An American studying medicine in the PRL 1978-1985: my story

Rybnik: did you develop an accent while you were studying in Poland? If so, do you still have one?

Thanks for the post, keep'em coming. I wish you had pictures to accompany with your stories ... you didn't bring a camera with you did you?

Great question BBman! Yes I did develop an accent. Apparently it was thick enough to make listeners back home ask me "what country were you born in?" This used to make me chuckle. I've lost it now, seeing as I don't speak Polish as frequently as I used to back in the 80's............I took some pics(can't find them though). I'll tell you most of us were so paranoid in the early years about taking pictures and being mistaken for spies! LOL.......btw thanks for the encouragement. You see I'm not used to talking about myself and truth be told, no one, until now, really was interested in this story.

During your time in Poland, how often did you travel back to the US? Every summer?

How did you spend your holidays (ie christmas) in Poland?

How annoyed or affected were you with the shortages of goods in stores?

Did you travel to any other eastern bloc countries at the time?

As often as I could! My first year in Krakow I went for Christmas and then the summer.


I hooked-up with a fellow student( Polish) soon into my time in country and spent holidays with her family.


Żartujesz? Very annoyed but not nearly affected as the Poles. I'll get into how we dealt with "nie ma" later.


just transiting through East Germany.

From the airport we were all taken to Warsaw's Old Town, some grand place with nice old furniture. I want to say Dom Polonii but I'm npt sure. I remember being very tired and hungry. The food was delicious I recall as well as the beer(fantastic Czech brew "Budweiser" in a 0.33l bottle!)

After lunch off to Krakow. I slept the entire way. We arrived to a rectangular, grey concrete building DS "Piast". It was very depressing in its appearance; warning us to what lay inside. Our room was very small, two cots and a window overlooking the courtyard. Our mattresses were filled with straw. We shared a bathroom with two other guys from the adjacent room. The accomodations were spartan to say the least. But I had some of the happiest, and saddest, times of my life.

I paired-up with a guy from Queens New York, who soon became know to us as PT. He was a very sweet, honorable and sensitive man. We too had many sweet and exciting adventures together.but we also fought like rabid dogs. Despite the fighting, we remained roomates and later house-mates for the entire seven years. I'm ashamed to say I might not have been the best friend to him and he might have expected a bit too much from me. Suffice it to say we both left Poland not speaking to each other. I'm seriously thinking about writing him to bury the hatchett. PT will appear frequently in the text. We were always together until the "skirts" appeared. That's for another day.

My first days in Poland were filled with so many emotions. It was intense!! I was so stoked to be finally in the land of my ancestors. In a place where everybody spoke the language my parents spoke' where everyone knew how to pronounce my name correctly! No stammering, no pausing, thinking to yourself, then asking "how do you say this"? I WAS WITH MY PEOPLE!

We attended the same event :)


Żaczek?

Coincidently eough, I used to study medicine in the approximately same period as you, but my tuition took place in Warsaw. I remember three American Polonia fellow students who started the course with us in the same year. One of them, a very friendly and sensitive guy, came from New York. After the first year he went for summer holidays back to New York, but he never again returned to Poland. We got to know he got murdered in America after getting off a taxi in New York or something like that! I remember having thought to myself on learning this news: "What a dangerous place America must be!", which was perfectly in line with the tunes of the then Polish communist propaganda on the US which was constantly portrayed in Poland as racist, full of crime and injustice. And yes, it was a great injustice, indeed, that such a decent man got murdered while on holiday in his native country! Nevertheless, the other two, a woman and a men had returned safely from the US and - as far as I remeber - finished their full six-year course in medicine in Warsaw.

It was awesome! :)


"Piast" I think


Sad story! From my group there was One girl from New Jersey, two brothers from Windsor, Ontario and a guy from upstate New York(veterinary medicine) who chose Warsaw.......Yea I remember the ONLY movies from the USA were the one that showed America's dark and dirty side.

I hope there is more, rybnik. I like the way you write.

I was staring at my screen wondering how to proceed as you wrote your very kind message. It's as if the gods had you give me that kick in the butt that I so very much need. I haven't really thought much about those early days and I'm afraid I'm suffering from writer's block. I'm stuck fstop. :(

ok... more about PT? The ladies? "Nie ma"?

Probably nothing but sometimes the world does seems smallish...
Way back then, the years seem to match, I knew two Polish Americans studing in that Academy.
One from LA another one from Chicago. The LA fella's name was Andy. I forgot the Chicago guy's name but I clearly remeber being impressed by the perfection of his beard's trim. Met both just a few times and not se why were were introduced.

And yes, ZOMO thugs did get doped up before "jogging".

Kraków was mystical. Period. I was hooked. This country-bumpkin was quickly and soundly seduced. For the most part it was the people. Those ever-curious, always bowing-in-politeness Cracowians quickly won me over. However, there were times, where I was overwhelmed. Most notably in the beginning, I felt like a piece of red meat thrown into a river of piranhas. These people were as hungry for knowledge as those Amazonian creatures were for flesh! It was very hard at first. I had never been a rock star before. Every encounter with a Pole was another interview. I had no clue as to how one behaves. It was all so new, so strange and so very, very cool.So how much does a worker make an hour"? "How much does a loaf of bread cost" "How long must the average American have to work to afford a car?" We "from the west" were bombarded with these and many, many more questions each and every day.

Mark
Roommates. I have had absolutely no luck with roommates ever in my life. Upon our arrival in DS Piast we were assigned a roommate. I got Mark. Marek was a medium height, skinny guy from Albany, New York. He was pleasant with a goofy laugh and a goofy moustache. I don't remember what his major was in college but sociology or art history come to mind. He was a gentle soul to say the least. His feathers never got ruffled(until one night that I'll share with you later).....My roommates sense of style was neat,neat, neat. To this day whenever I see a pair of freshly pressed slacks I think of Mark:)....Getting dressed was a ritualistic experience for him. It took him at least 15 minutes to put his pants and shirt on. It was something akin to a Japanese tea ceremony. Pants were extricated from the closet and laid on the bed. The shirt was removed from the hanger and gotten in to. Next, the pants, with creases sharp and tight, were climbed into. The care and time he devoted to tucking his shirt into his pant was beyond belief. I tried many times to get my shirt to fit into my pants as he but never could do it(still can't)....Mark went about his life in Krakow as did I. Our lives only intersected in our room. I never knew what he thought about sex, religion, politics, etc. He was a closed book; very difficult to know. Later in the summer I brought a girl(an American from New Jersey) back to our room. We started getting affectionate and Mark became very upset kicking us out of the room. He was raging! He was mad at me for a week! Shortly afterwards I found PT, who was roommate-less, just down the hall and willing to take me in.

Great story ... keep it coming.

Those first few months were hard. The culture shock was complete; the homesickness severe. The longing for home made its way to your bones. The worst time for me was when the sun went down. I have no idea why but after sundown I experienced an emptiness heretofore unknown to me. Many of our number sought comfort in the bottle, myself included. You thought about home. You thought about the girlfriend left behind. The regretful moments of the past began to rear their heads. "When I get out of this I'll make amends". Those were truly the loneliest times of my life.

Everything was different: the smells, the sights and the living conditions. I, for the first time, began to doubt the rational for my coming to Poland. Maybe Guadalajara or better yet, Grenada, was the real way to go. Maybe I didn't have to "suffer" communist lifestyle. Maybe, I could just leave, tell my family and friends that I tried it and didn't like it and go home. No harm, no foul!... Of course I couldn't do that. I had too much wrapped up both emotionally and financially to quit. I'm here for the duration. I'm not a quitter.

In the beginning, the Poles didn't know what to make of us and we of them. We saw them, the pensive Poles, as well-meaning people living their lives in darkness due to their oppressive Marxist overlords. We"tolerated" them reminding ourselves, that they are not to blame for the way they are (yes we were very, very patronizing of our Polish hosts during those first 12 months) and that we yanks were the enlightened ones. We would answer all their questions and try very hard not to gloat about our lives back in the States. We'll get through it. We have each other.

Rybnik maybe you should write a book? I think that your memoirs are very intresting and you obviously know how to write :)

Thanks for the kind compliment.

....but I don't have the discipline for such a project............
Leaving the dorm
My dorm, "Dom Studencki Piast" was a relatively new, seven-storied construction fashioned in the plain-grey communist style. It reminded me of the Lego buildings I used to build as a boy: rectangular, squat and wide. Yeah, it was ordinary but it was home. It was My first Polish home. Here, in those cramped, sliver-for-a-space rooms, l would learn many, many invaluable lessons on what it means to be Polish. Those first months in DS "Piast" were to prove priceless in awakening a pride and igniting a curiosity in my "Polish-ness" that I never felt before back in the States.

Ania
Ania was a tall, green-eyed Krakowianka with bee-stung lips. When I met her I thought I'd never look for another woman again! I was smitten. What I should've done, it turns out, was to say "nie dziękuje" and keep walking. But no! I took the bait, got hooked and went for a ride to frustration-town.

She was a law student at UJ (Jagiellonian University) and I have no idea how I met her. Maybe it was at one of those drunken dorm parties or by way of a friend of a friend. I don't recall. Anyway, there I was, dating this "10" and I thought I was king of the world. "Look at me. Not even 6 months in-country and look at the babe I've got on my arm!" I'd think to myself. Too bad for me the honeymoon period only lasted a few dates.

The early warning signs I failed to recognize: the fixing of the collar; the running commentary on the length of my hair; the sharpness of my pants crease. I, the American frajer, thought it was cute. "She cares about me that's all" I'd tell myself. These Polish girls really care about their guy! Little did I know. This Polka was on a mission- a mission to change me!

The cute comments like "Your hair is a little long don't you think?" changed quickly to "You know, here in Poland the man walks on the woman's curb-side protecting her" and "Never chew gum when you're with a lady" and "Don't whistle when you're with a lady. That's rude!" Huh?? "Ok", I said to myself, "When in Rome" and all that.

Successive dates were laden with more "lessons", more commentary and more alterations. This was wrong, that was incorrect, this is how a Polish gentleman acts. I began to resent her but I couldn't leave. I wasn't pissed-off enough.

That's why. But I would be.

The final straw came in Radom. Anka invited me to a wedding na wsi(in the country) Her cousin was getting hitched. NA WSI!! Are you kidding me! This was great. Polish country weddings were legendary. Especially back then in the PRL-days of "nie ma". There would be plenty of good food, drink and music. They were renowned affairs lasting 3,4 days sometimes even longer. All that was expected of a guest was to have a good time: eat, drink, sleep and repeat. I COULDN'T WAIT.

Unfortunately, by the time it was over I would only remember the bad moments.

The train ride to Radom belied what awaited me at the end of the line. She was all kinds of sweet, attentive and complimentary on the train. So far so good.....Short-lived I'm afraid. The disclaimers [please forgive him he's from America; his Polish is not that great; yes, he is kind of rough around the edges-but I'll take care of that] started flying. Nothing I did was free of apologizing for. How I dressed( lol I went to Katowice specially to buy some corduroy. I got a real nice 3-piece suit);how I spoke( my Polish was weighted with a heavy accent). She even yelled at me for not knowing how to dance the Polonaise! I couldn't wait to return to Kraków.

Needless to say, I broke it off shortly after returning. She cried. I didn't care.

NB....one beautiful(weeks before the wedding) May afternoon Ania and I were walking on the Planty just outside the Barbakon. She was dressed all in white. She was immaculate. As if on cue, at the precise moment she began laughing at her own joke, a pigeon dropped a big, sloppy one one her right shoulder! I couldn't help myself - I started howling in laughter. Naturally, she was horrified at my reaction, blah, blah, blah. I guess it's telling that that particular moment is the sole happy memory I have of that brief (mercifully so) relationship. From which it

took me a while to recover....I wonder what Ania's doing now?

she's probably in politics ;) Do you remember her last name?

LOL What party do you think?


No. I don't (I wish I did).

I would send her a picture of a pigeon. Anonymously. LOL

Right!....She was soooo full of herself. She was almost alien, she was so weird.....I would've dropped in on her had I remembered her last name. She lived na Hucie(in the Nowa Huta).

Loved your Anka story, Rybnik. I had a friend in a relationship with a controlling woman like that. This poor guy married her. I'm wondering if they are happy. I've lost touch with them. He was a doctor too.

Thank you Marynka! At the time I really didn't see it. I was very lonely and her attention seduced me. I was in a trance. That is until the wedding. The charm was broken........You know, some guys like woman like that. I know one case myself here in NJ. I'm sure your friend is happy.

Lance
Out of all the characters I met that first year in Poland Lance was the most intriguing. Why the son of a well-off, Jewish, Southern Californian lawyer wanted to come to communist Poland to study Medicine was a big mystery. Lance, by all accounts, all his own, had no connection whatsoever to Poland. What is remarkable is that this nebbish-of-a man, Lance, decided to forgo Mexico and Grenada as the go-to destinations for medical degrees, and come to Poland, not knowing the language or culture to pursue his dream.

Lance, in all fairness, gave us all a heads-up at the airport, that he was going to "immerse" himself in Polish once he landed in Warsaw. We all thought he was full of it, laughed and thought to ourselves "we'll see".

True to his word, Lance stopped speaking English upon our arrival in Okęcim and never spoke it again in public!

We all thought he was weird, an attention seeker(however, most of us recognized the wisdom in his action but were too cowardly to acknowledge it).

Soon after our arrival in Kraków Lance began hanging with Poles and speaking Polish exclusively. If you said "Hi lance" in English, you would get "cześć" in response. It didn't matter the time of day or what you said Lance was not speaking English...We resented him for that.

He was also guilty of not shying away from the full expression of his feelings whenever possible. Lance, in other words, called a spade a spade. We all thought he had big balls or was simply very naive.

Lance continued his "Polish immersion" much to the consternation of his fellow Americans. By years-end Lance's Polish was good enough to get into UJ Medical School - an amazing accomplishment!

Lance's idealism got him finally into a trouble he couldn't talk his way out of. During the student Solidarity movement
Lance joined the local UJ chapter, demonstrated and was summarily deported. He finished his medical studies in France!

maybe he worked for the government of the USA. Interesting stories nevertheless, thanks for sharing.

The first six months for most of us were the hardest. It didn't matter, that you came from a Polish background, where you were familiar with some of the customs and some of the language. Irrelevant was the fact that you could say a prayer or two in Polish or that you broke opłatek once a year. You were out of your element boy! And you knew it. You were an alien in an alien land.

To cope with the stress most of us turned to vodka, żytnia, when you could get it. Others turned to women. Lance, on the other hand, immersed himself completely in the language and culture. To his credit he warned us not to get mad at him because he was going to shun English for the duration. By the end of the first month, Lance only spoke in Polish. "Hey Lance, How ya doin'?" "Dobrze i Pan" Lance replied. What the ? How dare he! What's he doing?! We all felt he was "betraying us"! Ridiculous right? That's how we felt at first. It was us against them. And damn it, he went over to the other side and we resented him for it. To further rub our noses in it, Lance began wearing a beret!! You know the one: Not the sexy French, Charles Boyer type. Nope. The anemic, robotnik blue was what he wore. And he reveled in it. We really hated him....Needless to say, his Polish by year's-end was pretty good while mine was still lacking to put it nicely.

We had two guys( one from Seattle, who would insist he "jammed with Jimmi Hendrix" in his father's garage and the other from Chicago), who would drink vodka everyday. They would get wasted, get into trouble only to repeat the next day. Suffice it to say, those two didn't last the year.

.......After a few months my homesickness was so bad, that I was convinced that I needed a phone call home to get me right again. Wrong! At that time, if you didn't have your own phone, you needed to go to the Poczta Główna (main post office), show your legitymacja(student ID) and your wisa pobytowa (extended stay visa) and reserve your call. This didn't mean you got to say when you wanted the call. No. They told you when to expect your call. In my case it was in 72 hours at 1 in the morning!

So there I was riding the tram at 12:30 AM on my way to make a phone call. It's just me and a sleeping towarzysz(comrade) riding in one of those really old, rickety, all-wooden-on-the-inside, trams. There was no one inside or out. It was surreal. When I arrived at the post office it was empty. My rotten Polish, after several attempts, got the message through to the old tea-drinking woman behind the slatted window. I had someone write down on a piece of paper what I was to say: "Prosze panią, mam rozmowę z USA umówioną na godzinnę 1-szą". Barely taking her eyes off her glass of tea she told me to sit and wait. 1 o'clock. Nothing. 1:15. Nothing. 1:30 "Telephone to the United States cabinet 3" loudly, barely intelligible, blared over a single speaker. Luckily I understood "USA" and "3". Otherwise who knows how long I would've been sitting there! I ran to the designated booth, picked up the receiver and said "hello? On the other end through lots of static was a voice that I recognized as my mother's. Thank God she's alive and well! " "How are you Mom. How's Dad, How, this, how's that....?"We spoke for what seemed like a few seconds ( later Mom tells me it was 15 minutes) and then, nothing but white noise. Our conversation had been abrubtly and summarily disconnected. It sucked. I felt sick. The whole thing SUCKED! I hated Poland.

Very amusing stories of yours, Rybnik, that show the double culture shock: one arising from the difference of country/society, the other from the difference of political and economic system. Yet I admire the path chosen by Lance: once he had decided to study a subject in a foreign country, why should he have got himself to continue as an American? One of the sillest things to do in a foreign country when having been given a chance to immerse totally in the culture and language of that country is not to immerse in them totally.

Actually, I once have been given such a chance, but for only six months . I did not speak Polish as I had no one to speak in Polish to. I did not read Polish as I had nothing to read in Polish there. I was totally immersed. I could really "sense" the country I sejourned in, and no other fellow Polish student "distracted" me from that in those six months. And I am happy to have gone through this experience. Anyway, your friend Lance was much more brave as he deliberately renounced to speaking English since the very arrival in Poland.

As I told you before, I met several American students on their medical course in Poland at the time when I myself was a Polish medical student in Warsaw. Mixed Polish-American liasons had emerged then as well. You may find it interesting to learn how some Polish guys commented with some envy on such a liason between an American lady student and a Polish male student, a certain Stanisław: "O, popatrz, stoi tam Stasio ze swoimi dolarami!" True, the dollar with its crazy black market rate of exchange was king in the 1980s in Poland. Luckily for all us now, the Polish and the American alike, it is no longer the case.

You're correct in your analysis. I too admire Lance. Iagree that it took a lot of courage.

ha ha ha :) attach a picture :) please.

Great stories. Please continue posting more:)

How about you talk more about your experiences with "nie ma"?

Did you end up marrying a woman in Poland or did you return to the US a bachelor?

It was very funny! Too bad I don't have a pic. He was a sight: gangly, big nose and smile protruding from underneath his proletariat beret. The only thing missing was a Gauloises smoldering in between his teeth. He was so proud of himself :)

Lance was the king.
Wasn't a boyfriend from the West a valuable trophy for a Polish girl back then? Weren't local Poles jelous of that?