Valjevo Walker: The Factory

by Ljiljana Ljiljak, Valjevo Walker, Kolubara, Nov 2006

Translated by Milos Savic

Radojka Rada Jeftic, spends her retirement days in the Kolubara housing estate, facing the new “Gorenje” factory. She followed up its construction completely, from the very start until the last days before the opening, when they digged, levelled, and planted the area from the street to the factory with grass. ‘Finally,’ says she, ‘somebody has remembered to tidy up a large area, which used to be turned into a jungle and dump for all sorts of things on a piece of town land.’ On a town plot with protruding remains of started-but-abandoned contruction site of Valjevo Sports Centre with an indoor pool. ‘If only this would stir the town to at least fill the holes on the other side of the road there would be less mud, maybe even the grass would grow. They do not need too much for that, they just need to “remember”,’ states Rada.

And this event with the new factory, which shines at night flooded by light like a spacecraft, only gives her ground to conclude that something is finally going to be offered to young people. To work! She says that we have forgotten how to build factory halls, that the “rip-off” of her former company called “Stefil” will also be forgotten. First of all, it has been forgotten how those “abandoned and overgrown” factories were built. Yes, she was a worker in that factory, but she helped together with her colleagues to asphalt the area around the factory as well as a road through that area. That used to be done, too. Not that there was justice for everybody in those days. However, we built and worked. Everything after that, including the legalized robbery, need not and must not have happened.