Brzesko

Sister cities

• Százhalombatta
• Langenenslingen
• Sovata

History

The town was founded in 1385 by Spytko II of Melsztyn, the castellan of Biecz, with permission of Queen Jadwiga of Poland. Brzesko still retains the medieval shape of its town center, with a market square and the Gothic church of St. Jacob (1447). In 1440, the town built a hospital for the poor, funded by Gregory of Sanok. Brzesko was administratively located in the Kraków Voivodeship in the Lesser Poland Province of the Polish Crown until 1772, when it was annexed by Austria in the First Partition of Poland. Then it became part of Galicia (Austrian Partition of Poland), to which it belonged until Poland regained independence in 1918. Before that, in 1856, Brzesko got a railway station, along a line from Kraków to Lwów. During the German invasion of Poland, which started World War II, the Wehrmacht arrived in Brzesko on 5 September 1939. Soon afterwards, the Einsatzgruppe I entered the town to commit various atrocities against the populace. Under German occupation, the town became part of the kreis (county) Tarnów in the Kraków District of the General Government, a separate administrative region of the Third Reich. 44 people were killed and about 200 were injured as they were waiting for the evacuation trains from Silesia. Several Poles from Brzesko were murdered by the Russians in the large Katyn massacre carried out in April–May 1940. A closed Jewish ghetto existed between spring 1941 and September 1942. Several Poles were imprisoned by the Germans in the local prison and then deported to concentration camps for rescuing Jews. The Red Army arrived in Brzesko on 19 January 1945,