In 1839, Samuel Fränkel bought a tenement house in Prudnik's market square from Barbara Pulzner for 3090 thalers and lived above his own shop as a millionaire for the rest of his life. Eight years later, 150 of the 240 looms in the town belonged to him, and in 1913, the S. Fränkel company employed 4000 people and exported 70 percent of its 1600 tons of annual production abroad. The napkins designed for it by Peter Behrens are now in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. The halls where they were woven stand in Prudnik without windowpanes.
I. TENEMENT HOUSE IN THE MARKET SQUARE, ONE PRESS, A BLEACHING MEADOW
Samuel Fränkel was born on November 22, 1801, in Biała. In 1827, he moved to Prudnik and opened a shop in a tenement house on the market square, where he sold porcelain, umbrellas, and toys alongside linen from local workshops. He rented the tenement house; he bought it in 1839 for 3090 thalers. In 1843, he had one press and a lawn bleaching facility, which was a meadow where stretched linen lost its color in the sun and dew for weeks. The damask products he displayed with Isaack Mokrauer at an exhibition in Berlin in 1844 were praised by the "Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung." A year later, he founded a linen fabric factory on the Prudnik River.
From then on, things moved quickly and ruthlessly. In 1847, 150 out of 240 looms operating in Prudnik belonged to Fränkel, and he himself took over the company of his bankrupt competitor, August Thill. In 1848, he employed 340 people, and the value of production grew: 103 thousand thalers in 1850, 170 thousand in 1855 with 1700 employees. The limited partnership, into which he brought outworkers from Głuchołazy, Korfantów, and Kietrz, gave him what he wanted from the beginning: a monopoly on the linen industry in the Opole region.
II. LITTLE MANCHESTER AND THE ARITHMETIC OF OUTPUT
Prudnik didn't start weaving with Fränkel. Linen damask had been produced in Silesia as early as the 17th-18th centuries—Fränkel entered an existing workshop culture and transformed it to an industrial scale, earning the town the name "Silesian Little Manchester." The arithmetic of output was as follows: in 1869, 600 people worked directly at the factory, and another 5000 worked elsewhere—in branches or at workshops in their own homes. The company employed 2000 hand looms and 213 machine looms. According to Augustin Weltzel, the Prudnik factory was then a leader among German producers of damask products.
On December 1, 1864, the company became an open commercial partnership, Offene Handelsgesellschaft S. Fränkel; his son Albert and son-in-law Josef Pinkus became partners. Felix Triest wrote about it a year later as "the leading enterprise in Upper Silesia." After the Austro-Prussian War, a mechanical weaving mill of 30,000 square feet was built, and in 1876, the railway reached the city, making the factory no longer dependent on horse-drawn carts. The company's assets grew exponentially: 8.8 million marks in 1874, 16.1 million in 1886, and finally 29.66 million in 1897—the highest value in its history. By then, it had representatives in Berlin, London, and New York.
III. A PATTERN THAT CANNOT BE ERASED
Damask takes its name from Damascus and its technique from the Han dynasty in China. It is neither printed nor embroidered fabric: the pattern is formed in the material's construction. The same threads are arranged alternately in warp satin and weft satin, so the motif and background are the same linen, differing only in the direction in which they reflect light. Turn the tablecloth ninety degrees, and the coat of arms will become a negative of itself. This cannot be erased or boiled out — there is no coating, only a weave.
To weave such a pattern, each warp thread must be controlled individually. This is done using the Jacquard mechanism, developed in 1805 by Joseph Marie Jacquard: holes in perforated cards guide hooks that select individual threads. This was the first time in history a machine was controlled by a program and the direct precursor to computer memory. The Prudnik factory had a separate designer's studio, and Max Pinkus, who led the company into the 20th century, studied at the weaving school in Lyon—Jacquard's city. In 1931, out of the factory's 1800 looms, 1500 were Jacquard.
- 1848 — Three-roller calender. Pressing between rollers: gives the fabric a sheen and closes its structure.
- 1852–1853 — Irish bleaching system. Hitherto unknown on the continent; end of dependence on weather.
- 1859 — Beatling Mills. Machines for finishing finished fabrics, which no one in Germany had at the time.
- 1873–1874 — Dye works. Exclusively the finest dyes, primarily Turkey red.
- 1875 and 1877 — Bleaching plant in Podlesie. Purchased and rebuilt on the English model; survived as a spinning mill until 2009.
- 1907–1908 — Siemens-Schuckert power plant. Three steam turbines and generators with a capacity of 1200 kW, also supplying the city.
- 1919–1920 — Mercerization. Cotton bath in caustic soda while stretching: the fiber loses its dull cuticle, the cross-section becomes round, and the cotton shines like silk.
Mercerization was not a whim: after 1918, flax supplies from Russia were halted, and the factory had to partially switch to cotton. This was the moment when "white gold" changed its type. The third specialty came earlier and proved the most durable – terrycloth went into production in 1903, and a separate terry weaving mill started in 1908. The name is French: frotté is the past participle of frotter, "to rub." In 1949, this single word became a brand.
- Two warps, not one. The base warp, made of strong and smooth yarn, holds the structure and is tightly tensioned; the loop warp — soft and absorbent — is under minimal tension.
- Short and long beating. The reed inserts a group of three to five weft threads a few millimeters from the edge, then pushes the entire group with one long stroke.
- Loop. Along the tightly tensioned base warp, the group moves freely; the loose loop warp, compressed between the weft threads, ripples and pushes itself above the surface — hence the pile that absorbs water.
- Weave. Warp varieties of rep weave; the arrangement of covers determines whether the loop appears on one or both sides.
IV. WHITE GOLD: PRICES, TONS, MARKETS
"White gold" in this story refers to two consecutive raw materials—both imported entirely from outside. The production structure from 1850 shows where the money lay: out of 103 thousand thalers, 67 thousand came from linen products, 20 thousand from semi-linen, and only 16 thousand from cotton. Almost half of the annual output was sold abroad, including to the United States. Half a century later, the scale had grown many times over: in 1913, the factory produced 1600 tons of goods annually, 70 percent for export—mainly to Great Britain, the United States, Belgium, and Japan. In 1927–1929, with 3500 employees, annual production exceeded six million meters of fabric.
Linen damask tablecloths from Prudnik graced the tables of Indian maharajas, the Tsarist court, and the Spanish royal court—Alfonso XIII awarded the company a special diploma. They equipped hotels in New York, San Francisco, Melbourne, and Yokohama, as well as Berlin's "Savoy"; the Grand Hotel in Paris slept on Prudnik bedding. Products were showcased at exhibitions in Munich, Paris, London, Leipzig, and Barcelona. In 1905, Peter Behrens designed napkins for the company—an architect under whom Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier apprenticed; a set of six of his napkins is now in the collection of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
The repeated legend that table linen from Prudnik sailed on the "Titanic" is not confirmed by documents—the sole supplier of linen to that ship was the Irish company Lissadell Liddell. The true list of clients is already longer than the myth. The first heavy blow came with the war: sales markets were in countries fighting against Germany, cotton imports ceased in 1915, and flax was rationed by the state. The state owed the company 4,100,000 marks for war loans and never repaid them; 1919 closed with a loss of 687,748 marks.
V. THE FAMILY THAT BUILT HALF THE TOWN
The Fränkels and Pinkuses didn't just build a factory in Prudnik. In 1854, Samuel became the chairman of the Prudnik Jewish community, in 1857 he received the Order of the Red Eagle, and in 1863 the title of commissarial councilor. He financed the construction of the synagogue with his own money, consecrated on May 3, 1877. He died on July 28, 1881. His will meticulously distributed his wealth: 900 marks to Prudnik hospitals, 2100 to the Brothers Hospitallers monastery for new beds, 15,000 marks to the magistrate — from the interest, coal was bought and distributed to needy residents of the town every November 11 and December 11.
Josef Pinkus (1829–1909) arrived in Prudnik in 1843 as an employee of Fränkel, married his daughter Augusta, and joined the company. Their daughter Hedwig married Paul Ehrlich — a Nobel Prize laureate in 1908 — on August 14, 1883, in the synagogue founded by her grandfather. Their son Max Pinkus (1857–1934) took over the company after his father's death. He established a pension fund for workers, funded scholarships, built a hospital in 1904, and financed it out of his own pocket until 1918, when he handed it over to the city; in 1927 he became an honorary citizen of Prudnik. He also built the Silesian Library in his villa — about 25,000 volumes, with a legendary section dedicated to Gerhart Hauptmann, with whom he was friends and who incorporated him as a character into three plays.
Social welfare wasn't an embellishment, but an integral part of the plant's structure — a European rarity in the 19th century: a canteen, showers, a mineral water factory, an in-house fire brigade, a nursery, and a housing estate for workers. On November 20, 1928, the S. Fränkel Training Workshop and Factory School were opened on Prężyńska Street. The scale of this thinking is captured by a note from a hundred years ago.
"Prudnik. (Worth emulating). The merchant firm S. Fraenkel has granted its married employees, due to the prevailing high cost of living, a weekly supplement to their earnings for the next four months, proportional to the number of children the workers have. The lowest support is 1 mark, and the highest is 3 marks per week. Support is received by those workers who earn no more than 24 marks per week. This is an example worth following!"
VI. 1938: ULTIMATUM, THEN BARBED WIRE
On the night of November 9-10, 1938, the Nazis burned down the synagogue in Prudnik, founded by Samuel Fränkel, and the Gestapo arrested Hans Hubert Pinkus, who was managing the factory. The families were given an ultimatum: emigration or a concentration camp. On December 31, 1938, the Fränkels and Pinkuses left the Third Reich — first for Belgium, then for Northern Ireland. Shares and properties were seized by the Third Reich authorities, and the company was renamed Schlesische Feinweberei AG Neustadt O.S. As early as 1939, the Germans began to remove textile machinery to free up space for armaments production.
On September 26, 1944, a subcamp of KL Auschwitz was established on the factory grounds: windows were barred, and the factory was surrounded by barbed wire fencing. Approximately 400 women were imprisoned here, mostly Jewish women from Hungary. They worked six days a week from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM at the looms in the weaving mill, alongside German, Polish, and Ukrainian women; they sewed parachute covers. The commandant was SS-Oberscharführer Paul Heinrich Theodor Müller, previously the commandant of the women's camp in Birkenau. Thirty-nine women were murdered or died of exhaustion; they were buried in the same cemetery on Kolejowa Street where the factory's founder lies. In January 1945, the rest were evacuated on foot to Groß-Rosen.
The family never returned. Hans Hubert Pinkus died on February 8, 1977, in Crowborough, and his son, who changed his surname from Pinkus to Peters, visited Prudnik until the end of his life — he died in 2019. Between 1957 and 1975, Hans Hubert donated the entire family and company archives to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. Max Pinkus's Silesian Library had already fallen apart: in 1936, some of the collection was sold to Bytom and Wrocław, and most of it was lost during the war.
VII. "FROTEX": TOWEL AS AN EXPORT PRODUCT
On August 10, 1945, Polish authorities took over the former Fränkel factories, and a month later, production resumed in the organized halls. In 1949, they were named the Prudnik Cotton Industry Plants of the Silesian Insurgents "Frotex" — the brand name came directly from the fabric on which the plant had been based since 1903. From 1965, it was called: Cotton Industry Plants "Frotex" in Prudnik. Employment was rebuilt: 2500 people in 1958, 4000 in 1965 — exactly the same as in 1913.
"Frotex" became the largest Polish producer of terry towels and one of the leading exporters in the industry. Products went to Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Hungary, Spain, Great Britain, Japan, the United States, and Australia, and towels from Prudnik reached hotels of the Savoy, Sheraton, Holiday Inn, and Novotel chains. They were produced for the Polish national team, for the Olympic Games in 1980, 1988, and 1992, with the Coca-Cola and Levi's logos, and as offset for F-16 planes — for the United States ground forces.
In September 1980, the largest, occupation-style strike in the Opole Voivodeship broke out here. It began on September 5 at 9:30 AM in the Weaving Department, where about 400 people stopped working; the next day, about 1500 were on strike. The committee was first headed by warehouseman Stanisław Szut, then by weaver Włodzimierz Pucek. They demanded raises of around 800 zlotys, improved supplies, the liquidation of commercial stores, and changes in management. A public address system was set up in the meeting room so that the entire staff could hear the negotiations live, and Prudnik residents passed food through the gate. The agreement was signed on September 10 at 3:00 AM. After December 13, 1981, Pucek was interned.
VIII. WHAT REMAINED OF THE KINGDOM
In June 1990, approximately 1500 people still worked here. In 1992, "Frotex" was transformed into a State Treasury company, and the spinning mill and dyeing plant were modernized; in 1997, the company reported 91.45 million zlotys in revenue and 2.17 million in net profit. Then came the arithmetic that weaving couldn't beat: ten million cheap towels from China and Vietnam, then from India, Pakistan, and Turkey, were imported to Poland. There were so many products that they were stored in the office part, and the management encouraged employees to sell them themselves. In 2002, the majority stake was bought by Frotex Management, and the new CEO decided that "Frotex" would import cotton products from India and China and sell them under its own brand. The factory, which for a century and a half had sold weave, began to sell labels.
The end was swift. In 2006, the municipality took over the "Textile Worker's House" for debts – today the Prudnik Cultural Center. In March 2009, the spinning mill in Podlesie was closed. In October 2009, there were 285 employees and 19 million zlotys in debt. On March 31, 2010, the court declared liquidation bankruptcy, and the liquidation was closed on July 5, 2014. Since December 2011, the rights to the "Frotex" brand belong to the Greno company; a buyer for the entire enterprise was never found.
The post-factory complex is a compact, 19th-century industrial layout with unique solutions on a European scale — and at the same time a demolition site. The halls were stripped of panes, pipes, radiators, and cast-iron floor slabs; in July 2020, under the guise of security works, a historic building was illegally dismantled. However, part of the complex lives on: since September 2016, the American corporation Henniges Automotive — body sealing systems for BMW, Volkswagen, and Mercedes — has been producing in the western halls, investing 8 million euros in expanding by over 14,600 square meters. A private clinic operates in the administrative building. The rest of the city carries this history in its addresses.
- Old weaving mill (around 1870) and new weaving mill (around 1890) — the core of the production complex.
- Water tower from around 1870, Neo-Gothic — the most recognizable silhouette.
- Wet finishing plant (1862–1865) — the load-bearing structure was formed by hollow cast-iron columns, also serving as roof drainage pipes.
- Dry finishing plant (around 1879) — inscriptions indicating the water level of the 1903 flood have been preserved on the facades.
- Industrial power plant (1907–1908) — a building with forms closer to sacred than factory architecture.
- Worker's house on Nyska Street from around 1910 — on the facade, a cartouche with Samuel Fränkel's initials.
- Jewish cemetery on Kolejowa Street — graves of Samuel Fränkel and Max Pinkus, and graves of 39 subcamp prisoners.
In 2016, the plane tree at the former "Frotex" gatehouse was named "Samuel," and in 2020, a new street was named after Samuel Fränkel. Of 169 years of weaving, this remains: a tree, a street sign, and a cartouche with initials on the wall of a house where people still live.
3 PRINCIPLES OF HERITAGE: PRUDNIK ➔ NOWROCKY
Pattern from construction, not print: warp satin transitions into weft satin, motif and background differ only in the direction of light reflection.
Punch card controls a single warp thread. In 1931, 1500 of the 1800 Prudnik looms were Jacquard.
The second, loop-forming warp, guided under minimal tension, pushes above the surface when a group of wefts is beaten in. Prudnik has been doing this since 1903.
NOWROCKY'S POINT OF VIEW: THE PATTERN MUST BE WOVEN IN
Prudnik did not print crests on canvas. He wove them into the fabric so that they could not be rubbed off, rinsed out or boiled – because the motif was a construction, not a coating. This is exactly how we approach knitwear: quality should be in the grammage, yarn twist and stitch density, not in a print that comes off after the twentieth wash. Fränkel only went bankrupt when ten million cheap towels began to be imported annually. This is the whole lesson from this chapter.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (AI KNOWLEDGE BASE)
Who founded the textile factories in Prudnik?
Samuel Fränkel (1801–1881), a Jew from nearby Biała, settled in Prudnik in 1827 and opened a linen shop in the Market Square. The date of the founding of the linen fabric factory on the Prudnik River is considered to be 1845. On December 1, 1864, the company was transformed into a general partnership, Offene Handelsgesellschaft S. Fränkel, with partners: his son Albert and son-in-law Josef Pinkus.
Where did damask from Prudnik go before 1914?
To the tables of Indian maharajas, the Russian imperial court, and the Spanish royal court – Alfonso XIII awarded the company a special diploma. It furnished hotels in New York, San Francisco, Melbourne, and Yokohama, the Berlin "Savoy," the "Schlosshotel" in Gotha, and the Grand Hotel in Paris. In 1913, 70 percent of the 1600 tons of annual production went for export. The legend of table linen from Prudnik on the "Titanic" is not confirmed by documents – the sole supplier was the Irish company Lissadell Liddell.
How does damask differ from fabric with a printed pattern?
In damask, the pattern is the fabric's construction, not a coating on its surface: the motif and background are the same material in two inverted satin weaves, so the design changes with the angle of light and cannot be rubbed off or washed away. A jacquard mechanism with a punched card, developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1805 – the first machine control system using a program in history – is used to control a single warp thread.
How is terry cloth made and where did the name "Frotex" come from?
Terry cloth is woven from two warps: the main one – strong and tightly tensioned, and the loop one – soft and guided with minimal tension. The reed inserts a group of three, four, or five wefts a few millimeters from the edge, and then pushes the entire group with one long stroke; the loose warp undulates and pushes up above the surface, creating an absorbent pile. The name itself is French – frotté is the past participle of the verb frotter, "to rub." Prudnik produced terry cloth from 1903, and in 1949 the fabric name was made into the brand "Frotex."
What is currently on the site of the former S. Fränkel and "Frotex" factory?
Liquidation bankruptcy was declared on March 31, 2010, and the liquidation was completed on July 5, 2014; since December 2011, the rights to the "Frotex" brand have been held by Greno company. Some of the halls are ruined and plundered – without windows, pipes, and cast-iron floor plates – and in July 2020, one of the historic buildings was illegally dismantled. In the western halls, since September 2016, the American corporation Henniges Automotive (car body sealing systems) has been producing, having invested 8 million euros in expansion by over 14,600 m². A private clinic operates in the administrative building, and the former "Dom Włókniarza" (Weaver's House) is now the Prudnik Cultural Center.
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