THE RISE OF THE COMMON PEOPLE 145transformed the social scene in several well-defined localities. In Upper Silesia,
in the Dabrowa Basin, and above all in the Lodz area, entirely new proletarian
concentrations sprouted where in 1800 there was nothing but green fields. All
the main urban centres multiplied their population in the course of the century
at least ten times over. By 1931, iz.7 per cent of the population of the Second
Republic was dependent on industrial employment.
The condition of the Polish proletariat at the turn of the century however, did
not invite superlatives. The squalor, the pressures, and the attitudes were remin-
iscent of scenes in England a century before. In Lodz, and in smaller towns like
it, for people who still had their roots in the ageless routines of the countryside,
life in a textile-mill was at once dark, Satanic, and unavoidable. It was organized
by a new race of entrepreneurs and managers, the so-called Lodzermenschen,
who drove themselves and their employees with the same inhuman frenzy as
their machines:
BOROWIECKI - But for us, in a factory where you are just one of a million cogs, it
makes all the difference. We did not employ you in order to practise philanthropy, but in
order to work: work, and nothing else. Here everything depends on perfect efficiency, on
precision and harmony; and all that you're doing is to raise confusion...
HORN — I'm not a machine; I'm a man.
BOROWIECKI — At home perhaps. But in the mill, no one is asking you to pass an exam
in the Humanities. In the mill, we want your muscles and your brain; and that's what we
pay for. Here you're a machine like the rest of us. So just do what you're supposed to.
There's no place here for bliss...
He was enveloped in stifling, super-heated air. The huge, sheet-iron frames were groan-
ing like distant thunder, as they spewed out an endless stream of rigid, coloured cloth.
On the low tables, on the floor, on the trolleys, vast piles of material were stacked. In
the dry clear air of the room, with its wide walls of window-glass, they shone with the
dimmed colours of trench-gold, of purple with a glint of violet, of navy blue, of old-
fashioned emerald-like sheets of metal with a dull, dead lustre.
Barefoot workmen, dressed in nothing but smocks, moved around silently and auto-
matically, their eyes glutted by the orgy of colour, their bodies answering to the needs of
the machines.
From time to time someone would look out from this fourth storey window on to
Lodz which loomed through the smoke and fog. On one side, they looked out on to a
thousand huddled chimneys, roofs, houses and leafless trees: on the other on to fields
merging into the horizon, and on to a long line of low tenements strung out along a band
of black mud between rows of bare poplars. The greyish, whitish, grimy expanse was
covered with the remnants of the Spring thaw, and dotted here and there with red-brick
factories which stood out from the fog with the dull tone of freshly skinned meat.
The machines howled incessantly; the transmission belts whined incessantly...
Everything in the vast four-sided room full of sad colours, sad light, and sad people,
moved in time with the gigantic metal driers - shrines of the despotical Power-God.
Borowiecki felt on edge, and absent-mindedly inspected the goods...
'What a foolish lad!' he thought of Horn.
And then as he watched the droves of people working in silence - 'I was once like that
myself.. ,'^12