Damn it, I want to go to Gdansk and visit the European Solidarity Centre.

Photo credit: In Your Pocket.

So, I was reading an article about the industrial architecture of the Communist-era steel mills in Kraków, Poland.

Kraków’s Lenin Steelworks: a rare view of a socialist realist gem, by Julia Szyndzielorz (The Guardian)

The interior of the plant in Kraków’s utopian socialist new town is preserved in all its 1950s glory, a fascinating window on Soviet-era design

 ... Above the shelter, the former steelworks was one of communist Poland’s most important industrial plants: a 600-hectare site that employed almost 40,000 people. Also known as Kombinat, the plant, which remains important to Polish industry, is the heart of Nowa Huta, a district of Kraków built around it in the early 1950s in stark contrast to the rest of the historic city. Designed as a utopian socialist new town, Nowa Huta was the largest urban spatial development in postwar Poland – and the abundance of parks makes it one of Kraków’s greenest districts.

Tourists come here to see the results of the utopian urban planning of the 50s: massive Stalinist apartment buildings, schools, theatres, wide streets and hospitals, which have been preserved by the city. Several milk bars, with interiors unchanged since socialism, still serve pierogi, Polish dumplings filled with cottage cheese and onion, meat or plums, or simply with sugar and butter. Other options on the menu include beans with sausage, or chicken legs with potatoes, served by fast yet rather unfriendly staff.

What tourists didn’t get access to were the interiors of the steel mill – until the present owner, Arcelor Mittal, moved out of its office buildings three years ago and Rawelin started running tours.

In 2002, four of us caught a train from Kraków’s city center and strolled around the custom-built town of Nowa Huta, which was fascinating; then we had a few beers -- but I digress.

After reading the article about the steelworks, I clicked over to tourism-related pieces about Poland, soon landing on an essay about Gdansk. Hence this post, because I had no idea there was such a thing as the European Solidarity Center.

European Solidarity Centre (Wikipedia)

The European Solidarity Centre (Polish: Europejskie Centrum Solidarności) is a museum and library in Gdańsk, Poland, devoted to the history of Solidarity, the Polish trade union and civil resistance movement, and other opposition movements of Communist Eastern Europe. It opened on 31 August 2014.

My bucket list just added a Polish destination. In fact, I spent very little time in Poland during the 1980s, and this always has been a matter of significant regret. The former Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk was the incubator for Solidarity, the Polish trade union movement.

It's about pilgrimage.

After all, I named a Baltic Porter after Solidarity.

European Solidarity Centre (Europejskie Centrum Solidarności) (In Your Pocket)

The huge construction you can see next to the entrance to the Gdansk Shipyards is the impressive European Solidarity Centre which opened on August 30, 2014, the 34th anniversary of the signing of the August Accords. The 5-storey building, which has been designed to give the impression of walls cracking and tilting and is covered in rust-coloured sheet metal reminiscent of a ship’s hull, has been a project many years in the making ...

... There are a number of aims to the centre. First and foremost it is designed to be a symbol of the victory of the Solidarity movement and the way that victory was achieved peacefully thanks to the power of people uniting in solidarity with each other. It is both definitions of this word that the centre’s organisers want to pay tribute to and to develop further. The proclamation issued by the joint-signatories in 2005 stated that they wanted the European Solidarity Centre to “become the world’s centre for the ideas of freedom, democracy and solidarity to be fostered”.

The building is centred around a permanent exhibition dedicated to the history of Solidarity and the opposition, which led to the democratic transformation of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. But the exhibition forms just a part of the European Solidarity Centre’s daily function. The building features a library, reading rooms and archives which are completely accessible to researchers and any interested reader alike. The conference rooms and other spaces, such as the winter garden on the ground floor, host debates and concerts serving projects of both the ESC and outside associations aimed at working towards the common good.

It seems to me that if possible, the Confidentials should visit Gdansk soon.

30 years ago today: Our dinner with Andrej on a surreal evening in Krakow.

The only two photos I took in Krakow in 1987.

Previously: 30 years ago today: The mysterious case of the phantom Warsaw pub.

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Warsaw, July 10.

Four of us – myself, Barrie, Nick and Nate -- really wanted to go to Krakow, and if possible, to Auschwitz. There wasn’t much tour time left, but we thought we had an “in,” this being an acquaintance of Nick’s named Andrej.

If we could navigate the three-hour train ride to Krakow, Andrej would meet us at the tourist office and arrange matters. The return train would get us back to Warsaw in time for the final group party on Saturday night. Our leader Kim was fine with our side trip, so a plan was hatched.

I decided to devote Friday morning to an American Embassy visit. In places like Eastern Europe, holders of American passports were allowed to go inside and browse the reading room, catching up on the outside world in a way that wasn't possible in closed societies without a free press.

For me, it meant checking the baseball standings and an all-purpose survey of the headlines. Walking back to the hotel, I felt raindrops -- yellowish-brown raindrops with the consistency of mustard, and of course they weren't raindrops at all, but pigeon droppings.

On a ledge two stories up, a woman was feeding a row of pigeons, whose butts hung out into space, depositing in perfect harmony with their intake.

Let it be noted that pigeons are rats of the air, and should never be fed in my presence. A perfectly functional Zantigo t-shirt was rendered obsolete, though quickly replaced from the seemingly inexhaustible supply hidden somewhere inside Barrie's duffel bag.

Daypacks promptly were loaded with overnight essentials, and rail tickets easily procured at Warsaw’s central station. So far, so good.

However, we hadn’t reckoned on it being an afternoon train out of the capital on a summertime Friday. Our tickets gave us the right only to stand in the corridor, and I was at peace with the idea.

Then I saw Barrie huddling with the conductor, gesturing and reaching into his travel pouch. Direct action once again carried the day, and moments later a whole six-seat, second class compartment had been cleared of its occupants. We were shown our places by the gracious, beaming and newly enriched conductor.

I’d like to believe the conductor split his cash bribe with the displaced passengers, though this is highly doubtful.

In Krakow, the tourist office informed us that no private rooms for travelers existed anywhere in the city. A luxury hotel was available, far out of our price range. We huddled; perhaps our local contact Andrej would be able to help us find a place to sleep.

After much waiting, Andrej belatedly materialized, promptly got us into to an upscale but scandalously inexpensive restaurant to dine on Polish duck and Bulgarian wine, but he possessed few coherent ideas about lodging.

Finally we were able struck a deal with a tiny, ancient woman Andrej knew, who showed up at the tourist office long after dark. At first she balked at housing all four of us, and so we upped the ante: $10 for the quartet. Soon we were on a tram headed into a leafy neighborhood, trudging up flights of stairs in an older building with no elevator, and entering the woman’s flat.

It was diminutive, with a kitchen, bathroom, truncated living room, and two other small rooms, all squeezed together like a dollhouse. By this time it was just before midnight, so we all turned in, scavenging an array of beds and couches.

What none of us realized, learning to our chagrin, each in turn, as we awoke through the night to use the toilet, was that our minuscule and superannuated host had surrendered her own bed, and was sleeping on two kitchen chairs pulled together.

Granted, she was short enough of stature to make it work, but to a man, we felt pure chastened embarrassment. On Saturday morning, she became belligerent (understandably) and angrily demanded more money, but what she didn’t realize was that without even conferring first, each of us had left a wad of assorted currencies to sweeten her pot.

I hope it was enough. Amid thanks, a hasty exit was made, and we returned downtown for brief sightseeing and bus tickets to Auschwitz. It wasn’t a place any of us wanted to go, but we all knew it was a necessary visit.

Next: 30 years ago today: Both Auschwitz and Lanzmann's Shoah.