I might have suggested at one point that the derelict health clinic in Jabłonka might be a depressing harbinger of things to come in Poland. The left two-thirds of the building is in its original state: old windows from the sixties (the ubiquitous three-pane windows of the Soviet bloc, windows I've seen in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania as well as period videos of the Soviet Union and East Germany), the strange nearly-mansard roof (also common in the Warsaw Pact), pealing paint and chipped plaster. It all speaks to the neglect that was so common in the buildings just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The right third of the building has undergone some renovation: an addition was initiated and roughed in, with the roof clearly made of a more modern material. Yet it, too, is neglected, standing in the raw state (as Poles would say in direct translation). A rebirth that was in fact a still-birth.

If you'd asked me what I saw as a worst-case scenario for Poland twenty-five years ago, I would have suggested something like this. I would have expected start-stop-start-stop growth and development that would manifest itself in buildings like this throughout Poland.

Instead, the last twenty-five years, it has transformed from a poor country emerging hesitantly from the Soviet shadow to a country with one of the top-twenty largest economies in the world. The GDP per capita increased from roughly $4,500 in 2000 to over $25,000 by 2024 (current U.S. dollars), and it has gone from half the EU average to 80% of the EU average during that same time. Buildings such as this exception not the standard.