On a rainy summer afternoon, I accompanied Barbara Palowicz to an abandoned coal mine in Zabrze, Upper Silesia, Poland. She shares her name with St. Barbara, the patron saint of miners, sailors, lightning and workplace accidents, who guides and protects those who do dangerous work. Every year on St. Barbara's feast day, December 4, the now elderly miners gather together with bands, sing mining songs and march through the snowy streets of Katowice. In the Zabrze mine, there is a statue of St. Barbara holding a sword, with the words “Szczesk Borze, may God be with you” inscribed beneath it. We headed down.
Barbara, human, not saintly, leads me through a dark tunnel. The tunnel is ventilated, she says, so visitors won't inhale methane gas or die in a fiery gas explosion. “You're not Bruce Willis. You can't run away,” she says. She runs through the mine like a spirit, tugging and creaking and clanking machinery to start. “That's why all the miners were deaf!” she yells. She says she hopes to get a PhD in coal heritage, scrolling excitedly through photos of Appalachian mining museums I show her. I come to understand how her hometown grapples with the cultural and physical impacts of coal.
The Barabara Mountains are part of a burgeoning mining tourism industry across the coalfields of Lusatia in East Germany and Silesia in Western Poland. These former socialist republics have landscapes and memories shaped by industry, war and energy. Here, coal is culture, and the German word Kohl has two meanings: coal and money. But now, as the European Union pushes for a future coal-free economy, the landscape and life here have changed a million times before, and are being asked to change again. The word here is “transition,” not “transition” as we would say in the United States.
A descendant of a vanished Jewish community in southern Poland, I came here with a personal history that is inseparable from the region. In Central Europe, the culture of memory resonates with horror and nostalgia; in Germany, it refers primarily to the memorialization of the Holocaust. But as the East German poet Wolfgang Hilbig often wrote, war sites and industrial sites are equally haunted. Recovery from war requires further upheaval for the planet and its people.
