WARSAW — The first thing that hit you about the Poland of 1987 was the smell — a pungent mix of coal smoke leavened with coarse tobacco, a whiff of cabbage and rancid sweat overlaid with clouds of diesel exhaust. Lingering on the streets and alleys of cities, towns and villages, it was not the smell of a successful or a happy society.

The odor hit me in the southern city of Kraków in 1987, where I was taking a year off from university in Toronto to study in Poland. It was only one symptom of a decomposing country.

At Kraków’s Jagiellonian University, the first phrase the foreign students (mostly from Brazil and Argentina) who were studying Polish before beginning inexpensive medical and architecture studies would learn was Nie ma (“We don’t have it”). They heard it in shops when they tried to buy meat or wine. They heard it in kiosks when trying to buy luxuries like soap and razor blades. They heard it fired at them by surly waiters indicating a lack of almost every item on the menu, from beer to “exotic” dishes like beef cutlets and pork chops (no point in ordering on Monday, as meat was not sold on the first day of the week). At one point I remember tossing aside the menu and telling the waiter, “Just bring me whatever you have.”

That country died a long time ago — replaced by one of the most economically successful nations in the world.

Looking at the numbers, there isn’t much question that the transformation that began in 1989 — when Poland became the first country in the world to ditch communism to recreate a market economy — has been the best time in the country's 1,000-year history.

The scale of what’s happened in Poland over the last 29 years is difficult to grasp unless you were there at the beginning, as I was.

However, that isn't a story that the current Law and Justice party government is keen to tell. It's more concerned with highlighting wartime bravery (and covering up wartime cravenness) than extolling something that really makes Poland stand out: Its long record of economic growth created by home-grown entrepreneurs and foreign investors lured to a country of hard-working people keen to get rich.

The scale of what’s happened in Poland over the last 29 years is difficult to grasp unless you were there at the beginning, as I was.

I spent a year at university in Kraków from 1987 to 1988, and then returned to Poland in late 1989 as a reporter to cover the country’s first post-war non-communist prime minister. I then spent a decade covering Poland for the Financial Times from the time it joined the EU in 2004, and I still occasionally write about Polish politics for POLITICO.

Back in 1987, Kraków’s medieval square — today thronged with foreign tourists and lined with cafés and restaurants — was almost deserted. Scattered streetlights cast small pools of light on the edge of the broad expanse of Europe’s largest town square, but did little to lift the gloom. The few restaurants were shuttered, while shops, all closed in the evening of course, bore imaginative names like “Bread,” “Shoes” and “Milk Products.”

The city choked under a pall of smoke issuing from the coal-burning smelters of the Nowa Huta Lenin Steelworks. The corrosive smog forced the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, up the road from the market square, to carve new life-sized statues of the 12 apostles lining the church’s front courtyard. The old ones had been eroded down to sandstone stumps by the acid in the air. What the smog did to the lungs of the city’s inhabitants can only be imagined.

The defining characteristic of retail life was the queue. Drably dressed people lined up outside food shops, furniture shops and stores carrying refrigerators and washing machines, often simply on the strength of a rumor that something worth buying or trading for had been “thrown” there by suppliers. Waits stretched into days, with officious line-watchers compiling lists of who was where in the queues. Professional line-sitters took the spots of people who had to work. War veterans, pregnant women and mothers with small babies were allowed to scoot to the front of the line — and this set up a roaring underground trade in borrowing babies to avoid interminable waits.

An aunt of mine remembers lining up for almost three hours outside a Warsaw shop with a decent selection of meat. As the hours wound down, she watched the beef disappear, followed by the pork tenderloin and then the stewing pork. She finally left, not unhappily, with a bag of frankfurters.

I didn't know it in 1987, but communism in Poland had only two years left to run.

On August 24, 1989, John R. Davis Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Warsaw, sent a cable to Washington announcing the formation of Poland’s first post-war government led by a non-communist: "I have the honor to report that Mr. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a leading member of Solidarity, was today confirmed by a vote of the Polish Sejm in the position of prime minister of Poland and commissioned to form a government. I believe that this development constitutes essential fulfillment of the political tasks assigned to me in my current letter of instructions and await further orders. Davis."

While the rest of Europe fell into recession following the start of the global crisis in 2008, Poland kept growing.

The answer came back from his boss, Lawrence Eagleburger, the secretary of state: "1. Department notes with satisfaction the essential fulfillment of the political tasks assigned in your letter of instructions. 2. Your next task is to promote and ensure the realization of economic prosperity in Poland, to include stable growth, full employment, low inflation, high productivity and a Mercedes (or equivalent) in every garage. 3. Best wishes for continued success. Eagleburger."

Eagleburger’s note may have been tongue-in-cheek, but the “tasks” he set Davis back in 1989 have mostly been fulfilled over the subsequent three decades.

First: economic prosperity and stable growth. Since emerging from economic freefall in 1992, Poland has not seen a recession. That gives it the best track record of any current European country, and one of the best records of any country ever. What Poland has experienced following the shock-therapy reforms of 1990 is the same thing that many West European countries and Japan underwent during their post-war booms.

Since 1989, Poland’s economy has become almost three times larger. While the rest of Europe fell into recession following the start of the global crisis in 2008, Poland kept growing. Once it joined the EU in 2004, Poland benefited from a flood of EU structural funds, in some sense the equivalent of the post-war reconstruction money it had missed out on because of the onset of the Cold War.

Poland has been so successful in absorbing cash from Brussels that it now faces the prospect of a steep cut in EU funds in the post-2020 budget. Brussels isn't as keen to spend money on what's now an increasingly wealthy (and increasingly politically difficult) member country.

The transition to a market economy wasn't without its costs; it laid waste to vast sectors of the economy. Thousands of people working for state-owned farms lost their livelihoods. Workers at inefficient heavy industries were laid off; the Gdańsk shipyard that gave birth to the Solidarity labor movement still hasn't recovered.

Lots of towns, especially those in eastern Poland that form the bedrock of support for the current government, became backwaters, attracting no investment and seeing their citizens flee for jobs in larger Polish cities or to Western Europe.

But now the unemployment rate is lower than at any time since 1989 — at 5.7 percent. Companies complain about a lack of workers, and Poland has sucked in more than a million Ukrainian labor migrants.

The hyperinflation of the early 1990s is a distant memory, and Poland's central bank expects to keep its benchmark interest rate at a record low for the foreseeable future.

Polish workers have also become enormously more productive. In 1993, the average Polish worker generated $10 of GDP per hour worked, about a quarter of the output of his German counterpart. Two decades later, the average Pole was generating $29, not far off the level of some of the poorer West European members of the European Union, like Portugal, and almost half of the output of an average German.

How about the Mercedes in every garage Eagleburger called for? He did leave some wiggle room, with his allowance of "(or equivalent)" — and if a new Skoda or a well-used Ford or Opel can be considered equivalent to a Mercedes, then that is in fact what is parked in Polish garages. Poland has 554 cars per 1,000 people, about the same level as France or Germany. In 1989, it had only 128 cars per 1,000 people, and half of those cars were the ridiculous little Fiat 126p — a 650cc micro car that often had to be repaired right after rolling off the production line.

All in all, Ambassador Davis should be pleased; his second mission has been more or less accomplished.

Jan Cienski is a senior policy editor at POLITICO and the author of "Start-Up Poland: The People who Transformed an Economy" (University of Chicago Press, 2018).