Poles Paying Steep Price for Industrial Success : Pollution: High infant mortality and litany of children’s ailments in Katowice Province are blamed on toxic spew from mines and factories.

The communists built a ring of factories and mines around Katowice, measuring success in sheets of steel and tons of coal.

Now, parents and scientists make a different calculation: The main product may have been a generation of children deformed, retarded or debilitated by the toxic stew spewed by the industrial belt.

Residents contradict the official “propaganda of success” with their own litany of pollution’s consequences--children with lingering colds, piercing headaches, learning disabilities, nervous disorders and deformities--and for some, no life at all.

Infant mortality in Katowice Province is nearly 18 per 1,000 and reaches 30 in some towns, compared to 15.7 per 1,000 in all of Poland and fewer than 10 in Western Europe.

Around a plant in Bytom that reprocesses battery lead, scientists found the highest infant mortality rate ever recorded in Poland: 52 per 1,000 births.

Twelve percent of the 50,000 babies born in Katowice Province in 1990 were premature, and the figure rose to 18% to 20% in heavily polluted areas, according to a regional medical center. That compares to a premature birth rate of 7% nationally and 4% to 6% in Western Europe.

Of the 1.3 million children under age 18 in the province last year, 350,000 required significant medical attention, said Dr. Roza Osuch-Jaczewska, the medical center’s chief of infant medicine. She said 5,000 were profoundly retarded or disabled and 60,000 were under constant care.

“You can see that some pay a very high price for this pollution,” said Dr. Maria Trzcinska-Fajfrowska, a pediatrician, who estimates that it has disabled at least one-quarter of the children she cares for.

The doctors belong to a small band of scientists struggling to reveal the environmental tragedy of Silesia in southwestern Poland, one of the most devastated areas in the former Soviet bloc.

“We doctors feel a responsibility to offer reasonable help, but at the same time, we feel desperate and hopeless,” said Trzcinska-Fajfrowska. “The battle must be against environmental pollution because no medicine will be able to cope.”

Because they have few modern pollution monitors and are short on medicine and up-to-date therapeutic techniques, the doctors often can do little except advise patients to stay indoors.

Their real prescription, virtually impossible to apply in Poland’s perilous economic condition, is to close the plants that dust the region gray and sting the eyes even when the weather is clear.

“Emissions must be stopped,” said Stefan Godzik, an Academy of Science researcher in Silesia. “The only way is just to change the technology.”

Katowice is Poland’s most heavily industrialized region. Its factory districts went up in the name of the working class, starting in the 1950s. Apartment houses, schools, even garden plots were built alongside the plants, where according to Godzik heavy metal pollutants fall the thickest.

Growing anything for human consumption now is prohibited, but vegetables sold at produce stands bear no stamp of origin.

“People think there is so much pollution everywhere that it doesn’t matter what you eat,” said a young father holding his silent daughter in the waiting room of a makeshift clinic in a former prison.

The industrial race with the West left no time or money for pollution controls. The farther behind the communist East fell, the worse it got, and the more quotas and economic plans were used to drown out any whispers of concern.

“Only recently could we talk aloud about the problem,” Osuch-Jaczewska said. She recalled how “party secretaries laughed” in the early 1960s when, as a young doctor, she first linked the high rate of birth defects with pollution.

“During the period of the ‘propaganda of success,’ ” she said, “only achievements were being reported.”

As Poland makes the transition to capitalism, the environmental nightmare is getting more attention. Western creditor nations have translated some of Poland’s debt into environmental aid and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently installed eight pollution monitors.

Massive unemployment from plant closings is politically untenable, and there is not enough money for smokestack scrubbers or the latest technology, but Osuch-Jaczewska argues that doing nothing is even more costly. “These children cannot expect to live a normal life,” she said.

Many parents waiting to see Trzcinska-Fajfrowska at the makeshift clinic owe their livings to the very factories and mines that harm their children.

A severe housing shortage and tight job market make Poland an immobile society. Few families can move away from Silesia, and many cannot even afford the summer vacations in cleaner regions that are recommended for their children.

“I have only one dream, to get my daughter to a place where there is clean water and you could take a full breath of clear air,” said one mother, clutching a pale 7-year-old who has had a cold since last fall and never seems to get better.

Then she sighed and said, “But there are no prospects.”

Piotr, 9, is retarded and epileptic, and still lives near an antiquated steel plant. His mother had no problems during pregnancy or labor, but her son was born with a damaged central nervous system.

“It was caused by pollution that exceeds all norms,” said Trzcinska-Fajfrowska. “The fetus is very delicate and exposed.”

The boy’s father said, “Come see the yellow sulfur in the streets after the spring rains.”

A chorus of complaint, fear and resignation filled the waiting room.

“I’m a teacher, and every year the pupils are worse and worse,” a woman said. “They can’t pay attention. . . . There are many out sick.”