Alojzy Lysko

Alojzy Wiktor Lysko was born on 15 February 1942 in Bojszowy, in what was then Gau Upper Silesia under German occupation and is today part of Poland's Silesian Voivodeship. He remained tied to that village and to the Pszczyna land for his entire life. His father, also named Alojzy, was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and died on the Eastern Front on 12 January 1944, aged about thirty. The son never knew him. That absence became the moral centre of a lifetime of writing, teaching and public work devoted to Upper Silesia's hardest memories.

After finishing the mining school "Sztygarka" in Dabrowa Gornicza in 1962, Lysko worked underground as a miner and shift foreman at the Ziemowit hard-coal mine in Ledziny. He completed teacher training at the Studium Nauczycielskie in Katowice in 1967 and later earned a law and administration degree from the University of Silesia in 1976. From 1964 to 1992 he taught mining at the school attached to KWK Ziemowit, rising to deputy director in 1973 and director from 1977 until he took a teacher's pension in 1992. Parallel to classroom work he ran poetry-theatre groups in the works culture house, wrote dozens of folk plays and pageants, and from 1980 belonged to the folkloric ensemble Bojszowianie, later serving as its artistic director.

His literary debut came early. Stories such as "Moja pierwsza lekcja" (1965) and "Slazak" (1966) appeared in the magazine Poglady. Over six decades he published hundreds of articles in regional and national titles, including Dziennik Zachodni, the monthly Slask and the IPN Bulletin, and co-founded local papers such as Ziemowit and Rodnia. Books on Silesian legends, the Pszczyna forests and Bojszowy's twentieth century followed in the 1990s. The breakthrough came with "To byli nasi ojcowie" (1999), a collection of family legends about Upper Silesians forced into the Wehrmacht. The subject was still taboo. Lysko walked village houses, enlisted postmen, and assembled a roll of the fallen from his own parish. When a parish priest refused a stone plaque, he answered with a paper epitaph. The book shocked and liberated readers. Film-maker Mariusz Malinowski later drew on it for the documentary "Dzieci Wehrmachtu," and Lysko travelled to Ukraine to the site near Krupskoye where his father's remains were identified through dog tags.

From that seed grew the monumental cycle "Duchy wojny" (Spirits of War), eventually spanning ten volumes. The first four reconstruct a soldier's diary from Alpine barracks to the Atlantic Wall and the Eastern Front. Later volumes answer readers who asked for the widows, the disabled, the orphans, the deportees to Kolyma, and finally a prequel on the Bojszowy "Columbuses" born around 1922. Lysko insisted the ghosts were not metaphors. "Duchy zyja," he said. "I know that my father lives and that he is here." He worked with Germany's Volksbund to locate field graves and transfer remains to maintained war cemeteries, closing a circle that began with a child who never met his father.

Another strand of his work reached a mass audience through theatre. His prose "Jak Niobe. Opowiesc Gornoslaska" became the monodrama "Mianujom mie Hanka," premiered at Katowice's Teatr Korez in 2016 with Grazyna Bulka and directed by Miroslaw Neinert. Performed hundreds of times in Silesian speech, it was shown in the Polish Sejm and the European Parliament and, in January 2025, became the first Teatr Telewizji production staged entirely in Silesian, drawing nearly half a million viewers. A companion monodrama, "Godajom mi Helmut," followed.

Public service ran alongside the page. Lysko sat on Bojszowy and Tychy councils, served on the Silesian regional assembly (1998-2006), and in 2005 won a Sejm seat for Law and Justice in the Katowice district with 6,581 votes. He sat on the Culture and National Heritage Committee. On 7 September 2007 he was the only PiS deputy to vote against shortening the Sejm's term. He later accepted Civic Platform's backing for a Senate bid he lost, joined TVP Katowice's programme council, and supported Bronislaw Komorowski's presidential campaigns. In a long 2023 interview he said party discipline had eclipsed both law and homeland, and that he began drafting "Duchy wojny" on the sixth floor of the Sejm's deputies' house while homesick for Silesia.

Honours accumulated across education, folklore and literature: Silver and Gold Crosses of Merit, the Wojciech Korfanty Prize (2003), Honorary Silesian of the Year (2006), the Juliusz Ligon Award and a special Ministry of Culture prize (2011), the Augustin Weltzel "Upper Silesian Tacitus" prize (2014), the Krystyna Bochenek journalism Grand Prix (2015), the Karol Miarka Award (2018), honorary citizenship of Bierun (2022), the Bronze Gloria Artis medal (2025), and in February 2026 the title Ambassador of Silesia at the Kazimierz Kutz Prize gala. On 8 June 2026 the municipal library in Bojszowy took his name and unveiled a relief portrait in its lobby.

At home he credited his wife, Lucja, as the family's "vestal," raising six children while he taught by day and farmed or wrote by night. By his early eighties they counted seventeen grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. He called family the rampart of Silesian memory against forgetting.

Alojzy Lysko died on 22 September 2026 at the age of eighty-four. The Bojszowy municipal office announced his death and called him a builder of local community who had tended Silesian identity, history, tradition and language for decades. Katowice mayor Marcin Krupa wrote that Silesia had lost one of its foremost chroniclers. Funeral rites were set for 24 September 2026 at the Church of the Nativity of St John the Baptist in Bojszowy. His books, plays and the voices he restored remain the measure of a life spent making the silenced speak.