At Piwnica Paryska, the adult children of repatriates from France who came to Bolesławiec after 1945 celebrated the anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution. The date when the Bastille prison was stormed, July 14, is a national holiday in France. For Poles born in France, it is an important holiday. Every year, they try to sing La Marseillaise and raise a toast to sweet France, their second homeland.
Aniela Kowalewska, the daughter of miners from northern France, remembers France as she remembers her childhood. “When I feel sad, I think about the town where I lived to lift my spirits,” Aniela says. Today, she has children, grandchildren and friends in Poland. France, however, will always remain for her the land of a sweet childhood, where people were kinder than in Poland.
Poles emigrated to the mines of northern France at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when coal deposits there began to be intensively exploited. Skilled workers were needed, especially after the First World War, in which huge numbers of men were killed. In the 1930s, the French established recruitment offices in Kraków and Silesia and encouraged Poles to leave. Entire trains of emigrants departed from Lesser Poland and Silesia. After the Second World War, many of them returned to Poland. Today, their children remember their French roots. They were educated there, and return there in their memories.
The owner of Piwnica Paryska, Bogusław Nowak, who spent many years in France, remembers it with the same affection as his guests celebrating the anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution.