Place:Bielsko-Biała, Ślaskie, Poland

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Bielsko-Biała is a city in southern Poland, with a population of approximately 168,319 (as of December 2021)^[1] and an area of . It is a centre of the Bielsko Urban Agglomeration with 325,000 inhabitants and is an automotive, transport, and tourism hub of the Bielsko Industrial Region. Situated north of the Beskid Mountains, Bielsko-Biała is composed of two former towns which merged in 1951 – Bielsko in the west and Biała in the east – on opposite banks of the Biała River that once divided Silesia and Lesser Poland. Between 1975 and 1998, the city was the seat of Bielsko Voivodeship and currently lies within the Silesian Voivodeship.

History

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Both city names, Bielsko and Biała refer to the Biała River, with etymology stemming from either biel or biała, which means "white" in Polish.

Bielsko

The remnants of a fortified settlement in what is now the Stare Bielsko (Old Bielsko) district of the city were discovered between 1933 and 1938 by a Polish archaeological team. The settlement was dated to the 12th - 14th centuries. Its dwellers manufactured iron from ore and specialized in smithery. The current centre of the town was probably developed as early as the first half of the 13th century. At that time a castle (which still survives today) was built on a hill.

In the second half of the 13th century, the Piast dukes of Opole invited German settlers to colonize the Silesian Foothills. As the dukes then also ruled over the Lesser Poland lands east of the Biała River, settlements arose on both banks like Bielitz (now Stare Bielsko), Nickelsdorf (Mikuszowice Śląskie), Kamitz (Kamienica), Batzdorf (Komorowice Śląskie) and Kurzwald in the west as well as Kunzendorf (Lipnik), Alzen (Hałcnów) and Wilmesau (Wilamowice) in the east. Nearby settlements in the mountains were Lobnitz (Wapienica) and Bistrai (Bystra).

After the partition of the Duchy of Opole in 1281, Bielsko passed to the Dukes of Cieszyn within fragmented Poland. The town was first documented in 1312 when Duke Mieszko I of Cieszyn granted a town charter. The Biała again became a border river, when in 1315 the eastern Duchy of Oświęcim split off from Cieszyn as a separate under Mieszko's son Władysław. After the Dukes of Cieszyn had become vassals of the Bohemian kings in 1327 and the Duchy of Oświęcim was sold to the Polish Crown in 1457, returning to Lesser Poland after three centuries, the Biała River for next centuries marked the border between the Bohemian crown land of Silesia within the Holy Roman Empire and the Lesser Poland Province of the Kingdom of Poland and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

With Bohemia and the Upper Silesian Duchy of Cieszyn, Bielsko in 1526 was inherited by the Austrian House of Habsburg and incorporated into the Habsburg monarchy. From 1560 Bielsko was held by Frederick Casimir of Cieszyn, son of Duke Wenceslaus III Adam, who due to the enormous debts his son left upon his death in 1571, had to sell it to the Promnitz noble family at Pless. With the consent of Emperor Maximilian II, the Promnitz dynasty and their Schaffgotsch successors ruled the Duchy of Bielsko as a Bohemian state country; acquired by the Austrian chancellor Count Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz in 1743, and afterwards by Polish aristocrat Aleksander Józef Sułkowski in 1752, the ducal status was finally confirmed by Empress Maria Theresa in 1754. It remained in possession of the Polish Sułkowski family until the dissolution of the duchy in 1849, while the castle was still owned by the Sułkowskis until World War II.

After the Prussian king Frederick the Great had invaded Silesia, Bielsko remained with the Habsburg monarchy as part of Austrian Silesia according to the 1742 Treaty of Breslau.

In late 1849 Bielsko became a seat of political district. In 1870 it became a statutory city.

Biała

The opposite bank of the Biała River, again Polish since 1454, had been sparsely settled since the mid-16th century. A locality was first mentioned in a 1564 deed, it received the name Biała in 1584, and belonged at that time to Kraków Voivodeship. Its population increased during the Counter-Reformation in the Habsburg lands, when many Protestant artisans from Bielsko moved across the river. Though already named a town in the 17th century, Biała officially was granted city rights by the Polish king Augustus II the Strong in 1723.

In the course of the First Partition of Poland in 1772, Biała was annexed by the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy and incorporated into the crownland of Galicia. The Protestant citizens received the right to establish parishes according to the 1781 Patent of Toleration by Emperor Joseph II. Biala was head of the district with the same name, one of the 78 Bezirkshauptmannschaften in the Galicia crownland.

Modern times

Although separate, the two cities effectively functioned as one urban area known as Bielsko-Biała since the 19th century. With the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918 according to the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, both cities became part of the reconstituted Polish state, although the majority of the population was German, forming a German language island.

Some ethnic German citizens formed an anti-Polish, anti-Jewish Jungdeutsche Partei, supported financially by the Foreign Ministry of Nazi Germany.^[2] Its members smuggled weapons and waged a campaign of intimidating other German residents to leave for Germany. A considerable number of young Germans joined this Party during the mid-1930s.

During the German invasion of Poland, which started World War II, the Einsatzgruppe I entered Bielsko-Biała in the first half of September 1939 to torture, plunder, and murder Jews. During the war Bielsko-Biała was annexed and occupied by Nazi Germany. In 1939 Germans arrested several Polish teachers and principals who were then deported to Nazi concentration camps and murdered there. A prison for Poles was operated by the Germans in Bielsko-Biała. Many of its Jewish residents were murdered at the nearby Auschwitz extermination camp. Less than 1000 of Bielsko-Biala's Jewish community of nearly 8000 survived the war. After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, the remaining German population fled westward or were expelled. The town was polonized and gradually repopulated by Polish settlers.

Several widely known Holocaust survivors from Bielsko-Biała were Roman Frister, Gerda Weissmann Klein and Kitty Hart-Moxon, all of whom wrote accounts of their experiences during World War II.

The combined city of Bielsko-Biała was created administratively on 1 January 1951 when the two cities of Bielsko, and Biała (known until 1951 as Biała Krakowska), were unified.

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