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Nasza Przeszłość

Vol. 104 (2005): Our Past

Articles

Polish schools in the Białystok district under German occupation in 1915-1919

  • Adam Szot
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52204/np.2005.104.163-195  [Google Scholar]
Published: 2005-12-30

Abstract

During their first major counteroffensive on the Russian front, German troops captured Białystok in August 1915 and moved further east. As a result the Białystok District was placed under German administration, which pursued a policy of confiscations and wholesale exploitation of local resources for the war effort. Its other measures, aimed at Germanization of the population of the region (which was to be annexed to East Prussia), prioritized the German language and institutions.
The Poles saw the sudden end of Russian rule as a unique opportunity to start Polish schools. The initiative was taken up by a number of newly-formed voluntary associations, chief among them the Society for the Support of Polish Schools in Bialystok. The Catholic clergy, too, lost no time in setting up Polish elementary schools in parishes throughout the province as well as laying the groundwork for Polish secondary schools in Bialystok. The authorities, however, were not prepared to tolerate gladly anything that threatened the monopoly of the German educational system and could become the seedbed of a Polish national revival. Teachers and clergy associated with the Polish schools were harassed, and in some cases made to serve terms of imprisonment. But the patriotic Polish community was undismayed. Not only did it produce a crop of enthusiastic young people who wanted to train as teachers; there were also many educated adults of all professions who volunteered to teach Polish classes in a broad campaign to stamp out illiteracy. The number of Polish schools continued to grow, though at a much slower rate than before. The German occupation of the Białystok District (August 1915 - February 1919) came to be remembered as a time of hardship and economic exploitation. The fact that those years saw an astonishing revival of Polish schools has hardly been noted. The sources, believed to have been lost, were traced by the author of this article in the Archidiocesan Archives in Białystok. With the help of those documents it has now become possible to get a more accurate picture of that phase of Bialystok's history and of the history of Polish schools in that region.

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