This picture was taken a couple of months after I was born. The young man is a victim of the Communist regime during the Polish Martial law period (Dec '81 - Jul '83). This unfortunate time brought arrests to thousands of innocent citizens and deaths to approximately one hundred. My mother recalled empty store shelves and a national curfew.
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I remember watching a short film Krzysztof Kieślowski directed-back when the government allowed him to make documentaries-whose theme struck me as the epitome of Iron Curtain futility.
"Factory" focuses on a tractor factory that can't meet the production quotas set by the government. Most of the film revolves around a board meeting of bureaucrats-managers who spend hours squabbling over how to move a shipment of supplies that in most developed countries would take less than a day.
It's a tragic farce-it's almost like watching a really vivid Ionesco play-but when you look back on it it's startling to realize that an actual economy/country was run that way for close to four decades.
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