| History |
| ...meaning: there’s no ‘today’ without ‘yesterday’! |
| Historia |
Why the question about the history is so important?
Certainly, each of us is in search of their own roots – meaning something that differentiates us from others, something that makes us special… For many people it might be, and often it is, the history. It is the very history that makes our family different form many others.
'More precisely, please...'
Name ‘Kołaczek’, ‘Kolatzek’ or ‘Kollaczek’ comes from the Czech Republic. All variants have the same part ‘ek’. We still don’t know when and why our ancestors moved to Warmia. The only thing that we know is that they’ve been living there for over 150 years. Perhaps they were resettled by the Bishops of Warmia already in 16th century… or maybe later… They lived mainly in the southern Warmia, near Olsztynek – in villages Ruś and Pluski – called also “the Polish Warmia”. However, they didn’t speak polish very well. They ‘took’ a Polish course after the year 1945 since they stayed in their mother country although the language and the authorities had changed. In order to stay in Warmia they had to receive Polish citizenship and adjust their name to Polish spelling. Other Warmians while being called ‘szwaby’ after two years of suffering (1947) started to leave their homeland, but our family grew attached to the new inhabitants. The poverty of the people expelled from Lithuania and Ukraine and the suffering of Warmians who were deprived of their fatherland, in the case of our family, united the people (although it could have been, and sometimes it was, just the opposite). A born and bred Warmian isn’t permanently bound to the state but remains faithful to, what the Germans call, ‘Heimat’ (the small homeland, the region of one’s childhood). Owing to this decision, a rare and interesting family story had its beginning; the people forced out of their houses from over the Bug River and the Warmians loyal to their homeland but deprived of their possessions and of any kind of help got to know each other and got used to each other. Instead of hatred, there was harmony and friendship, and after few years there were first intermarriages…
That’s not all!
In fact, the above-mentioned marriages were not welcome. Negative experience and sharp hunger they had suffered from stood in the way of uniting the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Warmians. But there’s little that can be done when the young forget the hunger and pain and decide to marry a member of a different ethnic group. Like the Capulets and the Montagues, they started new families that overstepped the boundaries of hatred and xenophobia. The pressure put on them by their friends and relatives was not without significance. However, most of the families ‘turned out well’. Today, people form Gdańsk, Lidzbark, Delft, Homburg and Reidstadt (from Poland, the Nederlands and Germany) use this surname; spread throughout Europe, yet united by their ancestors and their effort put into unifying what had been divided by hate.
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