Gdynia – dzieło otwarte

The history of Gdynia, like any decent history, has many threads. Some are very important, others less so; some are explicit, others hidden. At the beginnings of Gdynia, it is easy to grasp the most important threads: on the one hand, the dream of a modern, dynamic Poland, boldly looking to the future; on the other, romantic patriotism rooted in national history. The modernising effort of the young country, which wanted to make up for its civilisational backwardness, thus met with the need to serve the homeland. Without this meeting, there would have been no Gdynia, no great Baltic harbour built from scratch, and no city growing at an "American" pace, which soon became an object of universal pride.

All this was brutally interrupted by the German invasion in September 1939. The people of Gdynia were among the first victims of the cruel war—murdered, expelled, exploited as forced labourers. The end of the war did not bring the expected revival. Gdynia's citizens demanded their freedom in dramatic ways: in December 1970, the streets of the city were covered with the blood of workers protesting against the communist regime; in August 1980, Gdynia became one of Poland's most important centres of opposition to the injustice of the system.

In the shadow of the great historical and social processes, however, ordinary life went on. Gdynia's women and men graduated from Gdynia schools, got married in Gdynia churches, buried their dead in Gdynia cemeteries, took care of their Gdynia tenement houses, travelled to work in the Gdynia shipyard on Gdynia trolleybuses, did their shopping in a Gdynia hall, went to sea from Gdynia and returned to Gdynia.