Everywhere—literally everywhere—human remains were scattered, and most of the underground tombs were open. First, following Rysiek’s instructions, we unsuccessfully searched for gold, but the remnants of clothes, pieces of coffins and miscellaneous accessories proved more interesting than gold. After a few minutes, Rysiek called me over, triumph in his voice, and showed me human bones with pieces of flesh. Fat, colorful flies buzzed above it all. The sight was better than the dead toad we had found in the garden that morning. In a corner of the cemetery, more human bones had been arranged in even piles. The following week, I saw groups of workers and a large excavator at the cemetery.
Under a gigantic oak, probably the largest in the cemetery, I noticed a modest grave with a porcelain photograph of a young girl dressed in white. Helga died in 1898, I read on the gravestone: 17 Jahre Alt. Pretty. Rysiek merely grimaced. He was a year older than me, but he knew as much about the world as if he had been an adult for a long time. She was certainly a virgin, he pronounced in the tone of an expert on the subject. Your aunt says: If you won’t give it to boys, you’ll give it to worms. And she gave it to worms, and the tree sucked her juices out too—look how big it is. Rysiek tenderly patted the mighty oak.
Today, there is a city park in this place. I noticed that residents do not use it as a destination. In summer, you do not see mothers with prams here; someone simply takes a shortcut to the city center and, from time to time, slips between the centuries-old trees.
Years later, that visit to the cemetery being demolished still remains in my memory and makes me think. In 1945, Poles driven from their homeland had to settle in a foreign, German city. They had to step into the shoes of their predecessors, light their stoves and begin smoothing their indestructible sandstone paving. The city’s German residents ended up in a great, deep pit, like waste from a slaughterhouse. They paid for the collective madness that seized their grandchildren in the 20th century, and for granting Adolf Hitler honorary citizenship in the 1930s.
Now their shadows wander through the city, pass through the great gate to the market square, climb into people’s beer mugs in the beer gardens, sometimes standing still at the sound of familiar speech articulated by loud tourists from Germany. Whenever I appear in Bolesławiec in summer, I always try to go to that park, if only for a moment. I find the great oak beneath which young Helga once lay. We remember her: the tree and I...
The Old Evangelical Cemetery on Garncarska Street. In its northern section stood the medieval Church of St. Nicholas, together with the parish cemetery. It was demolished in 1529. Through the efforts of the Evangelical parish, a cemetery chapel was built on its site in 1791; it was destroyed in 1813 and rebuilt again in 1819. From the 16th century to the beginning of the 20th century, this was the main cemetery in Bolesławiec. It contained many valuable historic monuments, senselessly destroyed after the war: Renaissance epitaphs of the Holtzman, Walditz, Rothlach and Seifert families—all from the mid-16th century—as well as a series of Baroque epitaphs, including the Rococo monument to Pastor Ambrosius Jaerschky (+ 1761). The cemetery expanded southward as far as today’s Willowa Street, beside which a mortuary was built, next to the transformer station that still stands today.
More photographs on the website: dolny-slask.org.pl