Inside, the first thing that struck me was the light. I had imagined the control room and broadcasting desk to be in a building that was dark, cramped, intimate — a place of shadows and secrecy. Instead, it was filled with natural light. Windows ran up both the front and rear walls, tall panes that made the room feel almost airy. The ceiling was higher than I expected, giving the space a strange openness… beside me, my two Polish friends stood completely speechless. Only moments ago, seeing the awe on my face at the sight of the radio tower, and agreeing to walk through the gates, they had been gripped by a sudden panic that we might be trespassing.
What fascinated me most was that neither of my friends had ever visited. One I understood; she lived in Bytom. But the other grew up in a small Silesian village only a few kilometres away. The tower had stood on the edge of her world all her life. To me it was history. To her it was simply part of the landscape.
Back then, I only knew a fragment of the story. “WW2 began here,” that was the extent of it. And yet here I was, standing in the very room where that fragment had once lived.
I hadn’t even known the tower still existed until the night before, when it rose out of the pitch-blackness.
In 2007 I was invited to stay with the families of two close Polish friends I’d met in the UK. I arrived tired but wide‑awake in the way you get when everything around you is new. Arriving at Katowice airport, I emerged from behind the arrivals gate to find my friends waiting to greet me, each waving a Polish flag, laughing, excited, and soon I found myself in the front passenger seat of her father’s car, heading toward a small village outside Gliwice where I would be staying.
We made a quick stop in Bytom to drop off our other friend, and now it was just the three of us — her father driving, my friend resting in the back, and me still in the front passenger seat watching the landscape unfold through the windscreen. I couldn’t speak a great deal of Polish, so I was content to just watch.
Wide open countryside.
Strip‑farmed fields.
Dense dark belts of forest bordering the road.
Pit heads in the distance, their steel frames cutting aginst the evening sky.
Silesia was heavy with industry, yet interrupted by sudden urban pockets.
Modern shopping malls with huge car parking.
Bytom, Zabrze, Gliwice — names I barely knew, places layered like palimpsests.
Old and new pressed together.
Tram tracks cut through cracked asphalt. Neon advertising hoardings glared down at peeling plaster and neglected courtyards, while apartment blocks bristled with satellite dishes and loops of cable. Old and new seemed permanently pressed together.
One of the billboards was enormous — devoted entirely to a brand of mayonnaise.
Mayonnaise.
I remember thinking: What kind of country advertises mayonnaise at that scale?
And then immediately: Whatever this place is, it’s nothing like the Britain I left this morning — it felt loud, new, and even colourful at times, then subdued and slightly depressing, neglected buildings and industry, wide open spaces and entirely not what I expected.
Everything was unfamiliar, but not in a frightening way, more in a what-else-am-I-going-to-see way. My friend’s father drove calmly through the dark, and I sat there, absorbing a world that didn’t match anything I thought I knew about Poland.
We had passed through Gliwice and were slipping toward the edge of the city when the tower appeared. It rose out of the darkness with a kind of solemn presence… Red lights blinked high above, slow and patient, like something breathing in the night.
The sight caught me completely off guard. It was familiar in a way that reached past thought — straight into memory, into childhood, into the part of me that had once sat at a school desk trying to understand how a war could begin.
I hadn’t expected to feel anything. I hadn’t even known the tower still existed. But the moment I saw it, something inside me tightened. It was as if a page from a history book had stepped out of its flat, printed world and into the road ahead of us.
I heard myself ask, quietly, “Is that the radio station?”
My friend answered from the back seat. Her voice held a small, unmistakable note of surprise — gentle, almost protective, as though she hadn’t realised this place might mean something to me. Her father glanced over, curious. They exchanged a few words behind me, soft and quick, and I felt suddenly aware of the space between us: them in their world, me in mine, and the radio mast bridging the two for a moment.
I didn’t ask what they said. I didn’t want to disturb whatever had passed between them.
The car moved on, headlights sweeping over the empty road. After a while, I tried to explain — haltingly, almost apologetically — the fragments I remembered. The Gleiwitz Incident — A staged attack. A spark that grew into something terrible. A name that had stayed with me long after the rest of the lesson faded. I asked if we might visit the tower in the coming days.
My friend seemed taken aback. Her father listened to her translation, nodded once, and let the matter rest. Their quiet acceptance made the moment feel even more fragile.
I realised then how carefully they had planned to show me their world, and how unexpectedly I had reached for something from my own distant past — a radio mast I had only ever known as a grainy photograph in a book. I had come to Poland with a handful of memories, none of them sharp, none of them complete. And now, in the dark, as a passenger in their car, one of those memories had risen out of the night and met me halfway.
It felt like recognition, and loss, and wonder, all at once.
That night, the tower had been a sudden silhouette in the darkness. But the next day, the daylight changed everything.
The Visit
The next day was bitterly cold, the air sharp enough to ache in the lungs, and overhead the sky stretched out in such a way that it made the Silesian plain feel twice as wide as anything I was used to back home. My friend’s mother had been fretting since breakfast, worried I hadn’t eaten half enough, that the weather was turning, and with snow forecast, I needed dressing properly against the cold. Once my friend translated all of that maternal anxiety into something actionable, we left to drive to Gliwice. We met up with our friend waiting outside the railway station and drove out towards the outskirts, and in bright unfiltered daylight I was completely stunned.
The radio mast was wooden.
I had imagined steel — something industrial, modern, metallic. Instead there it stood: tall, dark, entirely wooden, fenced off with what looked like allotment gardens inside the grounds. No visitors. No obvious signs of staff. Just the tower and a cluster of buildings that looked unmistakably German in their architecture.
The access gates were open.
“Can we go in?” I asked.
My friends looked at each other, shrugged, and seeing the awe on my face, agreed. We walked through the open gates and around the buildings. It felt eerily quiet, as if I had stepped back in time. I can’t help but smile at my own earnestness, but at the time I was completely captivated. I remember asking softly, “Do you realize how extraordinary this is? It feels like it belongs in a museum, just sitting here. Why isn’t it protected more? Preserved?”
They shrugged. One of them said gently, “It’s something we don’t really talk much about, Gary.”
We continued to wander about the grounds, until we were stopped in our tracks as someone called out.
Not a demand — not “Why are you here?” — but more of a “Can I help you?” Still, it scared the life out of my friends. A man walked over, and a rapid Polish discussion took place, tense at first, then easing, then laughter. My friend explained: he was from a preservation society, someone with an official capacity to maintain the site.
He was clearly unused to visitors.
He was clearly excited that I, an English visitor, was there and interested in the radio station.
To our complete surprise, we were invited inside for a guided tour of the control and broadcasting room.
That brought us into the room, surrounded by Bakelite switches, valves, gauges, and strange wheels whose purpose I couldn’t guess. Materials and mechanisms from another era, preserved almost accidentally by time and disuse. It felt unreal — as if I had stepped into a photograph from a school history book and found it still warm. I was still a visitor trying to understand Poland.
Reflection
Years later, sometime in 2011, my friend and I cycled back to Radiostacja.
By then, the site and surrounding area had been beautifully developed into a very pleasant park. The allotments were gone, the buildings restored, the tower carefully preserved. It had become somewhere people could visit, walk, sit, and spend an afternoon.
We sat there in the glorious early summer sunshine and I thought about that first night.
I thought about the tower appearing out of the darkness, the red lights blinking above us, and the strange feeling of recognition I had experienced from the passenger seat of my friend’s father’s car.
I thought about history.
By then I had learned a great deal more about the history of the place, and about Silesia itself. I had begun to understand that the story I had been taught at school was only one layer of a much more complicated history: German Silesia, Polish Silesia, borders that had moved, people who had been moved, identities that had survived political changes and sometimes been forced to change with them.
Sitting there in the sunshine, I tried to imagine that night in 1939.
What had the place felt like?
What had the people there known?
What had they believed was happening?
And how impossible would it have been for them to imagine what would follow?
The sunshine made it difficult to hold the thought for long.
Around me was a park. People walking. Birds. The ordinary sounds of a summer afternoon.
And there was the tower.
The same tower I had first seen as a sudden silhouette in the darkness, when I was still a visitor trying to understand Poland.
Only now I lived here.
That, perhaps, was the strangest part.
→ First Tastes
→ Elevated Discovery — Katowice
→ Walk & Tram — Katowice: a poem
→ Ôbzdrzōnek przez śniyg — Katowice: a poem
→ Czekając przy torach w śniegu — Katowice: a poem
→ Symbols, Snow and the Train to Wrocław
→ The Grammar of Hospitality
Image Credits
⚬ Signpost to the Gliwice Radio Station Museum – Bärbel Miemietz / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
⚬ Radiostacja Gliwicka – Dariusz Kobla / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 PL
⚬ Radio Station Gliwice: Transmission Room – Kamil Czaiński / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
⚬ Radiostacja Gliwicka at Sunset – Dariusz Kobla / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 PL
Leave a Reply