The 1980s, as it turned out, were golden years for Polish mountaineers. After their first winter ascent of Everest in 1980, Polish climbers became national heroes—not unlike the U.S. hockey team that pulled off the "miracle on ice" by beating the Soviets at the Olympics that year. The climbers' faces were in the newspapers. They signed autographs and did lectures. Zawada even received a letter from Pope John Paul II, the first and only Polish pope.

State industry lavishly paid the best winter mountaineers to paint their belching factory smokestacks. Both the climbers and their clubs were subsidized as professional athletes, not unlike other Eastern-bloc athletes of the time. And they performed like pros.

"We were hungry back then," said Wielicki, "hungry to write our own story." To succeed, they had to do something that no one else had ever done. "No one had climbed the Himalaya in winter," he said. "But Polish know cold. Cold makes us more creative. An Everest winter ascent in 1980 was a beginning, first chapter."

In the winter of 1986, Wielicki and Jerzy Kukuczka climbed Kanchenjunga (28,208 feet, 8,598 meters). Among serious alpinists, Kukuczka is often considered the greatest high-altitude climber of all time. Described as a "psychological rhinoceros," unequalled in his ability to suffer, Kukuczka was second to climb all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, but he did ten of them by new routes and four in winter. In February 1987, Kukuczka and Artur Hajzer summited Annapurna (26,502 feet, 8,078 meters); and Wielicki soloed Lhotse on New Year's Eve, 1988.In a mere eight years the Poles had managed to knock off seven first winter ascents of 8,000-meter peaks. They were hailed as the Ice Warriors, a new breed of hard-core mountaineers.

"Then suddenly in 1989 everything collapsed," said Artur Hajzer, one of the now white-bearded Ice Warriors. "Listen, I was one of the guys out there on the street marching. I was fighting for the fall of communism, but when the end came, so did our way of life."

Which, Hajzer revealed, was even more picaresque than it appeared. Painting smoke-stacks subsidized Polish expeditions in the '80s, but the money wasn't enough to support the climbers' families as well. So top Polish mountaineers became master smugglers. Purchasing cheap Polish products—down jackets, tents, mattresses, shoes—they hired trucks or even planes to transport them to Nepal, where they sold the items on the black market during expeditions.

"In the 1980s, the average income in Poland was ten, fifteen dollars a month," said Hajzer. "Smuggling Polish products to Nepal, we made thousands. Climbers and climbing clubs had a huge income. Everybody wanted to be a climber!"

When the communist state finally disintegrated, so did the whole brilliant life Polish climbers had devised. "No money, no possibilities," said Hajzer. No expeditions to the Himalaya.