Following our interview with Trojan, a former member of the Sosnowiec skinhead crew in the 1980s, we came across an article from the third issue of Derby skinzine Birth of a Hooligan, which was edited by Mic Shaw and published in 1992. As you may recall Trojan mentioning, despite the rapid evolution of the scene towards the far right starting in 1989, “some members of the original Sosnowiec crew managed to hang on and hold their ground”. This article was penned by two of them. It contained a few inaccuracies, some of which I address in my footnotes.
Matt Crombieboy
Skinheads from Poland
Hi there. This is Jarek and Igor from Sosnowiec in Poland. We were asked to write an article about the skinhead movement in our country so here it is. We live in Silesia and we can only write about the situation in our area, but we will write generally about the rest of the country.
The first skinheads appeared here in the second half of the Eighties and they came from big towns like Warszawa, Gdansk, Wroclaw and Silesia. The majority of these were disappointed punks. The punk movement was fun, kids started at 15 and stopped at 19. By now the first Oi! bands were beginning to play, they were Ramzes and The Hooligans from Rydultowy, D.D.T. from Gdansk[1] and Sex Bomba from Legionowo. Their music was not perfect due to them having trouble in finding rehearsal rooms and the poor quality of their equipment.
The first Polish skinheads were totally non-political and they were not connected to any political organisations or parties. Two skinzines were published, both from Silesia, Przebudzcie and Fajna Gazeta,[2] and these featured bands and music from around the world.
The first public performance of Oi! band Sex Bomba took place at the Jarocin Festival in 1986. By the way, the group had pacifist lyrics and have not really been accepted in the general skinhead movement. The scene was getting stronger, fights during football and hockey matches, and a lot of them began to join different nationalist organisations, with radio, press and television showing all skinheads as Nazis.
After 1988, the scene was very strong, but almost all of the bands were nationalists, such as Grunwald, B.T.M., Szczerbiec, Baranki Boze, Honor and Polska, and new zines arrived like Legion, Kolomir and Krew I Honor. The most important event of that year was totally destroyed by skinheads, as they fought with satanists at the Polish metal music Fest-Metalmania ’88. During the fight, a skinhead from our native town was seriously wounded by a knife, the Sosnowiec crew was the strongest in all Silesia, and took revenge on heavy metal fans for it, and this is still happening to this day.
In 1989, the only reports on skinheads on the television was about attacks on black students and minorities. There was an Oi! Festival organised in Sosnowiec in 1990 but only local bands played and it was not very successful due to poor advertising. Three months later another Oi! Fest was organised and this time a lot of skinheads from all over Poland attended, but only two bands played – Honor from Gliwice, a fucking nationalist and racist band and Zacier from Sosnowiec, who are a non-political Oi! band.[3]
The non-political skinhead crew from Sosnowiec is struggling as 95% of all Polish skinheads are fucking racists and nationalists. There aren’t any organisations like SHARP or A.F.A. In Poland the majority of the skinheads belong to mindless organisations like Blood and Honour and White Noise. The stupid dicks don’t know that the members of these organisations hate Poles and all Slavs too.
There has been a programme on television about Polish skinheads, lately a lot of skinheads have risen up to speak out, but only one dared to show his face against nationalism and racism. This was our friend Krzysztof Marzec from Sosnowiec. There are more and more demonstrations and direct actions against minorities, Germans, Jews, gypsies and foreign students and the people who blame them for the bad situation here in Poland are both blind and crazy!
[1] DDT weren’t actually an Oi band, but a fast hardcore punk combo with punk rather than skinhead members. What’s more, they had a reputation as a ‘nazi punk’ band, stemming from their song ‘Racism’: “You will perish, darkies, you will perish, filth, because that’s the law of the white race”. Whether the band was really invested in racism or merely indulging in dark humour/shock tactics is difficult to say. Insofar as the lyrics are decipherable (only an amateur live recording from 1984 exists), they seem to make fun of empathy with oppressed peoples, especially blacks and Native Americans in the US, while also trying to be as outrageous as possible. In the context of the band’s other songs, many of which are pointedly anti-communist, I guess the main intention was to insult the values of the Polish People’s Republic. As Trojan relates in Part 4 of our interview, Polish state propaganda “preached friendship with Third World countries and claimed that ‘in America they beat the blacks’, duly publicising all instances of racism in the US and in western Europe”. However, some came to “endorse racism as part of their identification with the west”.
[2] Apart from Fajna Gazeta and Przebudzcie (“Awake” – a satiric reference to the Jehova’s Witnesses magazine of the same name), it seems there was at least one other early skinzine at the time, called Oi! Front (1987).
[3] In the April 1995 issue of Skinhead Sosnowiec, a member of the band Skankan remembers his old band Zacier as an early Polish ska combo rather than an ‘apolitical Oi band’: “When Zacier existed, hardly anyone in Poland had heard about ska music. As one of the first Polish bands, we played covers by The Selecter, The Beat and Kortatu back in 1988”. He remembers the gig at the Oi festival in Sosnowiec thus: “Four bands were supposed to perform: Zadruga, Branik, Honor and Zacier. Apart from us, only the latter two played. Our music was relegated to the background, serving as a soundtrack for punch-ups. Discouraged by the skinhead presence at our gigs, our guitarist stopped attending our rehearsals afterwards”.
Creases Like Knives 