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Poznań

Poznań June 1956 Monument — Bread, Dignity and a Broken Silence

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Transcript

On 28 June 1956, workers from the Cegielski works and other factories marched to the city centre with economic and political demands. The protest became the first mass workers’ revolt in communist Poland and was violently suppressed. The monument here was not built immediately. Public commemoration became possible during the Solidarity period, and the twin-cross monument was erected with extraordinary speed in 1981. The city’s official history notes that its main elements were made at the Cegielski works—the same industrial community central to the original protest. That connection is powerful: workers who had been denied a public memory helped manufacture the object that restored it.

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