What Was Left of the Mine

Jakub worked twenty-two years underground in a coal mine in Upper Silesia, until the pit finally closed six years ago, along with three of the region's four other mines. Today he's a museum guide in the very shaft where he used to work, since converted into a tourist attraction with helmets for rent and a gift shop at the exit.

It's a strange way to explain his own past, he says. He leads school groups and tourists through corridors where he once genuinely sweated, felt fear, lost colleagues, and has to hit a tone that's informative and mildly entertaining, not heavy, not political, family-friendly, as the museum management calls it. When a child asks whether it was dangerous, he says sometimes, even though the real answer is more complicated and carries a name he doesn't let himself say during the tour: that of his best friend, who died in a collapse in 2003.

What preoccupies him most is how quickly a place that fed and destroyed entire families across generations becomes an attraction with an admission fee. The region around him has struggled with high unemployment for years since the mines closed, and the tourism the museum brings covers barely a fraction of the lost jobs. Still, Jakub goes down every day, because he believes someone who lived it can tell the story differently than a text panel can.

I'm not showing people a place anymore, I'm showing them my life, he says. Sometimes I wish they wouldn't just try on the helmet, but understand what it meant to wear it every day, not knowing if you'd come back up.

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