Another installment from Canada's Globe and Mail Newspaper:

One country, two views of history

For Poland's young, waxing nostalgic for the bad old days of communism
is a fad, DOUG SAUNDERS finds; not so for the older generation

By DOUG SAUNDERS

UPDATED AT 3:56 PM EDT Monday, May. 19, 2003

WROCLAW, POLAND -- Europe's most dramatic division these days may not
be between the "old" west and the "new" east. A far more painful
fissure lies between generations and livelihoods, the kind one can find
in a visit to Eva and Zdzislawa, two Polish women who live only a few
kilometres apart but represent deeply polarized visions of the
continent's future.

On this sunny afternoon, Eva Kawulok has decided to stay away from her
university campus and go downtown for a meeting in a dark, smoky room
filled with the images and slogans of communism.

On the walls, socialist realist paintings show revolutionary workers
and peasants struggling against capitalism. There is a red banner:
"Western imperialists want you to enjoy Coca-Cola." But it is all very
foreign to Ms. Kawulok.

At 22, she is part of the first generation of Poles who have no adult
memories of the 40 stark years before Poland became the first Eastern
European nation to abandon communism in 1989.

This café, named PRL or "Polish Democratic Republic" after the
country's name in those days, is part of a wave of campy nostalgia that
young Poles, like most Eastern Europeans, are expressing for the bad
old days.

It is an aesthetic fad, like That 70s Show in the West, among people
for whom communism is more a joke than a menace. The waitresses wear
shapeless blue polyester uniforms, and the mood among the beer-drinking
patrons is exuberant.

"I find it really very amazing and funny to imagine that everyone lived
like this for so long," she says, flipping through a scrapbook of
Communist memos and posters near the bar.

Her parents, doctors, lived in a minimal apartment building on a state
salary in those days, and this city, now attractive and colourful, was
a monotone of grey concrete.

Less than 50 kilometres south, a very different sort of nostalgia for
Communist times is being expressed by Zdzislawa Zmuda.

At 44, she is dressed in the modern-day peasant's uniform of a cotton
print top, Lycra tights and thick rubber boots. She has been up since
dawn, tending to the animals and weeding her beet field on her hands
and knees.

There is nothing ironic to her about her warm memories of the system of
collective agriculture that governed her thin strip of farmland and her
ramshackle village from the end of the Second World War until the 1990s.

"When I was young, life was happy, people were together. Farmers like
me were treated like important people."

With her youngest daughter, Asia, 16, she walks across the
debris-strewn yard from the barn to the feed shed. The village of
perhaps 40 people is little more than a collection of cinder-block
houses and barns amid hand-worked fields.

"We have three cows, the highest number in the village, but you can't
sell milk any more, because the price is too low, so we make cheese and
sell it to our neighbours," she says, her brow furrowing with worry.

"If we join Europe and the Germans start running things, I won't be
able to sell anything and I don't know what I'll do. I'm very
frightened."

Mrs. Zmuda may be Europe's biggest problem. While Western European
countries have modern, industrial food-supply systems, millions of
subsistence-level peasant farmers populate the 10 former Communist
nations about to join the European Union.

Poland is one of the most agricultural nations on the continent; more
than a third of its 38 million people live on the land.

In France, less than 5 per cent of the population works in agriculture.

In the next few years, Eastern Europe's more productive farms will
become far more prosperous, but millions of peasant farmers like Mrs.
Zmuda will have to find a new living. Her husband already works five
days a week at a bakery in a nearby town, earning the equivalent of
$300 a month.

Their oldest daughter has moved to Wroclaw, where she attends
university. Their other two girls, who will help with this fall's
harvest, have no intention of staying on the farm.

The family's main crop of wheat -- they expect to harvest five tonnes
-- is worth only $100 a tonne, down from $200 a few years ago. Once
Poland joins the EU and adopts its rigid standards for agriculture
production, the government-set price is likely to decline further.

"We are living day by day," Mrs. Zmuda says as she carries a bucket of
water to the barn.

"We have to pay everything -- gas, water -- we are living day by day
and that's it. I once thought I could sell my crops and save money for
a better house, but that's impossible now; that will never happen
again."

Mrs. Zmuda, who has never been to the city, does not understand why
anyone would want to join the European Union. "On TV they say most
people are for joining Europe. I don't understand it. I've never met
anybody who thinks this. I don't know where they get these views from.
Why would anyone want to make it harder to have a farm?"

Back in the city, Eva Kawulok is returning with her boyfriend from
tennis class, dressed in capri pants and a sweater. Like most of
Poland's urban majority, she has never spoken to a farmer, though she
knows quite a lot about the political clout of the peasants.

"I don't understand why they think this way," she says, her friends
nodding in agreement. "The Polish countryside is quite lazy,
inefficient. But they don't want to do anything about it, and they seem
to think that the EU is coming in as a colonial occupying power."

Her worries are the worries of university students everywhere: how to
keep up with rent payments on her shared apartment and how to get a
summer job when the official unemployment rate has reached 19 per cent.

Like many Poles of her generation, Ms. Kawulok looks outward, to
Western Europe, where thousands of Eastern Europeans occupy the lower
ranks of the service industry. She has already worked a summer waiting
tables in London, and hopes to find her way in the more robust
economies west of the Oder River.

"So maybe we leave Poland," she says.

"But maybe not for a long time. Young people don't want to immigrate;
they just want to get some experience somewhere else. We feel very
strongly about Poland, and we want to come back."

Crossing the new Europe

Saturday: Europe Redefined

EISISKES, LUTHUANIA

Today: Divided peoples

Wroclaw, Poland

Tomorrow: The grey continent

COTTBUS, GERMANY (Remember the bad roads?!?! - Doug)

Wednesday: The rising regions

RENNES, FRANCE

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