Environment : For Children of Poland, a Legacy of Pain, Pollution : In a corner of the country, more is tainted than just air and water. Youngsters are paying the price of industry with their health.

The province of Katowice is 2,568 square miles, slightly smaller than the state of Delaware and about two-thirds the size of Los Angeles County. It represents just 2% of the land area of Poland, but it contains 11% of the country’s population--4 million people who live amid what must surely be one of the wonders, or horrors, of the modern world.

Here, in an area that could be traversed in under an hour if a good highway existed, are 69 coal mines, three lead and zinc mines, 20 steel mills, eight coking plants, four lead and zinc processing mills, 15 coal-fired power plants, and 18 other metallurgical plants processing wire, coins, pipe, brass, tin and aluminum. There are three crude oil refineries, three glass factories and six chemical plants manufacturing carbides, pesticides and paints.

Altogether, more than 5,000 industrial concerns operate in the province, 238 of them producing, by estimated weight, 40% of all the air pollution in the country.

It’s the worst part of the heavily polluted region known as Silesia. The area’s rivers are dead. In some areas, a square yard of soil contains enough lead to fabricate a toy soldier. The annual fallout of dust is estimated at 762 tons per square kilometer, 13 times higher than the national average. In addition to lead and cadmium, the industries of the province release into the atmosphere a stew of organic chemical compounds whose effects on human beings scientists fear, but can only partially measure.

The population of this area lives tucked between the mines and mills, one town scarcely recognizable from the next, along snaking roads choked with heavy truck traffic. No one here hangs washing outdoors. The houses and playgrounds are gray with the dust. Home, for these people, is a nightmare landscape of smokestacks and cooling towers, slag heaps and mesas of coal tailings, of subsiding earth and pits filled with a chemical broth masquerading as water. About one-fourth of the area’s population is under the age of 20. It is these children who are now inheriting the earth of Katowice province. It is a frightful legacy.

The town of Bytom, late on a chill afternoon. A circle of four-story Germanic-style a partment buildings, and a sort of playground-common set among them. Two women speak together, a dozen children play nearby. The women speak of how often they must wash the apartment windows. From the center of the yard, looking in one direction, coal smoke can be seen pouring from the chimney of the power plant. In the opposite direction, the stacks of the “huta,” (steel mill, in Polish) also pour forth. The plants, like bookends, stand at either end of the apartment block.

The daughter of one of the women runs up. She is 5 years old, blonde, with a face as delicate as bone china. She is covered with a fine black dust, like graphite. It is all over her face, and her hands are black with it. The women shrug. It’s the “sandpile,” one indicates. That’s the way it is here, says the other.

Dr. Roza Osuch-Jaczewska, heads the infant-care clinic at Silesia Academy of Medicine in Katowice, the city from which the province takes its name. She has been assigned by the local Health Ministry officials to gather regional statistics on the health of children. She says she finds the results “terrifying.”

Of the 51,381 children born in the province in 1989, 13.1% of them were born either prematurely or with illnesses or defects that require special care. In 1988, the child mortality rate due to congenital malformations or defects of the brain, nerves, heart or respiratory systems was 471 per 100,000 births--the standard calculation devised by the World Health Organization. The comparable figure for France, according to the U.N. agency, is 167.5 per 100,000 live births. The number for Poland as a whole is 443.6 per 100,000, which is the highest rate listed in Europe by the WHO. Including those who survive past one year, a total of 2.1% of those children are disabled from birth, Dr. Osuch says. She adds that 50% of the pregnancies in Katowice are classified as “troubled.”

Officially, as she and other scientists point out, it is difficult to pin all the medical problems of children on the environment. Precise causes of infant medical problems, and birth defects in particular, are difficult for science to isolate. Those studying the problem say that parental factors--high rates of smoking, alcohol consumption, diet and stress--all may play a significant role. This is a population that resembles industrial England of the mid-19th Century, with all of the social ills that inspired Karl Marx--whose followers, in turn, were inspired to found Katowice as a “cure.”

However limited the precise scientific links between environment and health, Dr. Osuch, like many other physicians and scientists in Katowice, is convinced that pollution is killing the people and maiming the children.

“The environmental pollution affects all systems--the heart, the brain, the digestive system, the genetic code. We see too many terribly deformed children born. We see too many children who cannot be taught, who cannot live normal lives. There are times of the year when we see, particularly, children born with malformations, webbed fingers or worse. There are times when we see a lot of cases of spina bifida (a congenital defect of the spine) . We are not sure what causes these things--perhaps it depends on what kind of pollution may have affected the fetus, and at what stage. Some defects are not detected immediately, so the damage to some children is not always apparent at first.

“We have 1,253,000 children in this area under 19 years old, and 60,000 of them are in some way disabled. Five thousand of those are deeply retarded--they will never be able to care for themselves. We have 10,000 with movement disabilities, 2,000 due to brain paralysis, 2,000 due to other birth defects. We estimate that we have 15,000 chronically ill children, 10,000 with chronic respiratory problems, 3,500 with inborn heart defects.” Her list went on: blind children, deaf children, children with diabetes, kidney defects, leukemia, endocrine and metabolic illnesses.

“Unless we cure the environment problem, there is not much we can do,” she says. “We can operate on children, we can keep them alive, but the problem is not going to get any easier.”

The official at the Katowice office of the Ministry of Health does not really know how many children are in homes for the retarded in Katowice.

“Until last April,” she said, “this information was a secret. No one could find out. We’re trying to count them now, but it’s hard.” The problem, she pointed out, is that jurisdiction over them is spread between three government ministries. There are 82 state-run schools for mentally handicapped children in Katowice, including 62 for children of primary school age and 17 vocational schools, with a total of 12,872 students. Thirty-eight kindergartens have special units for 670 retarded preschoolers.

The Health Ministry, additionally, operates 31 homes for the mentally disabled, including 25 for those so severely handicapped that, in most cases, they will never be able to feed or care for themselves. Most of these state-owned homes are run by nuns.

The St. Boromeusz nuns in charge of the Social Assistance Home in Ruda Slanska have 80 boys in their care, ranging in age from 5 to 18 years. “They are severe cases,” says the nun who heads the staff. “They have to be fed. A few of them can signal their needs. Some have throats too narrow for solid foods, so they are fed mashed food. I want to do what I can for them, but I cannot do much more than provide clean conditions. I try to make their lives easy. I just came from the market to buy bananas and grapes for them.”

Five years ago, Dr. Maria Trzcinska helped to found what has become known as the Special Care Center of Katowice. For Poland, it was a pioneering attempt to provide more than domiciliary care for children born with damage to their central nervous systems. The center, threatened now with having a share of its funding removed by the local government (itself in financial crisis), treats about 100 children daily, in two shifts. It would take more--far, far more, Dr. Trzcinska says--if space, time and money were available.

“We are noticing an evident increase in the number of children with disorders of the central nervous system,” Trzcinska said. “One reason is that we are able to save their lives as infants, but there are simply more of them. There are some towns--like Dabrowa-Gornicza, which is just next to the Huta Katowice steelworks--where the disability rate is 5% to 8% of the entire child population.”

Until the Special Care Center opened, she says, “there was no help for people. Parents and doctors had to deal with the problem alone. We started with no basic programs. We designed them ourselves, and it has become so successful that other centers are being formed, by doctors, parents, the government and the church. It was a joint parent-and-professional operation for therapy for severely damaged children. We wanted to prove that we could help these children despite their handicaps. We don’t want to separate the children from their families, we want the family to take responsibility. We want society to be aware of the children.”

In one classroom at the center, three therapists are working with five children. They are sitting at their special lunch chairs, plates of food before them.

“Try it, Lukasz,” the therapist says. Lukasz, age 5, grips the fat handle of his fork, lifts the fork to his mouth. “Head up, Lukasz, head up! Bravo, Lukasz!”

Lukasz, triumphant, beams out at the room. Around him, Mateusz, Bartek, Marcin and Agnieszka are tackling the same problem. Agnieszka is having the hardest time.

“Her eyesight is very bad,” the therapist says. “She doesn’t see very much at all. Perhaps she is a little better, but she doesn’t have much control over her muscles. She is 12 years old. Mentally, we are not sure. We guess several months.”

Hope is perhaps among the most valued treatments offered at the clinic, and the word has spread. On Saturdays, when the clinic receives parents and children from outside the township area for consultations, hundreds come. There is a plan to set up workshops for older patients, if only the money were available to build the facilities. Parents, bringing their children from other towns, are trying to organize their own clinics modeled on the Special Care Center.

Jan Polok, who has brought his 9-year-old daughter Monika to the clinic, has organized one of those efforts in his home in Mysliwice. “The official data said there were 48 cases of handicapped children in Mysliwice,” he says, “so they said it was not such a problem for them. But when we started organizing, we found 180 without trying.”

A primary school in the center of the city of Katowice. It is a “teacher’s day” holiday, and some of the children have been dismissed early. But the school is pandemonium. Fistfights break out among the children , all below the age of 12. One boy, 9 years old, runs screaming down the hallway, first one way, then the other. Anna Klajnert, 31, has been a teacher for eight years, two years at this school.

“Every year it seems worse, for manners, for behavior. Every year there are more students who have to be referred to the psychologist. Lead poisoning is a common phenomenon around Katowice. I have a child like this. He is overreactive. His parents tell me he can sleep only five hours a night. The rest of the time, he is up, pacing around. He cannot sit still. In school, children like this have to keep moving. More and more, there are children whose brain power is weaker. They simply have more trouble learning. They are hyperactive and emotionally explosive. These reactions go hand in hand. A day like today, with most of the children dismissed, is calm. Normally it is much worse.”

More and more, the teachers of Silesia are convinced that something is wrong with the children they teach, and they believe their observations, anecdotal though they may be, are based on more than a standard complaint that everything, from children’s intellect to the durability of automobiles, declines from year to year.

They see more illness, more bizarre behavior, more learning disabilities than ever before. It is an incontestable fact that children from the province score lower on test scores than children in the rest of Poland, but they believe there is a deeper pathology here--something, literally, in the air of Katowice that is damaging its children more and more. It may be even more dangerous because it is “normal” and officially unnoticed. As a problem, it doesn’t exist, unless you happen to be a teacher.

“I’ve had the doors in my classroom re-hinged three times,” said Maria Lorek, another teacher in the Katowice primary school. “They kick the doors open, smash them off the hinges. Keep in mind, this is the third grade! These children are 9 years old! I walk in the classroom and two boys are on the floor fighting. I’m used to it by now, but some teachers, who come here from other schools, cannot handle it.

“I have one child in my class who is not untypical. He has chronic respiratory problems--asthma and bronchitis. His hearing is impaired. He has problems reading and writing. After his first year in school, he began having problems recognizing letters in the alphabet. But his intelligence is normal. He has been tested. He is also extremely emotional, overreactive and aggressive. There are many children like him.”

Grazyna Gregor is the principal at a primary school in Dabrowa-Gornicza. She does not dispute the observations of her colleagues, but adds: “It’s hard to know what is to blame. We know that these are children of factory workers, so perhaps they do not get the motivation from their parents to learn. But the environment has a tremendous effect. It is the tragedy we live with. Every new class of children is generally weaker. They are more susceptible to all kinds of illnesses--anemia, eye inflammations, allergies, lung problems, sore throats. This is the norm. And of course children’s health affects their learning abilities. You can clearly notice during the lessons how hard it is for them to concentrate. I don’t believe it is the subject matter. The only way I can say it is that they simply seem to have smaller capacity.”

Dorota Zygmunt has been teaching art at this school for 27 years. Not long ago, she gave her eighth-grade class, children of 13 to 14 years old, an assignment to draw their perceptions of the adult world. They were to paint portraits, not of their parents, but of their parents’ generation. The results shocked her.

She spread the portraits on the floor of the principal’s office, displaying an apocalyptic gallery of anxiety, misery, terror, anger and deformity. Only one face wore a smile.

“I asked them what these meant,” the teacher recalls. “They said, ‘Well, that’s what we see.’ ”

Dorota Zygmunt says she has thought about their answers often and concludes that, in effect, they were looking at the future and seeing themselves.

How Bad Is Silesia’s Environment?

* 65% of the region’s rivers and streams are deemed unfit even for industrial use.

* Atmospheric pollution in some districts exceeds acceptable levels by 80 to 120 times.

* In some areas, a square yard of soil contains enough lead to make a toy soldier.