Piotr Borowy is a very important person in the history of Upper Orawa. This Polish people’s and independence activist came from Rabčice (now in Slovakia). He was self-taught but an excellent speaker (and thus able to win over a wide audience), an ascetic, ran his own bookbinding workshop, and was a member of the Polish delegation to the Paris peace conference in 1919 and to the US President Thomas Woodrow Wilson to talk about Orawa becoming a part of Poland. In 1929, Piotr Borowy called the ‘Orawa Apostle’ was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.

After studies in Budapest and having been ordained a priest, Msgr. Ferdynand Machay worked in the parishes of Zázriva and Ružomberok. He cooperated with the ‘Gazeta Podhalańska’ newspaper at the same time. During World War I he was a military chaplain in the Austro-Hungarian army. After the war he was an active member of the Committee for the Defence of Spiš and Orawa, a member of the Polish delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and an advisor to the Polish government on these territories, and a senator of the Republic of Poland. During World War II he rescued people threatened with extermination as the parish priest of the Most Holy Salvatore parish in Krakow (by issuing fictitious baptismal certificates among other things). After that, he was the archpriest in the Mariacki Church in Krakow. His entire life, his patriotic, pastoral, social, political, underground and charitable activities earned him the inscription on his family tombstone that reads: ‘He went through life doing good’.