There were also songs about spa towns, too. The 1932 tango Na To Jest Ciechocinek (That’s What Ciechocinek Is For) was, in fact, written by patients at Ciechocinek that year, and promotes the town as an ideal place to visit.
Ciechocinek, according to the song, transforms 100-year-old women into Greta Garbo, eradicates tiredness and gout, and ensures adults and children are always healthy. ‘If you have money to throw away, you can go overseas,’ the song suggests – ‘but when you want health […] if you want to live up to a hundred years, come here!’
Perhaps once the current pandemic is over, we too can take a trip to the ‘mud, salts and swimming pools’ of Ciechocinek – and hopefully, we can do so just for fun.
Written by Juliette Bretan, Jun 2021
Sources: Kirsty Duncan, Hunting the 1918 Flu (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Kathryn Ciancia, On Civilisation's Edge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Antony Polonsky, Hanna Wgrzynek and Andrzej Bikowski, eds., New Directions in the History of the Jews in the Polish Lands (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018); Tamara Trojanowska, Joanna Nizynska, and Przemyslaw Czaplinski, eds., Being Poland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018); Dieter De Bruyn and Kris Van Heuckelom, eds., (Un)masking Bruno Schulz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009); ncbi.nlm.nih.gov; wielkahistoria.pl; bazhum.muzhp.pl