Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol4, 1920.pdf/302
sang Bohemian hymns at home. In later times a special effort was made by a Protestant Superintendent named Haase to banish all Bohemian books out of the Protestant families of Silesia. In the year 1900 he asked the Protestant congregations to collect together all Bohemian books used for the public worship, pretending that they were to be sent to the Slavic peoples of the South. Instead he caused half of them to be burnt, the other half to be concealed in the tower of the Protestant Church of Teschen.
The schools were Polonized by similar methods as were the churches. About the year 1870 most of the schools in Eastern Silesia were Bohemian. It will suffice to give as an example the school at Karvin which was Bohemian till 1870 or thereabouts, in 1870 had become Polish and by 1902 German.
An Austrian decree relating to Silesia—notoriously known by the name of its author a certain Zeynek—conferred upon local Councils the right to substitute one language for another as the medium of instruction. In short, to introduce German or Polish at the expense of Bohemian. This decree served its purpose and contributed not a little to the destruction of the selfconsciousness of the native population.
The methods adopted by the Poles against the Bohemians in the Austrian Parliament at Vienna are well known and no further explanation is needed why the Poles in Silesia were favored by the Government as compared with the situation of the Bohemians in that land. During the elections the Polish political leaders worked hand in hand with the Germans and the result was the serious one of bringing under German rule schools and communities which were originally Bohemian. From this time on the indigenous Bohemian population there began to look upon the Poles as mortal enemies.
But besides Polish colonization, the forcible Polonizing of the churches, schools and communities, besides the official system of Germanization and the Polish-German alliance, besides all these there were the great German capitalists whose programme aimed at open or secretive Germanization by force. This programme they pursued in conformity with the intentions of the Government and under its protection and patronage. That these German capitalists had great influence in Teschen District is manifest, when one considers that the largest part of Silesia with all its underground wealth, its collieries etc. belongs to them. The result is that almost the entire population was up to the present time practically their slaves.
In the past, the Bohemian public was able to take but little interest in the desperate struggle carried on by its compatriots in the East, for the whole nation, even at its centre, was powerless in the grip of Austria. The Habsburg system and the Polish curse were all-powerful in the unhappy land. It had but one defender and that was the Silesian Bohemian himself, who, alone and forsaken, through his own labors and with his own modest means fought out his heroic rebellion against his oppressors. He fought, he died; but he died in hope.
Through his labors, his indomitable perseverance, his self-sacrifice, there began in the year 1900 a re-awakening of Bohemian life in Teschen. The foundation of a private Grammar School at Orlová in 1909 was one of the fruits of this awakening.
The Austrian authorities did all in their power to paralyze the growth of the Bohemian movement. Bohemian engineers were refused employment, only those of German or Polish nationality being accepted. The Austrian Governor of Silesia Count Coudenhove reminded Count Larisch, that Bohemians, no matter what their abilities should be, were not to be employed.
On the outbreak of War the German hatred of the Bohemians reached its culmination in the wholesale destruction of everything that was Bohemian in Silesia. Life and existence were made impossible. German managers of mines and engineers and other educated and supposed-to-be civilized Germans together with their wives vied with the lowest class of informer as to who should denounce and ruin the greatest number of Bohemians whether they happened to be engineers, workmen, professors, teachers or students. When martial law was proclaimed in Silesia eight out of nine engineers in the employment of Count Larisch at Karvin were denounced by informers who alleged against them high treason, espionage and other capital crimes; they were arrested, kept in prison and sent into the horrible Austrian concentration camps, or, when possible to the front; their wives and children were accused of different fictitious crimes; they were persecuted in an endless variety of ways,and when, after all the torment of imprisonment, trial, and endless inquiries it was impossible to convict them, they were deprived of their livelihood or their careers were ruined by dismissal—punishments but little alleviated in some cases by the granting of a trifling pension.
The Chief Constable, Kunz, distinguished by his methods of cruelty and the still more notorious police commissioner Janka of Moravská Ostrava carried on regular hunts for Bohemians throughout the country, so that no one’s life was safe, every Bohemian lived in hourly expectation that the gendarmes with fixed bayonets would appear and drag him away. Life with its torments and ignominies became a regular Golgatha for the Bohemian.
While the “Marquis Gero” (i. e. the Archduke Frederick, so designated in the political songs and poems of the Silesian poet Peter Bezruč) was holding revels in the Castle of Teschen, and at Karvin Count Larisch was entertaining the tyrant Kaiser William, on their estates, in their mines and factories Bohemian workmen were arrested and dragged at the point of the bayonet to the gallows. Others with their families were