The story of a boy from Bielsko – my great-grandfather Karol

The family treasure I chose to describe within the 2026 edition of the project ‘Grandparents. Grand Stories’ is a certificate from the school for officers of the Polish Army, which belonged to my great-grandfather Karol Koska. The certificate is dated 28 April 1928 and states that my great-grandfather was promoted to senior rifleman with good results. At the bottom of the document, there is a photo of all the recruits who attended this school in 1928. The story I want to describe begins in Bielsko, in the heart of Europe, in 1906, when my great-grandfather was born. Unfortunately, my homeland, Poland, was then under partition, meaning it did not exist and was not marked on the map. My great-grandfather was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When Poland regained its independence in 1919 after the First World War, my great- grandfather was thirteen years old and, although he spoke German, he felt Polish and continued his education at a Polish school. After the outbreak of World War II, Bielsko, my great- grandfather's hometown, found itself in another country again, as it was annexed to the Third Reich. My great-grandfather's birth certificate, issued in 1940, is written in German, and Bielsko is referred to as ‘Bielitz’. After World War II, the entire family, except for Karol and his elderly parents, was resettled to Germany, where some of them still live today (including my favourite uncle Rajmund, who always gives me 10 euros for sweets when we meet and mispronounces Polish words in a funny way). Bielsko, on the other hand, found itself within the borders of Poland again. It is also interesting that my ancestor, like his hometown, is named slightly differently in every document I found in the family archive. In 1961, he received a document from the Polish authorities stating that his surname was ‘Kózka’ and that he could no longer be called anything else. The story of my great-grandfather ends in Krakow, where he arrived in 1945, where he met my great-grandmother, started a family, where my grandmother was born and where he remained until the end of his life, and also where my mother was born (and where I live - in Poland, in the European Union).