Produced by Polish comrades

Stories of Czech industrial buildings and Polish guest workers in mutual perspective

The project focuses on the activities of workers from the People's Republic of Poland in communist Czechoslovakia and the industrial buildings they worked in or built directly. The aim of the project is to present the "biography" of selected objects (lignite power plants, textile factories, sugar mills, etc.) - the most important in terms of their importance for the Czechoslovak economy and in terms of the involvement of Polish workers (number of workers, specialization, volume of contract). The biographies of the objects will be supplemented by the Polish perspective (archives and oral history). The purpose is to contribute to the understanding of the society of state socialism through the multiplicity and diversity of perspectives and "memories" of objects that played an important role in the economy of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic but are now losing both their symbolic significance and often their material form. At the same time, I will present the hitherto little-known phenomenon of Polish guest workers in the CSSR from "below", from the perspective of the things they built and worked in. Archival and oral-historical research will be conducted in the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany. The project will result in a scholarly article, a book chapter and a monograph.