KWK Fryderyk August / Piłsudski — szyb Helena Jaworzno · Województwo śląskie · Poland

Szyb Helena was sunk in 1837 as one of the primary shafts of the Fryderyk August colliery at Jaworzno, which traced its roots to a state-founded coal-mining enterprise established in 1792 by Count Moszyński under Habsburg administration. The colliery was successively held by the Polish state, then the Austrian imperial treasury, and later under the various successor administrations of the Duchy of Warsaw, the Free City of Kraków, and the Habsburg crown again. In 1871 the Austrian state sold the Jaworzno collieries, including Fryderyk August, to the Jaworznickie Gwarectwo Węgla Kamiennego, a Viennese mining company formed by a consortium of financiers including the Gutmann, Schoeller, Springer, and Todesco families.

The new owners undertook significant investment in the mine, deepening and modernising three shafts: Paulina, Helena, and Karol, during 1876–77. By the early twentieth century, the colliery was operating from these three shafts, with a fourth ventilation shaft, Pańska Góra, added in 1902. That same year brought catastrophe: on Christmas Eve 1902 a fire broke out at the surface of the Fryderyk August colliery, destroying the timber sorting plant and the pithead structures at szyb Helena and szyb Paulina.

The fire also damaged the steam-pipe network supplying the main pumping engines at the 160 m level, causing severe flooding and forcing closure of both Fryderyk August and the adjacent Jacek Rudolf colliery. The reconstruction that followed was comprehensive: both shafts received new steel headframes, and the electrification of the complex began in 1903. By 1920, szyb Helena had been deepened to 220 m, and a pumping station was also completed at that level in the same year.

After the First World War, when the colliery passed from Austrian to Polish administration, it was renamed Piłsudski in 1919. Under occupation during 1939–45 the German name Friedrich August was temporarily restored. After 1945, the colliery became part of the amalgamated KWK Jaworzno, and the section incorporating szyb Helena was subsequently known under the ruch Bierut designation.

In later decades szyb Helena continued to serve the enlarged underground network, eventually operating as a double-compartment strut-frame shaft reaching 530 m depth and serving levels at 220, 300, and 500 m. Following the formation of Zakład Górniczo-Energetyczny Jaworzno III in 1999 and the subsequent cessation of mining operations, the shaft and its headframe passed into the residual post-mining estate.