Pamięć i zapomnienie przemysłu i środowiska okręgów przemysłowych w okresie PRL-U I III RP

The article analyses the forms of memory and forgetting about the heavy industry from the post‑war period to the transformation period. In the post‑war years, the rhetoric of great acceleration dominated, in which the emphasis on the intensification of work and production overrode all obstacles – both the exploitation of workers and the excessive exploitation of the environment. At the turn of the 1960s, forms of ecological awareness began to appear related to knowledge on the destruction of the environment in the vicinity of large factories. The modernization narrative about subsequent industrialization plans began to be accompanied by increasingly more vital voices recalling the destruction of forest, agricultural, and urban environments. Only during the transformation period, when industrialization projects collapsed, could the ecological disasters caused by the Polish People's Republic’s industry be remembered and commemorated. New forms of memory about the rapidly degrading heavy industry, especially photographs, demonstrate the ongoing deindustrialization's social and spatial effects.