- Polish Migration:Moving Beyond the Iron Curtain
BT:Did you always want to travel?
Tomek:Yeah. I still want to. I hope some day . . . my first plan . . . cos I couldn't move during the communist regime, I couldn't travel. I didn't even have my passport, they took it away.
BT:Could you travel within the communist bloc without a passport?
Tomek:If you belonged to the Communist Party, yes. But they knew about my father, so I didn't have my passport . . . If you wanted to have a passport, you had to pay for it. If you were lucky, if you were a member of the Communist Party, if you had some connection, you would get it very easily . . . When we were travelling to Slovakia or Czech [as part of his school ice hockey team], we got a special coach, who was a member of the special service, special police. And she was 'looking after' me and some other people, and that was funny. Even there, I didn't get my passport physically. They had my passport, but I didn't have it in my pocket . . . When you got back, you had to send it back to the department. You couldn't hold your passport in the house, no way . . . [but when the regime collapsed] I got my first passport. And finally they gave me German ID as well. When I was twenty, twenty-one, I got a Czechoslovakian passport, because I applied because of my grandma. I get my German and I get my Polish. Twenty years I didn't have anything, and now I've got three! . . . I behaved like a child. I hadn't had any toys for such a long time, so now I want to have everything.
Magda:I've got quite a lot of cousins, and now a baby's been born, my cousin's, and it's the first baby in the family who's actually Polish completely, because we have [babies who are] half-Polish/half-Portuguese; we have half-Polish/half-German; half-Polish/half-British . . . [End Page 128]
Our interview with Tomek took place as he prepared food in the back kitchen of the delicatessen he runs with his wife in the East End of London. In contrast Magda made her comments in a sunny, modern flat in Kazimierz, the revamped 'Jewish' quarter of Krakow, towards the end of our life-history interview with her.1 Her story, which began in the days of Solidarity in 1981,2 covered her periods abroad in the United States and Britain as well as the reasons for her return and her hopes for the future. Taking the interviews together, Tomek's memories appear to encapsulate the 'bad old days' of socialism, while Magda's epitomize the explosion of Poles travelling abroad, which increasingly captured the attention of social science and migration studies research following the collapse of socialism in 1989 and its accession to the European Union in 2004.3 As historians, however, we were interested in looking at continuities as much as change, and in fact Poland has long been recognized as a place of emigration.4 Consequently, there is a strong body of historical literature about pre-1940s emigration, particularly, though not exclusively, in relation to Germany and the US.5 However, the assumption tends to be that the socialist period saw little in the way of migration, except for political é migré s and 'repatriations'. Partly, as Krystyna Iglicka has observed, this has resulted from a lack of data, but it may also be seen as the product of ideological positions.6 Socialist states had a vested interest in undercounting emigration; and western academics also played a role. Mirroring contemporary geopolitics, the academic world from the 1950s developed 'Sovietology', a new and separate discipline to study the socialist regimes of east and central Europe. As Alison Stenning and Kathrin Hö rschelmann have argued, during socialism this contributed to the construction of 'the Eastern Bloc' as 'the west's other — largely homogenous, monolithic, totalitarian and pan-Slavonic'.7 Along with underplaying the differences within this vast and diverse part of the world, it...