Gianni Truvianni’s Life in Poland Under CommunismMy experience with Poland started back in 1987 when I arrived in Warsaw to visit a friend of mine whom I had first met in New York while we were both students at Hunter College. There was something about that morning which I will never forget as I got of the train at Warsaw’s Central train station which was and is still called “Warszawa Centralna”. My friend, a girl from Warsaw whose name I do not disclose told me she would be there waiting for me at the station when my train arrived and true to her word there she was.
My first impressions of Warsaw were not particularly memorable or innumerable for that matter as this city seemed like any other though in many ways there was a mood about the city that reminded my of Budapest; another city behind the “iron curtain”. Warsaw upon stepping out of the train station I noticed also had streetcars, and very small cars with most of them being of a particular model which was the “Polski Fiat”, (Polish Fiat) which I would find out was by far Poland’s best selling at the time.
My friend took me to the apartment she and her parents inhabited in the center of Warsaw not far from the train station on a street which then was called “Marchalewskiego” (now a days “John Paul II”) where I was introduced to her mother though not her father who was still back in the States. As for their apartment it had one room which for Polish standards was not bad.
I naturally offered to invite my friend and her mother to have dinner with me in any restaurant they chose but was however refused as my friend’s mother had cooked up a simple but tasty chicken dinner which included wine which must have been quit expensive for what was these people’s budget. This being that my friend’s mother though a doctor only earned twenty dollars a month; naturally this taking in to account that the Polish Zloty (then the old one as opposed to today’s new one) had an official exchange rate of 100 to the dollar. However Polish people were not allowed to buy dollars at this price so when ever they did the exchange rate they got was a lot higher. So what Polish people would do when ever they wanted to get dollars was to get them on the black market at a rate of 400 Zloty to the dollar which of course was much higher then the official rate making this lady’s salary came out to 20 USD a month though at the official rate her monthly wages would have been 80 USD a month. Black market purchases of dollars however were illegal after all that is why it was called a “black market”; this meaning that Polish people could be arrested for attempting to buy or sell dollars on the black market while foreigners were simply deported.
As for myself I was required to exchange 7 USD for everyday that I spent in Poland (naturally at official rates) and this because I was a student for if I had not been one I would have had to exchange 15 a day. Many other things though were strange about Poland back then. This being a communist country, for instance a one night stay in a hotel room for a Polish citizen cost about 3 USD a night while the same service for a foreigner cost 30 USD. One could imagine that even this 3 USD was a lot of money for most Polish people.
As for the meal at my friend’s; it would be served in the early evening meaning that my friend and I had time to go do some shopping which we did in a store called “Pewex”. This being one of a chain of stores that sold imported items for “hard currency” (this meaning money that can be exchanged outside its country of origin) only and at surprisingly low prices. For instance I remember a pack of Marlboro cigarettes were half the price of what they were in America and many other things were also cheaper. My friend did inform me though that for many people in Poland even those prices were much too high.
Another thing that struck me as strange about Pewex stores was that they had coupons called “Bony” which one got back as change when ever they did not have it to give back in dollars. For instance if one paid with a ten dollar bill for something that cost nine one would get back a one dollar bill or a piece of paper that was called a “bony” which in reality was like a coupon for Pewex stores. Some people who bought dollars, which they could only buy from the government which sold them at a much higher price then that which they purchased them at, sometimes even bought bony which were slightly cheaper since they could only be used in Pewex stores.
After getting some things for the meal which I paid for my friend and I went to her house where we watched a Latin American “telenovella”. What seemed strange to me was not so much that a soap opera from Latin America was being shown on Polish television but the way it was being dubbed. In most countries what happens is that subtitles are used or the voices are dubbed by other actors however here in Poland it was different. They used a narrator much in the way they do on CNN (when ever someone speaks in a language that is not English) to dub the whole program which at times made it confusing as to who was speaking and even hard to hear what was being said because one could still hear the original language which in this case was Spanish in the background. This by the way is a method still being used in Poland today with regards to television though one need not worry about this when one goes to the cinema, where subtitles are used.
During the meal I found out that my friend and I would be spending the night traveling to a far away town called “Zakopane” (Buried when translated in to English) which was right on the boarder between Poland and Czechoslovakia. It was at six in the morning that we arrived in Zakopane where we went to the house we would be staying in that till this day I am not sure if it was owned or just run by a priest who was a very good friend of my friend whom if I have not mentioned was a girl. It was in this house that her and eight friends of hers (one of them being her boyfriend) had rented two rooms, which had been divided by gender meaning one room for the six men (me now included) and another smaller room for the ladies who with my friend amongst them numbered four.
Upon my first day in Zakopane I recall going to do the shopping at a small grocery store and being amazed at how little there was on the shelves. Flour,(or what appeared to be), loaves of bread, sugar, butter, milk and very few other things were all that one could buy. I would later find out from one of the members in this group that one was required to have certain papers called “ration cards” in order to purchase certain products such as meat and many other items. I at that time thought that perhaps this was just a small town and that shopping in Warsaw would be different after all even in America, what one could find in a small town was never as much as what one could find in a big city; though later when in Warsaw the following year on another visit I would discover that there was as much or as little to be found in Warsaw as there was in that small town.
On the lighter side of this issue I remember going back to America after my second stay in Warsaw and seeing for the first time how much American supermarkets had to offer. I had never really stopped to think about how many items and varieties of which were available in America as opposed to a communist country like Poland that barely offered the essentials. Observing this difference for the first time with the knowledge of how little other countries had in a way even confused me as to what to buy; making me even feel lost as there was so much that I did not know from where to begin shopping. It was as if a real life scene that was reminiscent of the film “Moscow On The Hudson” in which actor Robin Williams becomes hysteric when faced with all that an American supermarket has to offer. I must confess when I first saw this film; I was of the opinion that something of the sort was comic though not possible but after having experienced what I did that day I can full well imagine that something of the sort was feasible believing that if I felt like that. Me being someone who had grown up with so much abundance and still felt the difference; how would it be for someone who was seeing it for the first time.
During my time in Zakopane, the meals I had with my newly met acquaintances were simple; consisting almost exclusively of cold cuts of ham accompanied by bread, butter, some apples and very little else. I at the time thought that these people were eating like this because after all they were on vacation and perhaps this was not how they ate at home where they had more food which there parents would be cooking for them but this was not the case for even at home the meals these people ate were basically the same.
One thing however in all this could not have escaped anybody’s attention that to the girl who was my friend, though I would like to make clear that ours was not and had never been a relationship that include sexual intimacy of any kind though this mostly applied to her friends I was a novelty. Most of which had never been outside of Poland and I think I was the first American they had ever seen in person which made me the object of quit a few stares. Of course it was clear to many given my slightly darker complexion then the average Polish person that I was not Polish but once it was found out that I was from the United States it made those whom I encountered ever so eager to find out as much as they could about me from minor details to more intimate ones. What I did? What part of the states I was from? How much money I made? These were the most commonly asked questions; some of which I was not willing to answer but could tolerate. I even recall how some people, men and women a like who could not speak a word of English or any language I could, would come to the house were I was staying just to look at me, “The American”. In a way all this attention did make me feel like a circus attraction or perhaps a fish in a tank.
Naturally my Polish is now fluent but in those early days my knowledge of this language did not include more then the two words which I had picked up in a book about Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary which said that in Poland that most commonly uttered words were “nie ma” which roughly translated were “we don’t have any”. I at the time of reading this book did not pay much attention to what I read; thinking it all could be possible but after a few days in Poland I realized that the answer to everything was “nie ma”.
For instance with regards to what most people did not have apart from the items they could not readily purchase at stores was telephones. There was even a list on which some had to wait as long as 10 years. This however to me was nothing new as I knew from the time I had spent in South America that some people were required to wait just as long for a telephone, even those who had strong financial resources. In reference to the telephones in Poland I would later discover when I moved to Poland in October of 1989