Free Down with Big Brother by Michael Dobbs

frying pans, cheap perfume, brown coal, cabbage, dried urine, and musty newsprint.
    Many of these towns were company towns, built around a single state-owned factory, such as a steelworks or a coal mine or a big defense plant, visible for miles around. The factory dominated the lives of the townspeople, just as it dominated the landscape. It provided them with jobs and poisoned the air they breathed and the water they drank. It organized day care centers and summer camps for their children and exposed them to an unending stream of Communist propaganda. It distributed housing and acted as an extension of the police state: If you misbehaved, you would be crossed off the ten-year waiting list for an apartment.
    Nowa Huta differed from other model socialist towns in one very important respect. At the corner of Karl Marx Avenue and Great ProletarianAvenue stood a soaring concrete structure that had not been part of the original plan. Topped by a huge steel cross, the Church of Our Lady, Queen of Poland was known to everyone in town as the Ark. The struggle to prove the planners wrong had infused the entire community with a sense of defiance.
    The first cross had appeared on this site in 1957, in the wake of the popular upheavals that swept Gomułka to power. Over the next decade the cross was repeatedly torn down by police and stubbornly put up again by the local inhabitants. Finally, in 1967, seventeen years after the building of Nowa Huta, the archbishop of Kraków had dug a spade into the earth to break the ground for the town’s first church. It took another decade of bureaucratic obstruction and arbitrary shortages of building materials to complete the Ark. Much of the work, including carrying two million stones from mountain streams, was done by local inhabitants with their bare hands. Consecrating the completed church in 1977, the archbishop had declared: “Nowa Huta was built as a city without God, but the will of God and the people who worked here prevailed. Let this be a lesson.” 181
    The archbishop had gone on to become Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. On his first pilgrimage back to his homeland, in 1979, Karol Wojtyła had been refused permission to visit the Ark. So he had said mass across the cornfields, in Kraków, against the backdrop of the dark, satanic steel mill. Now he was returning to Poland once again, and this time he would be visiting Nowa Huta. Frustrated in their attempts to pull down the local Lenin monument, the inhabitants of the “city without God” were determined to show the world where their loyalties really lay.
    T HE POPE’S FIRST VISIT had provided the spiritual boost that had paved the way for the rise of Solidarity. By turning out to greet their countryman, and becoming part of the millions-strong crowd that followed his every move, Poles acquired a sense of solidarity with one another. Never again would they feel alone and isolated, as they had during the dark days of totalitarianism. If anyone was isolated, it was Poland’s Communist rulers.
    During the 1979 pilgrimage John Paul had spoken in a voice that was simple and direct, quite unlike the voice of the Communist regime. He talked of the thirty-five-year Communist experience as a transitory phenomenon, insignificant in comparison with Poland’s thousand-year devotion to the Roman Catholic Church. It was a message that came across clearly on the first day of the visit, in Warsaw’s Victory Square, when the pope attacked the state for attempting to create an atheistic society. “Christcannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe,” he had thundered. The crowd greeted his words with a ten-minute burst of applause, ending with rhythmic chants of “We want God, we want God.” 182
    From that moment onward, Karol Wojtyła became the uncrowned king of Poland.
    During his weeklong tour of Poland the pope had elaborated on one of his favorite themes, the spiritual unity of Europe. He