Was he a hero or a traitor? And if he was guilty of treachery, which of the nations that claimed him did he betray?
As nationalism rises as a political force across Europe, Ernest Wilimowski, a long-dead soccer star who played for the national teams of both Poland and Nazi Germany, is raising tricky questions about national loyalty and betrayal.
In addition to Poland (for which he once scored four goals against Brazil in a World Cup) and Germany, Mr. Wilimowski also had a third allegiance — to Silesia, an identity without a state. He spoke its language, was formed by its culture and scored his first goals for teams on its territory, now firmly part of Poland but still in some ways a land apart.
“From the Polish perspective, he was of course a traitor. He betrayed Poland,” said Zbigniew Rokita, a Polish writer and Silesia native who speaks with his wife in Silesian, and wrote a celebrated book, in Polish, about his home region. “But from the perspective of his family and society, the judgment is different.”
Fans and the management of the Polish soccer team where Mr. Wilimowski made his name in the 1930s before moving to Germany, remember him only as a legendary goal scorer. During World War II, he played for Germany and died there in 1997.
His face looks out from posters at the stadium of Ruch Chorzow, his former team in the southwestern city of Chorzow (pronounced HOGE-off) in the Polish province of Upper Silesia. The club recently started raising money to pay for a new tomb for its late star at a graveyard in Germany.
The fund-raising effort, which started in April, caused outrage among Polish nationalists.
“He played in a shirt with a swastika on his chest and took money from the Germans while his teammates from the Polish national team were being murdered by those Germans,” said Pawel Jablonski, a member of the European Parliament from Poland’s previous right-wing governing party, Law and Justice.
But history looks very different to Mr. Wilimowski’s most fervent fans — nationalists of a nation that does not exist but is eager to assert its own language and identity.
“We want to show people that we have our own Lionel Messi. This is something we can be proud of,” said Arnold Reinhold Langer, a campaigner for the right of Silesia to exist as a distinct cultural and linguistic space.
A member of the “Silesian Association,” Mr. Langer runs a store in Katowice, the capital of Upper Silesia, packed with flags, books and knickknacks proclaiming Silesian separateness, as well as T-shirts emblazoned with the logo, “Not German, Not Polish but Silesian.”
Mr. Langer said his hope was not to break up Poland — “that would be illegal” — but only to promote a “flexible” view of national belonging. “Silesia is my place on earth,” he said, “My passport is Polish, but I am not attached to Poland in any emotional way.”
That is a view that infuriates the Law and Justice party, whose candidate for the presidency, Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist historian, this month won a tight runoff election. He lost in Silesia, where Law and Justice is remembered by many for a 2011 policy document that denounced the idea of a separate Silesian people as “a camouflaged German option.”
Poland’s departing president, Andrzej Duda, who is aligned with Law and Justice, last year vetoed legislation passed by Parliament recognizing Silesian, a Slavic tongue influenced by Polish and German, as a separate language. Nearly half a million people speak it, according to census data.
Mr. Duda ruled it was just a dialect of Polish, warning that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine had made it necessary to take “special care to preserve national identity” and counter “unavoidable hybrid actions” against Poland that stoked separatism.
Mr. Rokita, the writer, said the question of Silesia was difficult for Poles — and also many others — who are committed to the idea of their country as indivisible because “Silesian identity includes many different identities — it is like an umbrella.”
The soccer player’s mixed loyalties inspired Miljenko Jergovic, a Bosnian-born Croatian author alarmed by Europe’s nationalist resurgence, to write a 2016 historical novel, “Wilimowski.” The lesson Europe needs to learn from the soccer player is that “a person is never just one thing,” he said, adding, “Our identities change as long as we are alive.”
Mr. Wilimowski, whose mother was ethnic German but who took the surname of his Polish stepfather, was a mix of cultures and allegiances that defied both Nazi ideas of ethnic purity and Poland’s postwar idea of itself.
Stripped of its large Jewish population by the Holocaust, Poland also lost most of its ethnic Germans and Ukrainians through forced postwar population transfers and became largely homogeneous.
Grzegorz Joszko, a Chorzow city councilor, and the official historian of its soccer club, said Mr. Wilimowski had, at various times, played for — and been mistrusted by — all sides.
“The Polish press in Warsaw called him a Nazi. The German press called him a ‘Polack.’ How can we say whether he felt more Polish or more German or more Silesian? Or was he just a man trying to survive the war?” Mr. Joszko asked.
He said that much of what many Poles know about Mr. Wilimowski — that he was a chronic alcoholic, had six toes on one foot and supported the Nazi invasion — are “untrue legends” generated after 1945 under Poland’s Soviet-installed Communist government.
At a recent game at the Silesian Stadium in Chorzow between Mr. Wilimowski’s former team and Polonia Warszawa, Adam Bilek, a 16-year-old Ruch Chorzow fan, scoffed at accusations that his team’s most celebrated player had been a traitor. “He was just trying to stay alive,” he said, adding that “people don’t know much about history.”
Upper Silesia, where Mr. Wilimowski was born in 1916, was German territory until it was transferred to Poland in 1921 after World War I. Germany under Hitler grabbed it back in 1939 but then lost it again at the end of World War II.
“Silesia’s history is not black or white, either just Polish or just German,” said Seweryn Siemianowski, the president of Ruch Chorzow. A former player for the club, he said he had grown up spellbound by stories of Mr. Wilimowski’s exploits, including the time he scored 10 goals in a single game in 1939.
Raising money to pay for a new tomb, he said, was a sign of “respect for a legend,” not of affiliation with Germany. The club decided it needed to do something after a decision by the German city of Karlsruhe to demolish part of a cemetery where Mr. Wilimowski is buried, he added.
“We don’t know why he made the choices he did or what tools were used against him. We can’t judge him today,” Mr. Siemianowski said. Mr. Wilimowski, he added, “brought people a lot of happiness with his skills” and “should be viewed as a hero, not a traitor.”
Anti-German sentiment, initially rooted in memories of the horrors inflicted by the Nazis, has in recent years become a political weapon in Poland, deployed by Law and Justice to attack Civic Platform, a rival, pro-European party led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Mr. Tusk, regularly reviled by Law and Justice as a “German agent,” belongs to Poland’s small Kashubian minority and, in addition to Polish, speaks its German-influenced language.
Jerzy Gorzelik, the leader of the Silesian Autonomy Movement, a group lobbying to restore the region’s prewar autonomous status, insisted there “is no hidden plot to join Germany.” He added, “We just want autonomy, not secession.”
Mr. Wilimowski, he said, is emblematic of Silesia’s “hybrid identity” and its often tragic history between Germany and Poland.
“He was somewhere in between. He was not interested in national politics but was under great pressure from Poles and Germans to be one of theirs,” Mr. Gorzelik said. Mr. Wilimowski, he added, “was just a Silesian living in very difficult times.”
Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting.
Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw. He covers a region that stretches from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Kosovo, Serbia and other parts of former Yugoslavia.
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