The invited lecturer was Marek Szajda, a student of the full-time doctoral programme in Historical Sciences at the University of Wrocław Marek Szajda. The meeting focused on the history of national minorities arriving in Lower Silesia after the Second World War. In addition to the indigenous German population, Lower Silesia was settled by Poles, as well as Ukrainians and Lemkos displaced as part of Operation Vistula, Roma, Greeks and a very large Jewish community.
The interesting lecture, entitled “Reemigrants, settlers rescued from camps. Population exchange in Lower Silesia in 1945–1950, using selected counties as examples,” was interspersed with presentations of maps and documents depicting various groups of returnees, settlers and displaced people, as well as excerpts from documentary films obtained from newsreels and recordings made by private individuals shortly after their arrival in the Recovered Territories. Among those settling the Bolesławiec County area was a group of approximately 18,000 reemigrants from Bosnia.
Additionally, during the morning, Marek Szajda conducted a workshop for a group of students from Municipal Lower Secondary School No. 2, which proved to be an interesting history lesson. Both meetings took place at the Orzeł Cultural Integration Centre of the Bolesławiec Cultural Centre – International Ceramics Centre, an institution that provides substantive and organisational support for the Association’s activities.
