Life in communist Poland - personal relations

This was my experience even in the 1990s. Mind you, this is the time of unbridled Wild West capitalism.

Maybe her's were like they were because she grew up in a rural-ish suburb in out skirts of Poznan.

And they had plenty of delicious produce from nearby farms??? :):):)

80s/90s - a lot of dairy products: pierogi ruskie (lol), leniwe, milk soup, pancakes with cottage cheese, cream or vanilla budyń for dessert; apart from that a lot of gulash and chicken, rather decent soups (nothing like what we had at home but edible) and always some sort of fruit kompot. Now that I think of it, it was quite decent but back then I never really enjoyed the meals at our school canteen because my mom was a great cook and I was spoiled at home.

Not sure, but the meals were cooked by women who came from those nearby farms.

Yes, of course. We are not savages.

Everything you have posted chimes exactly with my experience of school meals. The free milk was horrible exactly as Pavian describes. The food was probably worse than Torq describes and not as balanced. Its nothing to do with communism just the bean counters undervaluing the country's potential and future.

We had that too. Even after the milk-snatcher stopped it, we still had it in South Yorkshire. It was always on the point of going off. I can't stand milk to this day. Nevertheless, it was vitamins and calcium which some kids didn't get much of elsewhere.


I think you could say that about most of the developed world and places less-developed too. And cynicism creeps into bureaucracies and is pervasive.

School meals (like hospital and prison food) have a tiny budget. It's a miracle really that they served what they did, and with Poland's kleptocracy meaning that not all the budget/food got to the kids an even bigger miracle.

Who are "We"?

Or have you let your mask slip?

Yes. It can be a matter of further discussion if it is better to have a canteen with lousy meals at school or no canteen at all which is today`s reality for most schools in Poland.

PiS, instead of wasting or stealing billions, should have spent them on reviving school canteens, nurse care and dentist surgeries in Polish schools. I had them in my primary school in 1970s.

We had those two. Not everyone went to the school dentist however the existence of one was important for kids whose parents didn't take them for dental treatment.

I'm surprised that there aren't school nurses now. They're important for head infestations which can spread in schools, for picking up on childhood obesity and for supporting girls when they reach the menarche.

School canteen are pretty important too and should always be free.

What were the famous words of presenter Bronisław Pawlik during the program for children, "Bear from the window"?

"Now, dear children, kiss your mother goodnight."
"Now, dear children, wash and sleep."
"Now, dear children, kiss the bear's ass."

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No!!!😱 This can't be true.

I can only reflect on life in communist Poland as an outsider. Very little info but it left it's mark on me. I remember listening to the adults speaking amongst themselves.

Firstly the conversations were sad and seeped in ignorance. The time was the late 1950s. Poland was one of the victors in WW II but nobody here in the USA knew how badly the Soviets brutally raped the country of literally everything. None of us common folk in the USA knew this.

Since Stalin was gone the news in the USA sometimes pointed to better times in the Soviet bloc. Most of the time the Soviets and their "allies" were the epidemy of evil.

The relatives who wrote to my relatives here were always complaining about money. They were dirt poor but never explained how or why in the letters. My relatives would send salt pork, bacon and dried beef to them. Slit in between were $20 USA currency. Evidently the money made it to them safely through the mail. They would ask for more. Nobly here knew how miserable life was there. Here in the USA in the late 1950s, times were so good that they haven't really been duplicated since. Incredible prosperity!

Finally my relatives complained that the other relatives only wanted a "free pass". I got the impression that my relatives here felt the relatives in the "old country" didn't work hard enough, smart enough. So they stopped giving money. They stopped answering the letters. By now (early 1960s) some of the older generation were dying off. nd that was it! That was the sad family dealings with communist Poland, Nobody ever heard from anyone again.

Communism in practice is very dysfunctional anywhere.

I don't condemn the family who was trying to get as much as possible from their US relatives (since working harder or smarter didn't guarantee you anything in communist Poland where there wasn't enough of anything.... by design) but I also understand the US relatives getting fed up with it...


Part of both the American High after WWII and the Great Compression (the period of American history with the least inequality created in part by strict limits on immigration....).

The US is currently is a second Gilded Age with massive inequality... an obscenely wealthy elite class and rampant homelessness and drug addiction... it's a disgrace that Americans put up with it....

Easy...I liked "communism" for my tuition-free MSEE and no-charge healthcare. I stopped liking it when I saw my first paycheck so I left - as did so many of my buddies.

In a free and democratic USA, I would still be paying off my student loans. The moral of this heartwarming story is that "communism" is a good thing when combined with brains.

This is called opportunism.

Opportunism, like hypocrisy and racism, is a basic tool of survival...One of the simplest things to assure positive results is not being a hero when there is no upside.

After my experience in "communist" Poland and as a father and a grandpa in "free and democratic America", I can honestly say that "communist" Poland was a better place to grow up in.

To make this story short...In Poland, fathers and sons were on the same side and hated the system. We were not afraid to discuss politics.

The free and democratic US has now become the USSR 2.0 - albeit its lighter version - where families are irreversibly split - parents on one side and their teen kids on the other. When the parents are from Eastern Europe, the split is beyond repair.

Where the commies failed, the woke social justice warriors succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. To the average teenager here, "America" is racist and whites are evil. I actually heard it today at a family get-together.

In "communist" Poland, our teachers, and the ruling commies would never put down the country or tell us that it was evil for any reason.

@Novichok
White devil? There is no such thing. As far as I remember from church, angels are white and devils are black and that's it.

evil =/= devil

the apparchiks at the post office would have taken it. i call bs.


really? in the mail?


What you mean was it the 1860-1880s migrant wave?


Partly true.

Please cut down on your quotes

@amiga500
Yeah surprisingly the money did make it through the system. They would thank my relatives for the "gifts" and ask for more. I know some of the gifts bought bicycles or a motorbike? I don't remember. Faster to get to work.

The relatives who were dying were born around the late 1880s-early 1890s. They are the group that came to the USA prior to WW I. In the late 1950s, 60s and early 1970s they were all dying off.

@mafketis
If I had known then what I know now, I would have yelled at my relatives to continue sending money. But I was a little kid them. Even the adults didn't know what was going on in Poland during the 1950s. I don't know where they lived in Poland but I do know they were probably part of that mass migration from "Old Poland" (Belarus) to modern Poland that happened after 1945. This part of the family originally came from the area now called Belarus. But they were Polish. So they were a minority in their own birth lands.

Did Polish people living in Belarus ever identify as Belarussians?

@Novicho
No they never identified as Belarussians. The village they came from was a "Polish" village. I think there was a church and it was Catholic not Orthodox. I wish they were alive now because I have so many questions to ask. Isn't that always the case though?

I do know that when this part of the family met my other parent's side of the family, they had a little bit of difficulty talking to each other. The other side said they used a lot of "Russian" words.

Do you mean that "Poles" do not assimilate so that after x generations they identify as Belarus citizens and patriots who love Belarus?

Shut up Borg. Do you know how many generations Belarus is on a map as a state?


No they were not. Don't worry about it. In the 50' in Poland anyone could use some relativies from US.

Wise up ****. Poland was not on the map for a very long time. So ******** what?

@Novichok
Nope they didn't assimilate. They were Poles. I don't know when they got there. I'm basing the statement that they were a minority on the 1897 Czarist census. The Minsk area had only about 8% Poles at the time (If i remember correctly). Even though they lived near Minsk, their village was at the very eastern end of the Vilna Governorate. A couple kilometers west of their village would have brought them into the Minsk Governorate. Everything they did plus their traditions and customs were Polish.

If that's the case, Poles were no better than Jews and Gypsies.

This leads to the question: What sane country would ever want them? To get another ghetto?

Also, why would Poles allow any foreigners like themselves to migrate to Poland? The only legitimate reason why we ask others to let us in is because we want to be part of them by being like them. All of a sudden, Muslim ghettos in Paris don't look so bad.