The extraordinary history of the Primary School in Pawłów Trzebnicki

It was April 1945. In Wrocław, declared by the Nazis as "Fortress Wrocław", war operations were still ongoing. Artillery fire could be heard from there as far as Trzebnica, and a column of smoke from the burning city rose above the horizon. In such a setting, on April 20, 1945, the first lessons began at the primary school in Pawłów Trzebnicki, the first post-war school opened in Lower Silesia.

Today, it is not easy for us to imagine the beginnings of education in the first Polish schools opened in Lower Silesia after World War II. Although the actual organization of the first primary schools, then called comprehensive schools, in the Western Lands fell on September 1, 1945, many institutions began operating already in the spring of 1945. They were most often organized and run by individual teachers. Later, it was noted that the first such primary school established in Lower Silesia was the one established in the village of Pawłów near Trzebnica. Its establishment was accidental, but so significant for the history of Lower Silesian education.

Anna Dawidowicz, the founder of the school in Pawłów Trzebnicki, a teacher from Volhynia brought to Germany for forced labour, recalled those first moments:

- We walked from Wołów in a group. We were in the camp together, we were looking for a port together. We settled in Pawłów. There were about 30 Polish families, including many grown children who couldn't write a single letter. There was a school there in pretty good shape, I felt like a teacher again. The school was cleaned up, we called the children. The first words that appeared on the board were "house" and "forest". I don't know why we started with these words, but I guess it was because we really wanted to have our own house, and the forest was nearby, so you could see it through the window - Anna Dawidowicz recalled years ago.

Anna Dawidowicz quickly left Pawłów Trzebnicki to live with her family in Ząbkowice Śląskie after the war. She died in 1978 in Wrocław and was buried in the Grabiszyn cemetery. But although she was in Pawłów Trzebnicki only a short time, it was decided to commemorate her contribution to the beginnings of the school in our commune and in Lower Silesia by giving the school the name of Anna Dawidowicz.

The school in Pawłów Trzebnicki, in a town that was called Pawellau, or simply Pawłów, before World War II, has a tradition of almost two hundred years. The oldest information about the school and plans of the school building in Pawłów Trzebnicki come from 1851. After 1945, it was commonly referred to as the so-called "small school", because it was an insignificant single-storey building. In 1863, a new school was built nearby, one-storey with a usable attic, and a complex of farm buildings was added in the yard. In this, almost unchanged form, we can see the school to this day, together with one preserved farm building, erected using the post-and-beam technique (Prussian wall).

Since the local population at that time was of the Evangelical faith, the school was also Evangelical. Mainly German, religion and basic arithmetic were taught there. It is not certain whether there was any earlier educational institution in Pawłów. If so, it was most likely established after 1770, when Pawłów was subject to the Kingdom of Prussia, which supported education.

Currently, although both school buildings no longer serve their function in the school system (they are residential buildings), they remain a living monument to the history of education in Lower Silesia, both before and after World War II. The specialty of this building and place is also the fact that it was the first Polish school in Lower Silesia after 1945, where teaching was in Polish.

Renata Faron-Bartels