Alum’s Photos of a Polish Pilgrimage

Three years ago, I decided to pursue teaching overseas. I sought to witness the adjustments to unimpeded American power that societies the world over must make. My curiosity has deep roots because, as a boy in Albany, New York, I was awed by the devastation visited on Albany (and much of the northeastern United States) by many of the economic and political changes lately given the name “globalization.” Where better than the Poland of today to glimpse the struggle to accommodate the new world order?

I sent my prospective Polish employer a short essay, drawing comparisons between the American “Rust Belt” and Upper Silesia. The essay secured me a job at a language school in Rybnik, in Upper Silesia.

Rybnik is a city of 150,000 people, most of whom are in the coal mining, steel, and power-generation industries. Industrialization came under German direction in the early 19th century, fueled by vast coal deposits. Later, the USSR vastly increased industrial development, spawning what would become one of the most heavily industrialized areas in Europe.

Many Polish people have asked why I do not photograph the many fine churches and castles, mountain resorts, or the gorgeous Mazurian Lakes. I wished instead to show something of everyday life in the Poland that few tourists would care to see, that is, the legacy of massive heavy industrial development in Upper Silesia, an area sidestepped by the new economic order.

A burdensome sense of inferiority wrought by severe economic hardship is compounded by the Pole’s acute awareness that Americans regard Poland as a waste zone. I wished, in some small way, to help rectify these mutual misunderstandings by presenting a version of the truth of the everyday Poland, to illustrate what is beautiful about it, and to show Americans a Poland I have come to love and to think of as home.

Joe Marsh, 1998, B.A., History

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