During the summer of 1984 I was in Milan, and on a whim, decided to visit Poland. At that time Poland was not on the average tourist’s radar. It had been under military rule, or Martial Law since 1981 when the government tried to crush and eliminate the emerging Solidarity movement. It was an awful time for Poland. The government closed the national borders and airspace, arrested people associated with Solidarity, and monitored telephone and postal services. Goods and food were in short supply. When I applied for a visa to Poland a year after Martial Law had been lifted, rumors that the brutal ZOMO riot police were still roaming about.
I arrived in Poland without a plan. Unsmiling officials greeted me. Store shelves were still empty, train and bus tickets were unavailable, and Krakow had four cafes open on the main square. A newspaper commentary summed it up best "troszke lepiej, ale wciaz kiepsko" (a little better, but still awful). To get on a train that was overflowing with vacationing school children, I stopped pleading in Polish, and finally asked a conductor in English to “please let me on because my visa is only valid for 4 more days”. Some soldiers sitting on their duffels in a postal wagon overheard me and invited me to ride with them. They said that during the summer months it is practically impossible to buy train tickets at the last minute. They offered me cigarettes and spoke what little English they knew as we sat on bags of mail. In this way, I was able to get from Krakow to Wroclaw where my family lives.
In Wroclaw I searched through a phone book for my Ciocia Lola and Wujek Janek Zioberski’s address. Their apartment happened to be near the center of town not far from the train station. I walked over, but they weren't there. An inquisitive neighbor came to my rescue. He informed me that my relatives were away, then offered to call up my other aunt, Ciocia Renia. She picked me up and made a few phone calls to friends and shop owners, and somehow food started appearing, sausages, ham, cheeses, vegetables, and pastries. Where these came from I don’t know, because the shops at that time were empty and Poles would stand for hours in line just to get a loaf of bread. It seemed to me that the Poles had some kind of an underground market or system of looking out for each other. Since I only had two days left on my visa to spend in Wroclaw, my Ciocia took me to the police HQ to apply for two more days. The police department couldn’t believe that an America could speak Polish, and that I was able to fill out the necessary paperwork for the visa on my own.
I had a wonderful stay with my Polish Ciocias and Wujeks. We drank tea and vodka and never ran out of things to talk about. They were still incredulous that I had appeared without warning on their doorsteps and kept hugging me.
On the evening of the appointed departure date they packed enough sandwiches to feed a family, then put me on the night train to Prague. At 1:00 am the train crossed the border and stopped. Officials with German shepherds on leashes woke up the sleeping passengers to check passports and tickets. As it turns out I had been in Poland one hour past my extended visa date. I didn’t have the money to pay for an extra visa day and for the steep fine for breaking the law. So the officials escorted me off the train and sent me to Warsaw to have the embassy help me out. Thankfully the American embassy arranged the extra visa days and lent me fifty dollars that I was to pay back upon my return to the States (which I did). I left Poland extremely sad for its continued oppression by the communist government, and extremely thankful to be American.
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