The eruption of extraordinary happiness that has been mine - beginning with the jubilee of 60 years of Nowa Huta - flowed from a source of communicating vessels.
On the one hand: a charge of emotion never known before, and a euphoric sense of joyful elation resounding in the mind. On the other: the surge of the conviction that progress in civilisation had been achieved in a newly forming community which required a gigantic cultural and sociological investment and potency.
In the past era the weekly rhythm of work gave no chance for the comfort of rest. Free Saturdays in those days (the 1950s and 60s) did not exist. Sundays - paradoxically - were marked by excessive activity. For they required the organising and running of a sometimes truly pyramidal number of artistic events, both in the open air and indoors. This simultaneous activity resulted not only from excessively ambitious programme plans - the celebration of a whole multitude of holidays and occasions of various types, including those of the trades.
A boundless degree of commitment, in the daily routine of taking on ever new tasks and setting in motion a wide palette of conceptual and initiating undertakings, became the rule, and that from the moment of starting out in the sphere of culture-creating work, both in the role of animator and as a singer and also a compère.
Over 15 years that expansiveness was a measure of its own of the scale of activity. The staging of artistic events, and also of forms of an educational nature, determined an important part of the cultural and educational process for the newly forming population as a potential category of townspeople of the town being born. And an extremely significant complement to that process was its surprisingly reproductive participation. This was served by a stimulator driving the impulse to create an improbable number of the most varied instrumental, vocal and para-artistic formations.
Contrary to all definitions used for the continuity of tradition, the structure of the culture-creating base that arose, supported by the values of civilisation, seemed worthy of being recognised as a great gift of transcendent forces. So it is hard not to acknowledge that this phenomenon fell to a community of newcomers deeply immersed in an ascetic current. The quasi-heroic inspiration of musician friends, with the help of the light of the moon and stars, bore fruit in the creation of a jazz formation. And this in consequence led to the opening of the doors and the arranging of the concert inaugurating the cultural and educational activity of the Steelworks' House of Culture.
The euphoric reception of the band's musical offer by the audience gave an important impulse to undertake - advancing on a wide front - a campaign aimed at the maximum revival of the artistic movement. And so music groups with various line-ups of instruments began to be formed. The fans' special attention was held by the group that ranked 25 accordionists in its line-up. The appearance in this category of an accordion formation represented by young men of no mean looks, equipped with accordions inlaid with alabaster white (120 basses) and with blue costumes, appeared not only as a spectacular stage picture: - after a relatively short time of preparation they dazzled listeners with their artistic and performing qualities, enriched as they were by the harmonies of the accompanying rhythm section with its jazz colouring - mainly thanks to Józef Krzeczek. Being the proud calling card of the ZDK, this formation soon set off on a foreign tour.
An important base for the working groups was the section training potential performers, both musical and vocal, on the basis of classes. The most satisfying source of the influx of new singers of popular and classical song and of musicians swelling the ranks of the various artistic formations, and literary ones too, were the contests organised, not infrequently together with Polish Radio, the editorial office of Głos Nowej Huty and other editorial offices.
An extraordinarily wide horizon of the artistic landscape appeared in the form of singing formations such as mixed choirs, and small vocal forms such as a duo, a female trio, a male quartet (of engineers) and a mixed quintet in the jazz style, created by the outstanding jazzman Alojzy Thomys. The plane of larger groups was filled by: "Margaretki", "Żonkile", "Andromeda". Solo displays were the business of the singers gathered in the "Estrada Operowa", and, in a similar formation, of the singers of popular song. An extremely wide panorama of associations, hard to take in consciously, could not do without including in its resources such important spheres of developing the aesthetic sensitivity of the young generation as: eurhythmics, ballet, theatrical, poetic and visual-art forms, and also reading education in the broad sense.
Summing up that many-sided artistic and educational activity, an exceptional picture clearly emerges, one that simply has no parallel.
Moving towards the final conclusion, one cannot fail to mention an unprecedented phenomenon which arouses the greatest resonance and degree of interest, especially from the mass media. In the era of the system of socialist realism, the creation and activity of the Jazz Club under the aegis of the ZMS (Union of Socialist Youth) cannot fail to arouse certain repercussions in today's media, since Western culture was being popularised on the ground of a socialist town. A similar analysis is applied - from today's perspective - to the activity of the Amateur Film Club, also under the auspices of the ZMS. A peculiarity is the fact that the outstanding director Krzysztof Zanussi comes from this club. On the basis of the Film Club's considerable achievements and successes in a number of film contests, several adepts of this discipline won significant spurs of popularity. Among them one must name the film-maker and director who rendered special services to the Nowa Huta community and still shines in the pantheon of stars. He is Jerzy Ridan.
Nowa Huta, already in the 1950s and 60s pulsating with the incredible potency of a wide spectrum of culture-creating conglomerate, is a sociological and civilisational phenomenon of a unique kind. And there is not the slightest confabulation in this confession. The content of this text results mainly from first-hand experience, supported by sequences of events drawn from archive publications.
Synthesising the many aspects of the incoming population, extraordinarily specific in the sociological sense, condemned, as it were, to shaping its civilisational and culture-creating face on the ground of a newly born town, one cannot omit the fact that this process set those carrying out the new reality of existence an almost titanic task. And the scale of their achievements, though presented in an extremely condensed form, not only shows a gigantic picture of the changes in the status of the new community, but at the same time makes up the great history of a new environment. And for the writer of these words it is an occasion to express unspeakable gratitude, full of empathetic feeling, to the Friends who became the authors of the reconstruction of my professional activities and - to put it immodestly - achievements, in the name of the ideas I professed, serving the cultural and civilisational processes of a new community in a newly born town whose name is Nowa Huta.
PS. I would certainly lose sleep constantly over it if, in the context of my confessions, I did not stress the unique merits of my unfailing Friend, protagonist and above all creator of the website, who undoubtedly is who? - Ryszard Szczudłowski.
