European Media Awards. Grand Award in 2013. Vienna.
Since the end of the Second World War, entire ethnic groups have begun to disappear – the Silesian, Pomeranian, Masurian. Indifference and silence overshadow the gravity of this historical reality.
Upper Silesia has always been a landscape of encounters and a bridge between Western and Eastern Europe. After the Second World War, millions of people from the annexed eastern Polish territories were forcibly resettled here. They brought their culture into this new, foreign world, and immediately collided with the traditions of the local population. From then on, old and new inhabitants, winners and losers, had to live as next-door neighbors. The only thing which united these people was their broken biographies. Was it possible for a new community to grow together on such turbulent soil?
This is a landscape of sorrow; sorrow and trauma. It is difficult to get out of that. It is a trauma – unprocessed, open; one that somehow always surfaces at the moment when we are not able to mourn these things.
I am in Upper Silesia and I am looking at the land and its people. I can see rubble and ashes, uprooted people, confused identities, uncertainty. The new Polish settlers continue to fight a war against a German and Jewish legacy which is irksome to them; they maintain an old concept of the enemy from their home country. The history of Upper Silesia has been suppressed for more than seventy years. The Jewish, German, and Silesian legacy has been gouged out of the landscape. I ask myself, what will happen to a land and its people when its history has been denied and its historical roots have been severed? The younger generation is asking for it. The future generations would like to know where they are living. They conjecture about the existence of a Silesia that does not exist anymore; a rich land full of life, history, culture, and tolerance. Even when their fathers remain silent, the youth have a right to find answers to their questions.
