Autōr: Tomasz Kamusella

Mickiewicz belonged to the privileged estate of nobles. The serfs on his family estate were mostly Orthodox Slavophones, who spoke in dialects which nowadays would be identified as Belarusian. His world was multilingual.

Despite the fact that after Polish, Silesian is the second largest language in today’s Poland, in school textbooks no attention is paid to the poetry of Óndra Łysohorsky,[35] whom, in 1970, Switzerland nominated to the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Modern antisemitism’s slogan is ‘Go back home, Jew,’ be it Palestine, Madagascar, Birobidzhan, Uganda or the United States. The tacit racist assumption is that Jews were not, are not, and will never be Europeans.

PiS’s ‘good change’ is the straight way back to the past, relentless polonization under an authoritarian regime. In PiS’s Silesia there is no place left for the Silesians and any diversity.