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It is a cold, grey autumn morning ten years [1999] after the collapse of communism. A lorry is delivering a winter's supply of coal to a retired widower in a poor district of Lodz (pronounced Woodge), Poland's second city. The widower stands outside her tiny terraced house, arms folded, glowering fiercely. The coal costs too much, she moans. "Life was much better before 1989." Work was easier, and she had a free holiday at the seaside every summer. Coal was free too, she adds.
The coalmen, three of them, steam in the frigid air from all the shovelling and carrying. "She's right about one thing," one of them says. "Life was much easier ten years ago." He leans on his shovel and wipes his blackened brow. "There's not much in the new Poland for people like me and her." Like you? "You know," he says bitterly, "the old, the sick, the workingman."
To make a living, the men drive their decrepit Soviet-era lorry through the night, selling coal by the bucket. They cannot understand why life is so hard for them, while others, especially young people, seem to have it easy. "It's like magic," says one. "We're struggling just to survive and all these kids have money to spend on music and clothes.". .
More than 11% of people in Lodz have no job. Women say it is hard to get a husband - in a city with 16% more females than males; and more than a fifth of the women are on the dole. Lodz's population, now 810,000, has been shrinking. . . .
The nostalgists tend to forget that in 1989 you had to queue for bread; now you can choose between croissants and bagels [if you are lucky enough to afford them!]. "Communists built big buildings with small flats," says a builder. "Now we're building small buildings with big flats." Besides, as Adam Michnik, once a dissident, now a leading editor in Warsaw, points out, the ideal society people dreamed of in 1989 was bound to be unattainable. "Poles wanted the shopping and nightlife of Manhattan, the security of the Swedish welfare state and the work habits of communism," he says. "That wasn't a real choice."
Source: The Economist, 23 October 1999, pp. 58-59.
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