Polski Związek Podnoszenia Ciężarów | Pro |

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.

Today, the Polski Związek Podnoszenia Ciężarów stands as a bridge between two Polands: the one that bled and the one that dreams. Its annual championship, held in a different city each year, is still a traveling carnival of iron. The elderly Baszanowski, now a frail man with bright eyes, still attends, shaking hands with teenage lifters who break his old records. The union’s latest mission is to build a museum in Gdańsk—a shrine to the silent warriors: the railway worker who snatched 140 kg after his shift, the mother of three who clean-and-jerked her way to a national title, the Auschwitz survivor who counted squats in the dark. polski związek podnoszenia ciężarów

The cold hung in the air of the Warszawa sports academy like a held breath. It was January 1957, and the war-scarred city was still learning to stand straight again. In a cramped, high-ceilinged room that smelled of chalk, sweat, and old tobacco, a group of men gathered around a scarred oak table. They were not politicians or generals. They were blacksmiths, teachers, former partisans, and railway workers. Their hands, calloused and thick-knuckled, had spent the last decade lifting not just barbells, but the rubble of a nation. Today, they were here to formally re-establish the Polski Związek Podnoszenia Ciężarów (PZPC). The union’s story, however, began long before the

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 men like Walenty Kłyszejko, a visionary coach