12 February 1945 is a significant date in the history of Bolesławiec. On that day, Soviet troops advancing westward occupied the town and drove out the German army, thereby displacing the German state apparatus that had exercised Prussian rule over it since 1742. This expulsion was to prove permanent—not because on that day, as has traditionally been presented, the Red Army liberated Bolesławiec for Poland, but because the interests of the then-superpower USSR coincided with Poland’s national interest, one of whose principal elements was Poland’s western border on the Oder and Neisse, and thus Bolesławiec within Poland.
Today this may seem obvious, but during the war and even afterward it was not so at all. Unfortunately, this is another “white,” or, if you prefer, “red,” spot in our history. And it is rather a gap in the history disseminated to the public than in the history known to a relatively narrow group of historians or researchers. The claim that the forces of the so-called progressive left—the communists—desired a sovereign and free Poland with a border on the Oder and Neisse is not true. As internationalists, they were instead interested in a truncated state between Soviet Russia and Germany, one that would in fact be another republic of the USSR. There is more than enough evidence of this. Only a twist of history meant that, through Stalin’s decision, the issue of postwar Poland’s border became one of the demands of the so-called “people’s power.” In reality, the Soviet desire to consolidate the division established by the demarcation line of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact (1939), to move Germany’s western borders eastward, and at the same time to shift the borders of satellite Poland (the so-called Polish People’s Republic) westward, basing them on the Oder and Neisse, had at least two aims. First, to set the “Poland” it was creating—and, in a sense, even the Poles—against Germany and the West, which, among other things, permanently tied the Polish People’s Republic to the USSR. Second, to push Soviet influence as far west as possible while supposedly “fairly” compensating (?!) for the loss of the Republic of Poland’s Eastern Borderlands, including Lviv and Vilnius.
The genuine demand for a struggle for Poland’s Western Territories, however, had been voiced almost from the beginning of the Second World War by the Polish national movement, which clearly formulated its position on the matter as early as December 1940, stating in an article entitled “Our War Aims,” published in the underground “Szaniec” (No. 49):
Here is a summary of our most important war aims:
1. Poland must regain all of East Prussia and, in the west, at least the line of the lower Oder (both banks at the mouth) and all of Silesia up to the Lusatian Neisse. There is no need to elaborate on this point; it has been sufficiently explained and is firmly rooted in the consciousness of the entire nation.
2. The Polish state shall have the right to resettle the entire German population to Germany, regardless of any possible options exercised by that population, at the unrestricted discretion of the competent Polish authorities.”
This was the first political position to be formulated so clearly and explicitly. At the time, it shocked moderate political activists, but it was to prove a prophetic vision of Poland’s future in the west. Gradually, the previously little-known concept of the Recovered Territories entered common usage through the national camp, only to be adapted for its own purposes by the USSR toward the end of the war.