B.Ratter: We studied life in the Borderlands before the war, the destiny of its citizens during the war and their destiny after the war

It shortly turned out that law studies in Warsaw are adverse compared to reliable, abundant lectures conducted at the University of Jan Kazimierz - the creator of Young Poland, the author of diaries, which is simply a origin of information for historians, biographers and literary scholars presented Karolina Strusińska in the book Modernist Lviv under the editorial board of Ewa Paczowska and David Maria Osiński.

Zdzisław Dębicki, born in a landowner's household in Volyn, raised in the most patriotic atmosphere, began medical and law studies at the University of Warsaw. On the centenary of the outbreak of the Kilinski Uprising, together with a group of students, he took part in mass and street walk, which ended in detention in Pawiak and exile into Russia with a ban on going to studies within the Polish Kingdom. After a year in Omsk, he was released as a consequence of amnesty and enrolled in Lviv.

Many times emphasizing innovation and universalism in teaching in a remarkable way, he glorifies lectures by prof. Stanisław Starzyński:

I was brought up by an “outside Europe” and “outside the law” during the reactionary regulation of the self-governor, specified as Tsar Alexander III, into the sphere of Western-European political issues. Invisibility under the influence of these lectures “I was Europeanizing myself, starting looking at the planet not only through the blocked window of the Polish prison in which we sat in the Kingdom. I have acquired, can be said, breath and orientation in the overall European political relationship. I began to realize what a constitutional state is and how easy it is to be a good citizen.

(... The 3rd lecture I attended was a lecture, "the past of the Polish system" by Prof. Oswald Balzer... these lectures were a revelation. They gave me a imagination of the erstwhile Poland, independent, based on its own legal system, about its "magnam chartam libertatum" from 1505. Everything here was fresh to me, due to the fact that even if I knew these things, they were crumbs of news, loosely captured, but having nothing to do with actual knowledge. This cognition was only prof. Balzer. The excellent author of the "Genealogy of Piasts" and "Genezy of the Crown Court" spoke clearly, you finished, in good Polish. In his courts, he was a subject. He decently judged what was good in the Polish system, and harshly judged what led to the inevitable disorder. However, it was not a dry historical-legal lecture. The heart of a citizen, a warm - loving homeland, has always been in him, seeking comfort in the past in the misery of today. (Sparks in ashes, Zdzisław Dębicki- Modernist Lviv, Warsaw 2009)

Lviv, Vilnius, Grodno – centres in a universal and European dimension – as centres of Polish national life in the late 19th century, where “the purely cultural movement was walking in parallel with the intense social and political movement”. The heart of the Polish citizen, warmly loving his homeland and seeking encouragement in the past was beating in the hearts of those inhabiting the east Borders of the Republic.

A Pole ready to fight for freedom and regain the independency of the Republic in 1918, for its maintenance in battles under Polish Thermopiles - Zadwórż, Dytiatin, Horpin. A Pole who built a free homeland and again resisted enemies in 1939. For allegiance to the country and its defence cruelly murdered and sent to the Russian camps. Not all Poles surviving in the east Borders of Poland managed to last the extermination planned by Germans and Russians (supported by minorities – besides Polish citizens).

On the 84th anniversary of Russia's aggression against Poland on September 17, 1939, on September 15-17, 2023, a conference “Generations Remember” organized by the Kresy-Syberia Foundation in cooperation with the Sibir Memorial Museum was held at the Sibir Museum. Poles arrived at it – those who survived from cruelly murdered and sent to Russian camps and children who survived planet War II – from deportation from the east Borders (now Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania) to Siberia, residing in various parts of the world. Members of the foundation founded in 2001 by Stefan Wiśniowski, Australian-Polish-Canadian boy of the Siberian deported.

They are moved by their will to come to Poland (despite the distance and cost), their warm memory of members of families, neighbours, friends who remained on the inhuman land, their love and respect for those who survived the time of destruction, and their desire to contact the native land and the trace of the household home on the land taken (now Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania), and their continued search through contacts with likewise deported and archives – to search for papers concerning deportation to the inhuman land of faithful Republics. Their descendants are faithful to the memory of their ancestors.

Should they not receive support from the budget of the Polish State alternatively of multiple organizations or foundations that do not carry out specified activities, and the materials they issue are mainly a registration of meetings and photographs of members and supporting self-promoting politicians?

The mission of the foundation of the Kresa Siberia (as representatives of the multiethnic and multi-religious community of the east Borders of Poland) is to give children, grandchildren and subsequent generations the cognition of "the conflict for freedom and endurance in east Poland and of forced emigration". Members sought archival information scattered in poorly accessible archives around the world, as well as in the hands of the post-war Polish diaspora- "We tested life in the Borderlands before the war, the destiny of its citizens during the war and their destiny after the war. In time, the group gathered, digitized and downloaded thousands of photographs, papers and diaries to its website and established close contacts with many Polish archives and museums around the world" – they compose about their activities on the website of the Virtual Museum of the Cress of Siberia, maintained by them.

For me, Poland, my country, the Nation was associated with dreams intertwined with the sound of Hussar wings, with Sienkiewicz's novels, lit figures of Piasts, Jagiellons and Polish insurgents, Beloved The homeland had a close connection to the contents of Grottger's works...a rising saber hanging over my ancestors' bed, Sarmatian pride, fantasy, nobility and courage. These were signs of my life – meditation arrested by NKVD in 1944 Marian Bilewicz, soldier of the National Army in Lviv.

Have I always disobeyed these ideals? Have I not sacrificed everything that I have had most precious, freedom, freedom, suffering and blood for my country - for my Homeland?

Why are they harassing me like that, and why are they stalking me like that? Why is individual taking my freedom again, treating me like a criminal? Who's hurting you like that and hurting you? Are they Poles? Are you in Polish or Russian prison? Is he questioning you, a Polish soldier, a Polish or russian officer? Who are you to the fresh authorities of your city and country? You don't like the way these authorities do things? And did your great-grandfather, who worked half his life in shackles on a messenger and whose bones whitewash to this day somewhere far in the east, or your grandfather, who for six years trampled on the roadless Siberian cathorga, enjoy and respond to the Russian authorities? Didn't a Russian bullet break your father's leg in 1920? What are you, that your destiny is to go on differently, milder than the destiny of thousands, millions over centuries of captivity?

(... ) I fell asleep on a wooden, narrow bunk, in my beloved town, in a building from which windows could be seen the prison building in Łąckiego Street - a German execution house. In that building, so not long ago, for more than 8 months, there were torturers sleeping in a restless dream in russian prison, a Polish fascist. (Marian Marek Bilewicz I came out of darkness).

It's been 84 years and they could ask the same question: Who are you to the fresh authorities of your city and country? Is it inactive (as in russian prison) a Polish fascist, or a citizen of “nibyland” or the east Borders of the Republic, who were again forgotten in the name of political correctness towards minorities? And asking for the memory of the large Polish national heritage of the Republic, created on the 600-year-old land (now besides Ukraine) and the fact about the cruel genocide of Polish citizens by Polish citizens – Ukrainians will stay “Russian onus”? possibly just temporarily, for the election, the deadline's expired?

Oh, my God.