderlands, from what are now Lithuania and Belarus.
In that sense, Olsztyn/Allenstein is a pretty typical East
European town, with a past you can’t sum up in a single sentence, a history
dense with the movement of peoples, armies and borders. That past remains very
much in the air. The hotel and the attractive Old Town are, for example, full
of coach parties from Germany, many of them here to see the place where they,
or their parents, grew up. They come into the archive, people in their 70s,
asking for the pre-war baptismal registers for the parishes where they were
born; looking for grandparents, for connections. In Olsztyn Castle, meanwhile,
regardless of the fact that Copernicus started his great work ‘De revolutionibus’ in that very building, the chief focus is an exhibition on
the ‘Kresy’, the eastern areas which people left c.1945, as part of the great
resettlement of Prussia with ethnic Poles. There were mock ups of Vilnius
middle-class parlours c. 1939, school certificates from Vilnius schools,
recorded interviews of people reminiscing about their ancestral lands in the
east. What the people of Olsztyn want to remember, it seems, is not the history
of this town, with which they have no genealogical connection, but lost places
far away.
And I too came here in search of more than one kind of ghost
– not just Copernicus’ bishop and fellow canons as they tried to fend off
Lutheranism in the 1520s and 1530s, but my grandfather, a Polish writer born
in Olsztyn in 1917, and my great-grandfather, a long-serving editor of the Gazeta Olsztyńska, a major Polish
political newspaper of the early 20C. Their photos are prominent in the town museum; the 21C journalists from that same newspaper came to interview me, as
the descendant of these local heroes; people came to reminisce
about my grandfather’s anti-Communist broadcasts. So this research trip felt
more personal than most. Sometimes the great volumes of 16C letters in the
archive, with their crabbed brown handwriting, can be a welcome escape from the
East European history which happened afterwards.
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| Allenstein, 1920 |
