Craftsmanship refined since 1957

In 1937, there was an accident at a coal mine in Silesia that left a certain boy without a father. We do not know what he felt at the time. No one wrote it down. We only know that twenty years later the same boy, by then a grown man, rented a few woodworking machines from his master, Antoni Spyra. He paid the equivalent of two hundred zlotys for them, which was what seventeen kilograms of sugar cost at the time. He was to pay them off over two years. He had fifty square metres of space and nothing more.

That was 1 June 1957. No one knew then that this date would one day be celebrated as the beginning of a company that would last almost seventy years.

He worked alone. Later, two employees joined him. The first things to come from his hands were not windows, or even furniture. They were wooden blocks, toys for children. Simple, sturdy, smelling of freshly cut wood. Only over time, board by board, came wall units and tables, then wall panelling, parquet floors and staircases. Whole Silesian homes began to carry the mark of his hands.

But something in those homes still was not right. They had beautiful interiors, solid furniture, well-made staircases. They lacked just one thing: good windows. The ones available on the market were draughty and poorly made, as if someone saw them as an add-on rather than the heart of the home.

In the seventies, the same man began travelling to Germany, where part of the family lived. It was there, looking at the windows, that he began to form a vision. He did not know straight away how to make it happen. The vision matured slowly, the way timber matures in a drying kiln: patiently, without hurry.

The decision came on one of his later trips, when friends took him to a German joiner who was selling his tools cheaply. He had no specialist machines for making windows at the time. He only had tools that could be adapted, and the determination to try. And so, between 1985 and 1986, the first simple single-frame windows were made. One of them still stands in the family home today, as a keepsake. You can touch it, smell the old wood and remember how it all began.

“There was no moment of revelation. There was something stronger: certainty.”

The early nineties, a trade fair in Katowice. In a small entrance hall stands a man, and beside him, still a little girl, his daughter. They are showing a single window. Single-sash, brown, with a hard-won double-glazed unit brought all the way from the glassworks in Szczakowa. People walk past and look at them as if they were aliens. No one in the area was making windows like that yet.

Instead of discouraging him, that look gave him wings. He realised he had found a niche.

That daughter spent every summer holiday with her father. She travelled with him to the glassworks for glass, to Masuria and the south of Poland for timber, and sometimes abroad. At first as a little passenger whose job was to make sure Dad did not fall asleep at the wheel. Later she took the wheel herself. In the house next to the workshop, an office was set up in the television room, where the daughter took over from her mother, who looked after the accounts and staff. There was no moment of revelation. There was something stronger: a certainty, always there, that she could not imagine life without timber and without these people.

In the nineties, money from the PHARE funds began to flow into Poland. That, and further grants, allowed the small joinery workshop to grow in a real way.

November 1998. The father dies. The company he had built up from an empty room of fifty metres is left without its creator. His work passes to his wife, and with her to the children, who grew up in this workshop and knew it almost by heart.

For the next few years the family runs the company together, the way their father taught them: step by step, board by board. In time, though, their paths part, and each of the siblings chooses their own way. It is the mother and two daughters, Barbara and Anna, who decide to carry on the work of father and husband exactly where it was born, in Czarków.

“Precision, strength and attention to detail are not reserved for men in the workshop.”

On 1 June 2003, exactly on the anniversary of the day their father founded the company, they begin writing its story anew. As ABA, from the first letters of their names: Alicja, Barbara and Anna. They want to show one thing: that a window can be a woman. That precision, strength and attention to detail are not reserved for men in the workshop.

Since 2019, after their mother’s death, the company has been run by just the two sisters, Anna and Barbara. Still together. Still under the same roof, in the same Czarków, where it all began.

Today ABA Wiktorczyk employs nearly fifty people and makes windows and doors for clients in Poland and Germany. It is approaching its seventieth anniversary. It could grow, spread itself thin, hand over management to people who only look at the bars in the charts.

That is not what we want.

Above all, we are proud of our employees, of the relationships and the atmosphere we build anew every day. We do not want to be a soulless corporation where the client becomes a number in a system. We still have Mr Piotr, who calls with a question about a window board. There is Ms Kasia, who wants a window to fit a hundred-year-old townhouse. Behind every window that leaves our plant, at the end of the day, stand the two of us, Anna and Barbara, ready to take responsibility for it.

We also make sure our products keep pace with the most modern solutions, with trends and with our clients’ dreams. A large corporation cannot tailor joinery so flexibly to a specific building, to a specific person. We have no such limitations.

Somewhere in the family home, the same window still stands: single-frame, brown, made with tools bought from a German joiner almost forty years ago. It is no longer part of any production. It is a reminder. When we look at it today, after so many years, after losing our father and mother, after everything we have built together, we know one thing: this is not just a window. It is proof that you can start with fifty square metres and sugar instead of money, and end up as a company trusted by people on the other side of the border.

And that through all these years, despite everything, the two of us are still here.