Łotewsko-śląskie związki na przykładzie biografii profesora Józefa Byczkowskiego
Latvian-Silesian relations on the example of professor Józef Byczkowski’s biography

Summary/Abstract: So far, neither in Poland nor in Germany have historians conducted any research on the history of Silesian-Latvian relations. The subject is worth examining, not only because of the history of the Birons dynastythat ruled Courland and Semigalia, and from 1786 also the Duchy of Żagań. In the interwar period, Latvian consulates operated in Silesia: in Wrocław and Katowice. After 1945, Poles from the Eastern Borderlands came to Silesia; among them there were Józef Byczkowski and Regina Wieżań-Siemieńska. The Kolbuszewski family, previously linked to Riga, also tied their fate to Silesia. However, professor Józef Byczkowski – a long-time employee of the Silesian Institute, a researcher of Polish-German relations, an erudite speaking several European languages, after 1990 dealing also with Latvian issues – has become a symbol of Latvian-Silesian relations. Byczkowski was born in 1927 in Daugavpils, the capital of the former Polish Livonia. He spent his childhood and youth in the conditions of the multicultural Latgale, but he grew up during the Second World War and the shifting occupations. After 1945, Byczkowski studied pedagogy and worked as a teacher in Latvia and Lithuania. In 1959, he decided to repatriate and lived in the Opole Silesia, with which he connected all his later life.

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