Life /
is it easy to live in Poland? [58]
Instead of caramel sweets we have Werther's Originals, but where are the jobs for Poland's baby boom generation?
Dorota Maslowska
Friday July 21, 2006
The Guardian
Not long ago I found myself standing in that industrial furniture shop at the Daszynski roundabout in Warsaw. It's a singular place, one of the abandoned slagheaps of early capitalism, stacked high with flimsy, cheap cupboards and chipboard counters. Massive freezers for making ice are shoved up against rows of ovens for fast-food outlets. Neon signs - "Hot Dogs, Hamburgers, Ketchup" - are piled-up, their cables trailing listlessly down. The shop is one big melancholy monument to bankruptcy.
I'm 23. My generation remembers the end of communism most of all as a matter of food - a time when nothing suddenly became everything, when potatoes became pizza, caramel sweets became Werther's Originals and instead of native toadstools you started getting proper mushrooms in pies. Here, in this warehouse of battered old furniture and kitchen gear, a sad testament to hopes from a far-off time, I was witnessing the last closing-down sale of some old, exhausted dreams.
These days, our dreams have considerably higher standards. We're not settling for green chips or ersatz ketchup any more. We can have anything, and more of it, and between their programmes peddling food and aspirations, our radio and TV seem to exist for the sole purpose of letting us all know how many different things we can have. Every building is plastered with pictures of the things you can buy and the people who have bought them and who are extremely happy, unlike you.
Unless of course you happen to become the most popular star in a reality TV show who reveres family values and gets into the shower still wearing your knickers, thus making sure that the viewers like you the best and send you the greatest number of text messages in support.
It's unlikely to happen. Especially if you have just finished your studies. You will more likely end up dragging yourself round from firm to firm, until someone takes you on for a trial period, pays you one or two euros an hour, and then sacks you, while you spend your spare time standing by a stack of free newspapers and giving them out to passers-by who don't want to take them, or else advertising language schools or cheap airline tickets by dressing up as a Scotsman.
Or you might be lucky and find a proper job. Then you can take out a 40-year debt and spend the rest of your life tenderly caressing the walls of your flat, which is all of 20 square metres but it's yours, a place where you can quietly surrender to the ageing process and no one will ever be able to evict you.
Let's be honest. It's not exactly an enchanting vision of the future for someone young.
We are Poland's baby-boom generation, conceived in the 80s, probably as a consequence of all the power cuts. And if from dawn till dusk everything you see tells you that "you are what you've got", then one day you wake up to find you don't exist any more.
Although we're in the European Union now, the west is still a fairytale in Poland. It is an attitude we have absorbed from our parents, for whom the term "abroad" meant luxury, excellence, impossible dreams: the promised land. In Poland, this idea seems to have turned into a weird kind of genetic complex. We have inherited the notion that everything real is happening somewhere else: that life itself is somewhere else.
There's another thing, too. In Poland now, the people of my generation have the sense of escaping from a sinking ship, where it's "every man for himself". A distinct sense of looming apocalypse has always been there; but in the past 12 months it's been getting worse.
In October 2005, Lech Kaczynski, the candidate for the rightwing party with the Orwellian name "Law and Justice", gained 54% of the popular vote in the presidential elections. I remember how my friends and I mourned that evening, how we sent each other texts: "It can't be true! This can't be happening!"
Polls showed that Kaczynski had mostly been elected by country people with poor educations. But what about the other half of society, what about the young people, who don't want to take an A-level in religious studies or take part in lessons on "natural methods of birth control"?
For me, what is happening in the political arena is simply obscene. And the weeks and months ahead look likely to bring new waves of unheard of political pornography. Underground clubs are being closed down. Programmes where someone intends to discuss fascism are taken off the air. Others are censored. One well-known feminist was practically lynched after she made a joke on a talk show about our so-called "rosary circles". In the name of national values, our president recently had a major row with the Germans because in some satirical paper they called him a "potato". We all blushed with shame as we watched him slugging it out day after day on TV.
At the same time he aims to introduce so-called "patriotism lessons" into schools. And since the leader of the "League of Polish Families" and "All-Poland Youth" became Minister for Education, measuring his success in stones thrown at demonstrators during "Equality Marches" (please note the hallucinatory quality of these titles), demonstrations by young people, students and teachers have become an everyday occurrence.
They estimate that 1 to 2 million people have recently left Poland. They are not the deranged pensioner brigade, the so-called "mohairs" in their fluffy hats. Those people feel very at ease in a Poland where every second person crossing the road is a policeman, and fewer and fewer drivers are jumping red lights, and hardly anyone puts their feet up on public benches any more or drinks beer in the park. At last.
The reason for the peace and quiet is that young Poles have packed their suitcases instead. And not just because of their lack of prospects, but because of all the extra law and justice.
I suppose it's a positive thing that we can go to the west, work, travel, learn, then go home, that such a possibility exists. It is just that it would be great if there was more choice and less necessity in the decision. But the truth is, I have never seen such keen satire and universal national derision for the ruling elite as exists in Poland today.
· Dorota Maslowska is the author of White and Red, published by Atlantic Books, price £9.99.
· This week Dorota watched the cartoon film Over the Hedge with her daughter; It's Me, a new Polish film by Anna Jadowska, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by Michel Gondry: "And that's all, because I was mainly engaged in housekeeping."
mmmmm
