Throughout the Perestroika period of 1987–1990, I spent a cumulative eight months in Warsaw, Poland. Poland, about the size of New Mexico, has always been rich in natural resources and tillable land. At the time I was there it had a population of 35 million people with a skilled, educated workforce that, under Socialism as a USSR satellite since WWII, had an annual GNP just less than the annual net revenue of General Motors Corporation. This, of course, was much less than its potential.
Here, I saw Socialism first hand from the ground up. The first thing I noticed while traveling the 350 miles from the Baltic coastal city of Świnoujście (my initial entry point) to Warsaw, was that the long distance rail cars were in fact unheated, seemingly unrefurbished, Parisian Metro light rail commuter trains from the 1960s. You could tell, because remnants of French advertising, Parisian Metro and French Tourist Bureau instructions were still plastered on the insides of the cars. For safety purposes, the train never went over 35 miles per hour. With stops and unscheduled sidetracking, it was more than twelve hours before we entered Warsaw Central Station. There were no toilets on these cars and they would have to stop the train every few hours in some woods or other rural setting so hundreds of people could pile out and relieve themselves. Often there were not enough trees or other barriers to hide behind and you could see men pissing in the open and women squatting over the frozen ground from the windows of the train. It was humiliating for both them and the observer. Each party averted their eyes.
The common automobile was the 1961 Fiat compact 4 door sedan, the exact same model of which was produced every year, year in and year out, but in a different color for each year so people would know which year the car was produced in order to determine it’s age. I believe the 1986 ‘61 Fiat was blue and the 1985 ‘61 Fiat was white. It was against the law to paint one’s car other than its original color as this was fraud—equivalent to tampering with the odometer.
There hadn’t been meat or fish in the shops since December 12th, 1981, the day that General Jaruzelski had declared martial law. On the other hand, vodka was plentiful and always available. A liter of the State product, Zwetnya Vodka, went for seven cents American and when frozen to the viscosity of cooking oil, was very good and soothing.
There was a wall phone at the end of the hall on each floor of every apartment building which was quite often inoperable. Next to the phone sat an old lady on a stool whom you paid to make calls or bribed to advance ahead of someone else in line. I never figured out on what authority these women were able to gouge their neighbors, but I suspect they had some sort of political clout, a son in the Party, a relative with the security police, etc. People would crowd around these phones all day long and call relatives to ask what type of food was in the shops in their part of town. Some would have cheese, others eggs or bread or a tasteless white margarine (that I always suspected of being some kind of lard), and swaps would be arranged. Coffee was nearly unheard of and meat was impossible to find unless you knew a member of the Communist Party. Fruit and vegetables mostly came in cans, but on a rare occasion one could get dehydrated. In all my time in the city, I never saw fresh produce except in groceries reserved for Party members.
Only once in my time in Poland did I see fresh fish available, all be it in limited amounts at high prices. The traditional Christmas meal in Poland is centered around a large carp, much like the American Christmas meal is centered on a large turkey or ham. During the Christmas of 1988, I saw some carp available in a few shops. They were quickly hoarded by black marketers and openly resold in the old town square at even higher prices. The state radio was telling the citizens that, due to the criminal Western Imperialist forces backed by the NATO Pact countries (read USA) which were ransacking their socialist brother nations in the third world of all their resources, a large portion of Polish meat and fish production was being exported to those countries as foreign aid. This was the official State explanation for the years of shortages.
A good lie has a modicum of truth in it, but nobody I knew actually bought this story as Solidarity Underground had proven that all of Poland’s meat production was being sent by rail to the Soviet Union to feed their vast army. I could go on all day with this. The fact is, the governments of the socialist east bloc were corrupt. The people were completely controlled in every aspect of their lives. In order to live, one had to break a law one way or another and therefore each person could be arrested at any time if the state security police deemed them important enough, or if one of their neighbors with any political connections at all chose to settle a grudge.
Apartments were handled through the State apartment exchange and the waiting list was 26 years. Women, once they realized they were pregnant, would register their unborn children with the housing office so their child might have their own apartments by the time they started their own families. The result was two and three generations living in one and two bedroom apartments. In order to register, the parents needed to name their children before they knew what sex they would be, and because of this, today there are many Poles with names of non-specific gender.
The list for private telephones was nine years long, cars eleven years—for that 1961 Fiat. It didn’t matter how much money one had, unless it was western currency. On the other hand, if one was a member of the Communist Party—which represented only ten percent of the population—anything could be had at anytime by simply showing their Party documents, usually a red plasticized picture ID card about the size of a driver’s license. They even had their own shops, hotels, nightclubs and the official state travel agency, Orbitz, all of which were closed to the common citizen. These facilities rivaled anything you could find in London or New York and they only accepted western currencies, the possession of which was officially against the law.
Bureaucracy and monetary exchange was very weird in Poland. Upon entry from the west one had to pass through the customs ritual. At Świnoujście, this took place in a Quonset hut the size of an airport hangar at the end of a path that led from where the ferry from Sweden docked. The first station just inside the entrance of the building was a kind of barred teller’s window behind which a middle aged woman in a babushka sat and furiously stamped the living hell out of my passport, taking up at least six pages with a variety of stamps. I’d never seen anything like it. She loudly recited the rules to me in Polish at the top of her lungs, which had no effect because I didn’t understand a word she said. She handed me a card with six different languages, including English, that explained that basically, you weren’t allowed to bring in any agricultural items, including meat or coffee, or western currencies.
I was carrying about a thousand dollars in deutsche marks, dollars and Swedish kronor. She asked me how many days I would be in Poland and I foolishly told her the truth, 30 days, and this required that I exchange about $20 at 9,000 zloty per dollar for every day that I was in country, plus there was some kind of nominal daily tax. On the suggestion of my Polish traveling companion from Sweden, Teresa, I gave her fifty bucks which she pocketed and that was that. Fifty dollars was nearly three months income for her. There was a large glass pyramid near her window which was full of Polish currency. When I asked about it, she explained that I would not be able to take any Polish currency out of the country when I left and this is where I was to deposit it, without any exchange.
I had four large duffel bags with me, one of which had clothing and personal articles, the other three were crammed with smoked Swedish hams and tins of primo Gevalia coffee, gifts for friends. At the next station I was asked to dump my bags on a long table for inspection by these very young soldiers in ill-fitting brown wool military dress with Sam Brown belts across their chests. When they saw the hams and coffee, they just stared at me. Not sure what to do, I gave them each a tin and a ham and they quickly packed my bags for me and sent me out the door at the other end of the Quonset hut.
On the other side of the door stood two more young soldiers leaning on their old bolt-action carbines. These kids still had peach fuzz on their chins. They immediately offered me an exchange rate of 90,000 zloty per dollar. Teresa told me to wait. Down the road toward the train station there was a row of taxis. Here, they were willing to trade 120,000 zloty per dollar, an inflation rate of about 1,300% within a quarter mile of the babushka lady that originally offered me 9,000 zloty by the official exchange. At this rate, I figured I’d be a multi-millionaire before I made it up the hill to the train station. But on Teresa’s advice, I made an exchange of about twenty dollars with the cabbies which lasted me a week.
I got better at this as time went on. It was the way things were done. The babushka lady and I got to know each other pretty well over the next couple of years and she always had a bright smile for me and I always had a tin of coffee, a ham, and a fifty for her and a couple of hams for the guys. She would clear me through customs without searches or delays, and everything always went smoothly. By the end, she was coming around the cage and greeting me with big hugs. But she always made sure to stamp the hell out my passport.
The Polish people I knew in my time in Warsaw, Krakow and environs were the nicest people in the world. I had never experienced people that were more polite and friendly. This says a lot about people who were forced to live under these circumstances from 1945 to 1990.
I remember in one case, a friend needed antibiotics for his sick daughter, but these were unobtainable from both the State and the Catholic Church due to shortages. He had to go to the old town square in downtown Warsaw to buy on the black market. He had to take whatever was available. A one ounce vial of clear liquid and an unpackaged one-time-use syringe cost him one month’s income. The label said Tetracycline. What he obtained was either the wrong drug, was too old to be effective, or just plain water, and the result was that his daughter soon died of sepsis.
As bad as it was in Poland, there was a mantra that I’d heard all over Europe: That life was much worse in East Germany.
