The Bolesławiec City Council adopted a resolution “on naming a square within the city of Bolesławiec”, meaning that the square visible in the photograph officially bears the name of Stefania Tajcher. Seventeen councillors voted in favour.
Let us recall. The Bolesławiec Senior Citizens’ Council submitted a request to Mayor Piotr Roman to name part of the city’s Planty at Głowackiego Street “The Stefania Tajcher Rose Square”. City councillors were to consider the draft resolution on the matter at the May session. The justification of the document in question states:
(…) Stefania Tajcher arrived in Bolesławiec on 7 September 1945 wearing a camp “striped uniform”. The city lay in ruins. There were no schools or school administration. Stefania Tajcher began working at the County Office, dreaming of organising a Polish school in the near future. With this in mind, she personally went to the educational authorities in Legnica, where she received support from Marian Dziubiński.
Upon her return, with the instructions she had received, she immediately set about the pioneering task of organising a school. Her aim was to establish a school for the children of Polish families arriving in Bolesławiec in repatriation and resettlement transports. After a pedagogical council meeting attended by Stefania Tajcher, Marian Dziubiński and Eugenia Trzaskowska (later Trzaskowska-Mazur), it was decided that the school year would begin on 1 October 1945.
From the memoirs of Eugenia Trzaskowska-Mazur: “Miss Tajcher wrote an announcement about enrolment at the school on the reverse side of former German forms and pasted it on a post near the school (the former German school at 6 Komuny Paryskiej Street) and near the town hall.”
She searched the ruins of houses for equipment, furniture and materials useful for furnishing a classroom, and transported them in a handcart. This is how residents remembered her: a teacher in a “striped uniform”, who loved children and cared about their education.
Later that same year, seeing the enormous need, Stefania Tajcher and Marian Dziubiński (who had already moved to Bolesławiec and become the first post-war School Inspector) opened the first class of a general secondary school after Christmas 1945. This marked the beginning of I LO.
Stefania Tajcher became the first head of Primary School No. 1 in the 1945/1946 school year. She also taught German at the so-called eleven-year school (the I LO building). In her diary, under the date 8 October 1945, Stefania Tajcher wrote: “On 1 October 1945, a solemn service and the opening of the first school in Bolesławiec took place. And so 1 October 1945 will be written in golden letters in Bolesławiec, because after more than 600 years, a school was established in the Piast Lands, in the Polish town of Bolesławiec.” The history of Bolesławiec’s education system was written in “golden letters”, but Stefania Tajcher’s surname was also written in “golden letters” forever.
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