European Centre of Solidarity

The last year, with one of my Australian friends, I visited the museum dedicated to the Solidarity movement. The museum was called Roads to Freedom and it was meant to be only a temporary exhibition while the big museum European Centre of Solidarity was being built, next to the historic Gdansk Shipyard. We both were impressed by the exhibition and I was moved by the hard and dramatic times Poland went through and then emerged as a modern country with a great future. Yesterday, I went to the new Solidarity Centre to see the place and the new exhibition. I found the Centre very impressive, very well designed and the new exhibition even more moving.

The building does not meet with everybody’s approval, but I like it a lot. Some call it a rusty heap of scrap and indeed it makes such an impression. It is a very nicely stylized and sophisticated heap of scrap, though. The entrance to the centre is next to the main entrance of the shipyard. One has to pass the monument of the fallen ship yard workers, the workers of Gdansk those who started the end of communism. Approaching the place I get emotional, so much has happened here, I am grateful for the turn of events, grateful to all those who went through the extremely hard times that formed the new Poland while I was working on my personal career in Sydney. I am aware of being somewhat pathetic writing what I just did but this is the Polish part of me talking.

We entered the building and my friend said : barn!. I thought : wow! This is what it looks like, what do you think? A barn or a modern, spacious entrance?

This already inside the building

I never thought I would be that impressed by modern. Me, a lover of Florence!

The building has 6 levels and we decided to start from the top. The sixth floor. It is not really that much of a floor. It is most of all a roof with views over Gdansk.

In some distance from the museum there is another place one can see the 360 panorama of Gdansk. The Basilica of Saint Maries. They are like two brackets defining the Main Town of Gdansk - new and old.

It has been very dry and hot in Gdansk for more than one month. The roof vegetation suffered.

I think that it would be rather nice  to sit at the roof garden in one of the deck chairs having a chat with a friend looking Gdansk or reading a book. I may try it before I go back to Sydney.

There is also a great library I can visit to browse books before I decide to buy something. The book offers are endless in Poland and they are so nicely published that it is a pleasure to handle them. I find it rather easy to get carried away and buy more that I should.

The end of August is this time of when the whole Gdansk ad whole Poland should celebrate the victorious days of Solidarity that happened 35 years ago. There are celebrations and there are also painful manifestations of power and hate showing how divided Poland is these days. It saddens me.

Day 2 of sightseeing in the Tricity

After the Old Town in Gdansk it was a time show my Aussie friend recent history of the town. I heard of a new museum Roads to Freedom and that it was a must to see. For some reason I had not seen it before. I was not even sure how to get there even if I knew that is was not far away from the shipyard. I must have passed it in my walks to the green market or the Old Town but somehow never saw an entrance to the museum. In my role of a tourist guide, which I played not all that brilliantly, I was supposed to know how to get there without any  hiccups. So I checked the situation in internet. I knew the street but why didn’t I see the entrance when passing the place? When we were near the museum I understood.  Not a salubrious entrance but communistic times were not salubrious times and this is what the museum shows. The museum is going to move in the near future to the still being build European Solidarity Center. I pass this impressive building often and it grows fast. Next time I come to Gdansk it will be most likely ready. I cannot wait.

But back to The Roads to Freedom. We walked down the stairs leading old shabby environment showing us how it was before Poland re-gained its freedom. We bought our tickets looking like old fashion cards from the time of martial law in 1981-83.  I believe that the ration cards were used for longer than this period. The first exhibits show typical Polish shop of the times. Not much there, vinegar and mustard were on the shelves, other things may have been available for the chosen ones but they were under the counter rather than displayed.

This is how the typical shop looked like. The men on the left just managed to buy toilet paper and this was the way to carry an unexpected purchase.

                                  

The museum covers the modern history of Poland, the events I was not aware of even if I lived in Poland in the 70ties.  I was in Gdansk in January 1971 learning about programming in Cobol and PLAN, the ICL assembly language. Memories, memories... That aside, December 1970 was a tragic time for Gdansk and its shipyard workers who protested against sudden increase of food and other everyday items. As the result of riots which were brutally put down 42 people were killed and over 1,000 wounded.

The events were not covered by news, they were the times the government could hide such things. Not to people of Gdansk, of course, they were involved themselves and saw things happening. My Polish neighbour, who worked at the time in a pharmacy, remembers the panic and how she was helping to sterilise surgical instruments in a great hurry. One month later nobody wanted to talk to me, a girl from Warsaw, about what happened. It was not safe to talk. I knew that something horrible did happen but it was only when visiting the museum I put the pieces of the puzzle together. If you are surprised at my ignorance I left Poland in 1976 and now I am catching up with my Polish history knowledge.

The museum has a multimedia tour covering events from 1956 to 1989. I would recommend using the audio tour and sit for a while at the computers reading the stories of the times. It is all both in English and Polish. And very inexpensive.

I like one of the last exhibits, domino of abolishing communism, with Poland starting the chain of changes.

                                        

I got carried away writing more than planned so the second part of the sightseeing day 2 – lunch in Polish style will be a subject of my next post.