Word: szczecin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Along the waterfront of Poland's rubble-strewn Szczecin (formerly Stettin) towering cranes on six miles of rebuilt docks load and unload freight at the annual rate of 4,000,000 tons. In Wroclaw (formerly Breslau) bright new arc lights along the main streets have ended years of dim nights in the city's bomb-shattered center. After years of neglect, Poland's "western territories," the lands east of the Oder and Neisse Rivers taken from Germany after the war, are slowly emerging from postwar desolation...
Last week TIME Correspondent Dwight Martin traveled south from Szczecin through countryside dotted with ruined villages, reported: "The western territories are the rawest, most livid scar on the face of Europe. During an eight-hour drive to Wroclaw we saw only eight passenger cars on the highways. In Police, amid the monumental shards of one of the Nazis' biggest synthetic-oil centers, the earth still reeks of explosives and soaked oil. Every week children are killed or maimed by unexploded mines or bombs in the rubble...
...Polish fears have largely faded. "We are not sitting on our suitcases any more," said a Polish scientist in Szczecin. "We are here to stay." Peasants, assured by the government that there will be no forced collectivization, are expanding their holdings under a new government scheme that allows farmers to buy state land at low cost. Obviously with Vatican approval, Cardinal Wyszynski has sent Polish bishops into the area, proclaiming, "Poland has come here, plows and sows here, kneels and prays, believes and loves here...
...Szczecin, 37-year-old Henryk Jendza, chief engineer of a local shipyard, proudly shows visitors his company's latest product, a 6,000-ton freighter. The city's mayor, 35-year-old Jerzy Zielinski, admits that Poland's western territories lag behind East Germany in reconstruction, but points out that "at the end of the war not one of the 56 bridges leading into the city was still standing. Today we have the highest birth rate in Poland. We have built eight schools in the past year and are working on nine more." Like Jendza and Zielinski...
Breathing Space. The Polish Communist leaders had settled for "gradualism." The question is: Will a gradual transition to national Communism satisfy the Polish people? The Poznan trials had sparked a vast flare-up of national feeling in Poland. Peasant farmers abandoned their collective farms (280 farms dissolved in the Szczecin district alone), workers took over factories, and university students demonstrated all over the country. The situation paralleled that in Hungary, except that the Communist leadership apparently reacted in time, and so earned a breathing space. Now something of a hero for his defiance of Khrushchev, Gomulka is using every available...