I spent nearly a month in Poland this summer because my widowed, childless aunt died unexpectedly and left me and my mother with a mountain of “death-min” which we have still nowhere near dealt with.
The media and political classes present us with a confused portrait of what Poland is really like. On the one hand, we hear reports that the country is thriving economically, on course to overtake Britain’s GDP by 2034.
On the other hand, we hear that it is effectively a dictatorship, run by an “extreme right”, “populist” government because, for example, it has banned abortion, supports the Catholic Church and controls its people by giving them handouts (every family with children gets 800 złotys a month which is the equivalent of about £200).
But having spent much of my time on this particular visit out and about, dealing with doctors, lawyers and public institutions, I would take this so-called right wing dictatorship over our liberal United Kingdom any day.
Sitting on a bus in Krakow, it is striking for someone coming from the UK how much pride the average Pole has in their appearance. Unlike in South Wales, where I live, where going to the supermarket in your underwear seems to be verging on the norm these days – the fatter you are the better – in Krakow the people, and women in particular, are modestly and attractively dressed.
As a rule, no one is trying to draw attention to themselves or be intimidating, by having strange piercings and tattoos and undue amounts of bare flesh on display, for example. This may seem trivial, but it is in fact the opposite because it signifies the Pole’s inherent respect for his fellow man and what he might want to see as he goes about his daily business.
What is also striking is how polite people are. The moment an old person or pregnant woman, or a woman handling multiple small children, steps onto a bus, all the young jump up to give up their seats, a routine which is then followed by thank-yous and smiles and courteous nods of the head.
My colleague Melanie McDonagh recently wrote about kissing in the Spectator and said that she was disappointed that the Polish men she had met over the years had not kissed her on the hand in greeting as she had been led to believe that they were in the habit of doing. My theory is that those who have left Poland have dropped the habit in order to assimilate, but I am pleased to report that the practice is still very much alive and well, particularly among the older generation, and it is as charming as Melanie might expect.
Organising a funeral in Poland is as bureaucratic and expensive as in Britain. What felt very Polish during the process, however, was my aunt’s local priest’s initial refusal to perform her funeral because, according to his records, she had not been to Mass or contributed to the Christmas collection since 1977.
My aunt was a believer and certainly a Catholic, but belonged to that violently vociferous variety of Pole which distrusts clerics – the type that make their distrust known by not attending Mass but secretly pray the rosary every night. We walked away from that first meeting with the priest thinking that a Cath-olic funeral would not be possible, but thankfully we managed to arrange one eventually.
There are two principal graveyards in Krakow – Rakowice and Salwator. Any fam-ily that has been based in Krakow for a century or more will have a grave in one of these. My family has one in each, my grand- mother’s family in Rakowice and my grandfather’s family in Salwator, the latter being where this latest funeral took place. It was the third time in three years that the lid of our family grave had been lifted off – step-grandmother, cousin and now aunt – and as my uncle finished his eulogy at the graveside, he looked around at us all and asked: “Which one of us will be next?”
During this extended stay in Poland I started to think that if my husband weren’t such an uncompromising “somewhere” and was able to be anywhere other than Wales for longer than a week, I would seriously consider moving to Poland. The perks seemed to be endless.
While we were there, my daughters attend-ed a nursery three minutes walk from our house which cost me £15 per day per child, a sum which included three meals a day, including a three-course home-cooked lunch. Compare this to the £120 a day that most parents in London will be paying for a similar service and you start to understand why the Poles seem keener to have babies than the Brits.
Cheap, high-quality childcare, combined with other perks like a brilliant state education system which doesn’t indoctrinate children with strange secular ideas but instead teaches them proper academic subjects, a healthcare system and transport infrastructure that actually work, all delivered with courtesy and a smile, make moving to Poland a no-brainer if you can. As far as I’m concerned this so-called “far right” dictatorship seems to have its priorities right.
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