Polski Związek Podnoszenia Ciężarów Access

That seed almost rotted during the Nazi occupation. Barbells were melted into weapons. Gyms became hospitals or execution sites. The PZPC vanished, its records burned, its champions scattered—some to the forests as resistance fighters, others to concentration camps. One such champion, a silent heavyweight from Poznań named Tadeusz “Kuna” Kuna, spent four years in Auschwitz. He survived by secretly doing squats and presses in the latrine, counting repetitions as a prayer for another dawn.

But the true titan was yet to come. In a small village near Siedlce, a farmer’s son named Ireneusz Kucia began lifting stones. By the time he was eighteen, he had a neck like a tree trunk and a deadlift that made coaches weep. Under the PZPC’s system, he was refined, sharpened, sent to Zawiercie for “the hardening.” At the 1980 Moscow Olympics, boycotted by the Americans, Kucia stood under the bar for his final attempt in the super heavyweight class. The stadium held its breath. He descended, caught the clean low, then drove upward. The bar shook. His arms locked. The world record—a 410 kg total—was his. Back home, the PZPC headquarters received a telegram: “IRON CROWN SECURED. LONG LIVE POLAND.” They framed it next to a photo of Kucia’s bleeding shins.

The Communist authorities were suspicious of the PZPC. It was too individualistic, too primal. A man alone with a barbell, grunting against gravity—this was not the socialist collectivist ideal. But the Party underestimated the iron will of the union’s second generation. Throughout the 1960s, the PZPC played a clever game. They organized “Workers’ Strength Days” in factories, disguising elite training as proletarian fitness. They built the legendary training center in Zawiercie, a grim, beautiful place where the walls sweated rust and champions were forged in silence. The coach there, a squat, fiery-eyed man named Janusz Gortat, ran a dictatorship of the bar. His philosophy was brutal: “The barbell does not care about your politics. It only cares about your back.” polski związek podnoszenia ciężarów

The union’s story, however, began long before the ashes of 1945. Its first incarnation was born in the spirited, fractured years after Poland regained independence in 1918. Back then, weightlifting was a carnival act, a strongman’s brag. But men like Walenty Kłyszejko, a visionary coach of Lithuanian-Polish descent, saw it differently. He saw geometry in motion, poetry in a clean and jerk. The early PZPC, founded in 1922, was a fragile thing—a union of iron enthusiasts who met in cellar gyms, lifting mismatched plates by gaslight. Their first national championship, held in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) in 1925, had more spectators than lifters, but the seed was planted.

On a rainy Tuesday in autumn, the current president of the PZPC—a former lifter named Maria Złotowska, the first woman to hold the office—stands before a hundred young athletes in a stadium in Katowice. She does not give a speech about medals. Instead, she places a rusty, dented barbell from 1946 on a pedestal. “This bar,” she says, “was lifted by a man who had nothing. No food. No hope. No country that believed in him. But he lifted it anyway. That is the Polish style. Not strength without pain. But strength through pain.” That seed almost rotted during the Nazi occupation

The 1970s were the golden age. The PZPC, now a sleek, ruthless machine, began producing giants. Waldemar Baszanowski—a man whose technique was so pure it looked like slow-motion water—dominated the lightweight division. He lifted not with rage but with arithmetic precision. In Munich 1972, as terrorists’ shadows loomed, Baszanowski stood on the platform, his face a mask of concentration, and clean-and-jerked 167.5 kg—three times his own bodyweight. The gold medal was Poland’s. The PZPC had arrived.

And so, the 1957 meeting was a resurrection. The men at the table elected Zygmunt Smalcerz, a former middleweight with a broken nose and unbowed spirit, as the first post-war chairman. Their first decree was not about records or medals. It was simple: “We will build a platform in every powiat (county). Because a nation that lifts together, heals together.” The PZPC vanished, its records burned, its champions

The young lifters nod. They tighten their belts. And somewhere in the silent, chalk-dusted rafters of the old Zawiercie hall, the ghost of Tadeusz Kuna—the Auschwitz strongman—smiles. The bar is still rising. The union endures.