For those who have never heard of Chelmek, it’s a town which history goes as far back as the fourteenth century.
Chelmek is situated on a border between Malopolska and Silesia, at runaway of rivers Przemsza and Vistula.
At the end of the project, all work will be permanently exhibited in our Town’s Centre in Chelmek as a proof of your talent and as an important cultural treasure for the inhabitants.
Footwear production in Poland(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-01)
The industrial manufacturing of shoes in Poland appeared before World War II when the Czech factory owner Bata set up first Polish fully mechanised footwear plant in Chelmek The Bata company also pioneered the application of vulcanised rubber to rubber o vershoes(galoshes)and textile shoes, such as sneakers and tennis shoes.
Immediatly after the war, in 1945, Polish shoe manufacturing capacity was limited, the main plans being based in the former Bata factories in Chelmek and Radom and the plundured plant in Otmet where machines had been stolen and only skilled workers remai ned.
It was the skill of the surviving labour force that became the backbone of a dynamic development in the post-war footwear industry which had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.
October 1, 1942: The Chelmek slave-labor camp, located in Poland near Auschwitz-Birkenau, opens to house Jews draining swamps to provide water to the nearby Bata shoe factory.
In the 1930s, the Bata Group was a well-known and prosperous company.
in Croatia (Borovo), Poland (Chelmek, Otmet), Holland (Best), the Switzerland (Möhlin), or even outside Europe in the United States (Belcamp), India (Batanagar) or Brasil (Batatuba).
