History /
9th November 1989: And the wall came tumbling down [113]
Do you recall where you were and what you thought when you first learnt the wall was being torn down?
Hm, I remember being that nigh (I think it was a Thursday or Friday night) with Friends who lived pretty far away and we were drinking beer while watching the events on TV. Can't really remember what I thought back then, but one of the things I remember quite clearly was that I though when seeing those Eastern Germans standing on "Die Mauer" was: "gee, what a bad taste in clothing they have". Don't know why I thought that as I was clearly aware of the importance of things unfolding on tv, but I somehow remember thinking that. Maybe I was just a bit drunk back then :)
I also remember those images of a long line of Trabant-cars waiting for the Hungarian-Austrian border, which was open for a while in the summer of 1989. I was a bit annoyed by that back then. Why? Because it seemed that Eastern Europeans weren't that unique from then on. It's hard to explain, but before that it was considered quite something if you knew somebody from the Eastern Bloc or had been there, which I was. Now, with the avalanche of Eastern Germans pushing through the border, that sense of uniqueness fell away and that kinda annoyed me.
The same went with Poles. However, that was a more national feeling: we Dutch had helped them survive winters and we made some contacts here and there and for the first few months it was kinda special to see Polish ppl, but soon they came in big numbers to our second-car markets and to see that they bought a piece of junk of a car (usually a Beamer or Mercedes as they had some status) for about 100 Dutch Guilders (about 45-50 Euros), take it home to the Motherland, refurbish it just a bit -or sometimes not even at all- and sold the same piece of junk in PL for ten to twenty times that amount, took away the magic and made most Dutch ppl view Poles as very materialistic. Also, the way they dressed in those days: extremely over-the-top and just a bit too much of everything, did help establish this image.
Of course this behaviour of Poles is understandable, after decades of communism they were like children for the first time away from home, and later on this behaviour changed, but for some reason this first image of Poles, the poor ppl we helped survive through winters, never fully changed yet in NL. Unfortunately.
Of course there were "family-reunions" between families who had received a lot of help and the families who had given that help, but it was this first image the Dutch got from the Poles that was never fully erased and is mainly the reason how Poles are being viewed upon by the masses. Not only in NL, but also in DE. And the massive migration that started literally on 10 May 2004, didn't help to change this image for the better. Although it's getting better: ppl see less and less Poles overdress, they only sparsely buy pieces of junk and when they do, it's for themselves, ppl come to realise that not every Pole steals, at least the vast majority doesn't do so and they've come to know the Poles as hard workers. In NL the outrage of the treatment of illegal Polish (and other former East Bloc) workers has helped raise the sympathy for Poles. We're getting there, but yet there is still a residue of those first impression we got from them. They say that the first impressions are the most important, the first cut is the deepest, and I guess it will take a generation before all the prejudices about Poles have vanished.
But they are underway: it seems that Polish girlies have taken a fondness of Dutch boys and it also seems that Poles, scattered around the country have "assimilated" much better than in Ireland or the UK, for example, while those countries have bigger numbers. We even have a Polish chickadee as one of our newsreaders (or is she Czech? Eva "boooobies" Jinek). We're getting to a truly united Europe. It's a painstakingly slow process, but we're getting there.
>^..^<
M-G (messenger of hope and future and stuff)
