Day 8: Crazy Communism! or Nowa Huta, Part 1

Wednesday, May 12---

Students went to Nowa Huta (means "New Foundry") today---the city near Krakow built under communism to house the workers at the Lenin Steelworks. The city was designed for the new socialist worker and intended to counteract the traditionally bourgeois Krakow.  You can get to Nowa Huta (today part of the city of Krakow) by tram or bus, but a group of enterprising young organizers has developed a "Crazy Communism" tour using a "fleet" of Trabants, the old East German  produced in the late 1950s through the 1980s.  Notoriously polluting, the Trabis survived---semi-plastic bodies, simple motors---even though Czech Skodas, Yugoslav Yugos, and then Polski Fiats became available.  

Nowa Huta was constructed on some of the best and most fertile land in the area.  As a new city, the Nowa Huta layout is rational and geometric, with broad avenues and circular intersections.  But the monumental buildings are quasi-Renaissance style with scrolling parapets.  The housing districts had shops, schools and day care for the workers' families and the apartments themselves were larger than in Krakow.  In communist days, the shops were better supplied than in Krakow too.  Workers in Nowa Huta were strong supporters of Solidarity. After the fall of communism,  the old, heavy industry like the Lenin Steelworks collapsed.  It's now  owned by Mittal, a Rotterdam

firm.  

People are coming back to Nowa Huta, especially the young and artists. The tour includes a visit to a typical, socialist era apartment: Pete, Jordan, Chris, Tony, Michelle, and Kim are there in the living room---about the maximum number of people for a party!
To see the most famous movie about the building of Nowa Huta in the 1950s, go to the Internet Movie Database: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075902/
This move is "Man of Marble" directed by Andrzej Wajda

.