COLUMN ONE : A New Life in Poland’s Dodge City : Entrepreneurs and misfits not afraid of starting over are turning an abandoned Soviet army base into a wild frontier town. Here, opportunity is open to all.

Thousands of pioneers from across this country are packing up their lives and setting a course for the new frontier--a rambling Soviet military base left a shambles by the departing Russian army.

Hidden deep in the northern forests, a circuitous 300-mile drive from Warsaw, Borne Sulinowo was a closely guarded secret for almost half a century of Communist rule. But in the last few months, hardy settlers have transformed the clandestine Soviet enclave into the Dodge City of democratic Poland, a rough-and-tumble land of opportunity where hired hands pack pistols and locals carouse at a bar called Temptation.

“We feel like people in the United States a couple hundred years ago,” said plumber Stanislaw Matysiak, 33, among the first to arrive last spring after the bulky metal gates on newly named Independence Street were sheared from their posts. “This is a place of new possibilities.”

The curious collection of misfits includes entrepreneurs, former convicts, unmarried couples, bored professionals, unemployed factory workers, uprooted farmers, restless retirees, teen-age runaways and even a former statesman who claims to have been “nagged to death” by his wife to quit gritty Warsaw for the countryside.

“We are not afraid of starting over, we are not afraid of hard work,” said Zygmunt Czarnecki, 59, who camped in a tent while converting a guard booth at the old north gate into a tile shop. When the shop flopped after a few months, Czarnecki and his wife moved into their car and remodeled the building again--this time as the popular Cafe Temptation.

“I want to leave something behind in this world,” said Czarnecki, an assortment of 10 vodka varieties lining the shelf behind him. “This place is modest, as you can see, but I did it with my own hands.”

Many of the modern-day trailblazers are running away from problems and hardships back home. Others say they are simply searching for the good life. Most have endured days here without water, heat and electricity. But they still could not resist the chance to land an apartment--at bargain prices--in a country where a housing shortage forces countless couples to live apart.

“People are different here,” said Father Remigiusz Szrajnert, 31, the town’s priest. He says daily Mass in an unheated back room at a ransacked movie theater and has gone days at a time without food because of the parish’s shoestring budget.

“I’ve found it is impossible to establish a regular kind of parish here, where people obediently go to church every Sunday and confess,” he said. “It is not that kind of place.”

But Szrajnert’s wide grin and sparkling eyes make it clear that he is not complaining. Like most everything at Borne Sulinowo, this was a voluntary assignment for the iconoclastic priest who favors sweaters over collars, welcomes believers and nonbelievers alike and recently was pictured in a feature story in the Polish-language Playboy magazine (much to the consternation of his bishop).

“He is the right person at the right place at the right time,” said Teresa Szalencow, 45, a jovial farmer’s wife whose 10-month-old daughter was the first to be baptized at Borne Sulinowo and whose husband is the volunteer church organist. “Your typical thundering parish priest would never make it in a place like this.”

Once considered among the most vital Soviet installations in Eastern Europe, Borne Sulinowo was built in 1936 as a garrison and artillery school by the Nazis. The Soviets captured the base in 1945; when the region was turned over to Poland after the war, the Soviets converted it into one of the largest training and testing facilities in the former Warsaw Pact. It is one of 21 former Soviet sites returned to the Poles under a 1992 agreement.

But when the Russians left a year ago, the 70-square-mile installation was in ruins. Scientists say thousands of acres of test fields were contaminated by chemical weapons, while years of tank maneuvers left a carpet of both live and dead ammunition. Wary cleanup crews join in prayer before venturing far from town; residents are routinely asked by friends and relatives if they glow at night.

Streams of Polish scientists have begun documenting the environmental devastation--the cleanup bill is estimated at $200 million--but so far government officials insist that the military base is safe to inhabit.

Radioactivity readings are lower than in some major Polish cities, they say, although they recommend that mushroom picking--a favorite pastime--be restricted to areas not used for chemical weapons tests.

“Our friends joke that we can pick mushrooms at night because of the glow, but my husband would never take us here if it wasn’t safe,” said Ewa Matysiak, 34, a teacher and mother of three from a seacoast village where her husband could not find work.

To make matters worse, Russian soldiers stripped the base of most everything of value--from toilets to telephone cables to tombstone markers. What they didn’t take has been plundered by vandals and armed thieves, some carting away truckloads of radiators, bathtubs and door frames.

Today, private security guards with handguns stuffed in their belts fend off intruders from scores of buildings boarded shut or hastily sealed with bricks.

The owner of the main power plant discourages trespassers with a rifle, while Polish soldiers, who until recently helped patrol the base, have opened fire on the unwelcome.

“Every time we came (back) from Warsaw, something new had been stolen from our house,” said Danuta Nowaczek, 57, who keeps watch on her newly purchased residence from a cramped second-floor perch that doubles as kitchen and bedroom. “First the wiring, then the windows. I had to move in before they took the walls.”

The rugged frontier conditions have done little to discourage the determined newcomers, most of whom have settled in three relatively new buildings at the north end of town.

Residents pay half of the average $4,500 price tag to buy an apartment from local authorities, covering the rest in small monthly installments. Equivalent dwellings elsewhere in Poland would cost at least two to three times as much--if available at all.

Some have worked out even better deals if they possess skills needed in the struggling town, or if they can persuade officials that they are a good investment in the future. Others have simply pirated dwellings, moving on to the next unoccupied apartment when the rightful owners arrive.

“I consider myself courageous,” said Beata Pozyrewska, 25, the town’s only dentist, who lived in a youth hostel in northern Poland before negotiating a three-room apartment with no down payment. “I had to start from nothing here. It is difficult, but there is also a great sense of satisfaction.”

Since the gates opened six months ago, 350 people have settled here, with newcomers arriving every week and several thousand more expected by spring. The mayor of the nearby village, which has jurisdiction over the dilapidated inventory, receives up to 100 inquiries a day from would-be residents, most describing desperate living conditions and the desire to start anew.

There is an 800-family waiting list--and growing--for government-renovated apartments; hundreds have joined private cooperatives remodeling buildings that once housed 20,000 Soviet soldiers and their families.

Local authorities recently conducted bus tours of a remote corner of the former base, about 12 miles from the other living quarters, in hopes of gauging interest in the secluded area when it is opened to settlers next year. The response has been overwhelming, with more than 500 people applying for 350 apartments in the first weeks.

“Every time there is a mention of the town on television, we get a new wave of people,” said Teresa Knopik, mayor of nearby Silnowo, which has jurisdiction over the new town.

In all, there are 2,500 apartments, a dozen or so single-family homes and 48 Nazi-era military barracks that can be converted to living quarters. There also are 500 warehouses and garages that once housed tanks and missile launchers and, not far from the base, a two-story underground bunker where the Soviets are believed to have stored nuclear warheads and where they reportedly were prepared to sit out a nuclear attack.

A few buildings have been set aside for a town hall, museum, church and school. But otherwise, everything--from the former commander’s lakefront villa to the oil-slicked fuel depot--is for sale. And the sellers say they are highly motivated.

“We are ready to negotiate the price,” said a fast-talking Tomasz Labudzki, 34, a ranger with the local forestry department, which wants $1.5 million to unload the nuclear bunker, five support buildings and surrounding forest. “The only condition is that it can’t be used in a way harmful to the environment.”

Nestled among thick groves of birch, linden and pine trees on a bracelet of crystal-clear lakes and streams, Borne Sulinowo has the makings of a paradise.

Government officials expect the town’s year-round population to swell to 15,000.

They have ambitious ideas about recreational and tourist attractions to help generate jobs in a region already suffering 30% unemployment.

Several military barracks have been designated for an environmental camp for inner-city schoolchildren, the Silesian University has renovated a building for researchers studying the area, and a Polish-Italian company hopes to convert a series of neighboring barracks into vacation rentals.

Town officials also dream of holding international off-road and dirt-bike competitions in the “Borne Sulinowo desert,” a vast sandy expanse cleared of trees by Nazi Gen. Erwin Rommel to train troops for his Africa campaign. But the area must be thoroughly swept for bombs and mines, and enormous environmental obstacles must be overcome.

The town’s first factory, a wood-processing plant, opened this month in a former warehouse. But so far it has jobs for fewer than 100 people, and many of them come from outside Borne Sulinowo.

Most jobs in town are in construction and security, neither providing the prospect of long-term employment once the base is settled. Local officials complain of being abandoned by the Polish government, which so far has allocated $100,000 for the town’s development, and they have issued pleas for national and international investors to come to their rescue.

“We need to find ways for people coming here to make money so they can pay their bills and live a decent life,” Mayor Knopik said. “I worry constantly about our permanent shortage of funds.”

Official consternation has not dampened the enthusiasm of most new residents, many of whom left far worse predicaments.

Pawel Szalencow, the church organist, used to feed his family of seven in southern Poland by stealing potatoes from a state-owned farm and cooking up deer and other animals dragged home by the family dog. Their house had no running water or central heat.

“I don’t miss that place at all,” said his daughter Ewa, 10, who had to fetch water from the bottom of a steep hill a quarter-mile away.

Szalencow, who has found part-time work as a security guard, and many other residents are counting on the military base’s idyllic setting and checkered past to attract vacationers and curious tourists--and in the process assure them of a future.

Adolf Hitler dedicated the Nazi garrison in 1936. Toward the end of World War II, the site was doubling as a prisoner-of-war camp for French, Polish and Russian captives.

The base’s prison has already been set aside as a museum and historic monument, and proposals to change the town’s name--a hybrid of German and Polish with unknown meaning--were dropped because officials count the town’s notoriety as one of its most important assets.

The future town hall, just off Independence Street, has been one of the most telling symbols of Borne Sulinowo’s evolution.

When the Red Army arrived in 1945, the victors covered a Nazi swastika on the building, then the German military command headquarters, with the Soviet sickle and hammer. Forty-eight years later, the new liberators stripped the Soviet emblem, making way for a planned bright-green linden tree with heart-shaped leaves, the official insignia of the new town.

“The history of this place is continuing with us,” Szalencow whispered to his 10-month-old daughter one cold, snowy morning.

“They are all gone now,” he said tenderly. “Now we are making our home.”