Poland’s Return of Chocolate Firm to Capitalism Has a Taste of Irony : Eastern Europe: Confectionery outlives four decades of communism.

The label on a chocolate box makes a metaphor for the troubled tale of postwar Poland.

“Formerly E. Wedel,” it says in large letters. In tiny print, a footnote adds: “22nd of July Confectionery Industry Works.”

Three generations of Wedel family labor were erased by Communist fiat in the postwar zeal to nationalize private industries. It took four decades to figure out that it was all a big mistake.

Now that Poland is embracing capitalism once again, the 22nd of July Confectionery Industry Works also will be “formerly.” The new label is not expected to commemorate it.

The chocolate company is to be one of the first five state enterprises offered for sale to private investors as post-Communist Poland tries to revitalize a crumbling economy.

From the state-owned industries, private companies are to be formed to flourish or fail without government subsidies.

First for the auction block are those deemed to have the greatest chance of success, and Wedel occupies a special place in Poland as a prewar company that still means quality to consumers otherwise awash in shoddy goods.

When the means of production were liberated from the capitalists, it is said the workers at Wedel “spontaneously” called for it to be renamed in honor of July 22, 1944, when a Soviet-backed committee proclaimed itself the government of Poland.

The candy-loving class and Wedel’s foreign customers were not impressed.

As the Communist economy staggered through its last years, apparatchiks in the confection section finally admitted the blunder.

The Wedel name went back on the packages, with the delicate addition of “formerly,” and the official name became a postscript.

This year, the national holiday was changed from July 22 to May 3, the date of a Polish constitution in 1791.

Andrzej Karbowniczek, who runs the factory, said: “Regardless of political changes, we have never been ashamed of the example of a man who achieved very good results” in the chocolate business.

That man was Jan Wedel, third-generation capitalist. His grandfather, Karol Wedel, opened a Warsaw candy shop in 1851 and the family’s fortunes were sweetened by the second generation, Emil, who sent his own son, Jan, to Paris and London for instruction in chemistry and management.

When Jan returned, the business expanded further. The Wedels opened a Paris shop in 1937 and flew the candy to it in their own airplane.

Jan Wedel is remembered with reverence in Warsaw.

“The company was Wedel’s ‘family,’ ” the weekly Tygodnik Solidarnosc said. “He attended name days, birthdays, weddings; granted loans, helped solve life’s problems.”

Wedel’s factory was occupied by the Germans during World War II and partially destroyed. Then, says a promotional booklet from the mid-1980s, “the liberation of Warsaw began . . . the socialist expansion of the factory.”

One day in 1949, the company was nationalized by People’s Poland and no longer belonged to the Wedel family.

“People close to Mr. Wedel said he was most happy that the old machinery was replaced by modern machines,” said Karbowniczek, the factory director.

Happy to lose his family’s legacy?

Well, Karbowniczek said, Wedel “was a clever man. He did not intend to fight . . . because he knew it was . . . useless.”

Tygodnik Solidarnosc said that Wedel was allowed to return as a technical manager’s assistant, but that the factory register shows him leaving after less than a year due to “poor health.”

The newspaper suggested that the real reason for his departure was harassment by Communist Party operatives at the factory.

Witnesses often saw Wedel sit for hours on a bench in the park across the street, staring at the factory, the paper reported.

In 1950, one Boleslaw W., identified as a candy wrapper, wrote to the Communist Party daily Trybuna Ludu: “It has been five years since the factory has been reopened by the Polish Communist Party . . . years of comrades’ efforts to . . . improve production and improve working conditions. Production and the existence of the factory itself have now nothing to do with the capitalist Wedel and owe everything to the working class.

“Up to this moment, against logic, the factory has been working under the old name Wedel. How can it be? How is it possible to export under the capitalist’s name? Our export production must be our tool of propaganda . . . of production of working people, without capitalists.”

The name 22nd of July--22 Lipca in Polish--was adopted, whether by “spontaneous” demand of workers or by the apparatus.

Karbowniczek said the decision “was not too fortunate. I had a lot of problems with foreign trading partners who were asking who that Mr. Lipca was.”

There are said to be Wedel heirs, two nephews and the children of Jan’s last wife, but the management said none had inquired about reclaiming the factory.

Parliament is still drafting laws on selling state companies and returning nationalized properties to former owners.

With agreement in principle, first steps have been taken at such major enterprises as the Gdansk shipyard where Solidarity was born and the Universal foreign trade company, but complex mechanics have yet to be resolved.

What, for example, should be the balance between ownership by Poles and foreigners and by investors and workers?

How is the value of a company to be established when standard Western accounting principles have never been applied?

“Bid low,” was the advice of a Western businessman helping organize the sales.

The Wedel factory, which has about 3,000 employees, made sweets last year valued at 126 billion zlotys, or $13.2 million. Roughly 20% of its production was exported, including the trademark Wedel chocolate wafers in round blue-and-white boxes.

“Wedel is one of the first enterprises to be privatized because we are one of the best,” said Jozef Rutkowski, the factory’s financial manager. “We belong to the group of enterprises that can guarantee to their shareholders that their capital will be quickly multiplied.”

The company suffered with the decline of Poland’s economy. In 1983, under martial law, there was not enough foreign currency to buy raw materials and chocolate production ceased for the first time in Wedel’s history.