The 1970s.
Western Europe was a paradise then. For us, descendants of Warsaw insurgents, exiles from the Polish Borderlands strangled by the power of the russian Union, by falsified elections. For students with “points for origin” children impoverished by the socialist utopia of layers of Polish peasants, workers and pointless children of “working intelligence”, which inactive remained after Katyn and the murderous anti-intelligence actions of both invaders, after transports to Siberia, Auschwitz, Dachau, Gusen and Ravensbrück. After escaping the most capable and most energetic leaked years to the West, to America 1 or another, Australia and another friendly lands.
In the 1970 ’ s, passing the russian East Berlin as shortly as possible, there were crowds of young people from behind the iron curtain from east Europe, who, after years of anticipation and anguish, yet adopted a passport. The authorities gave passports as costly as possible due to the fact that they did not want people to see what average life looked like there and what it might look like here.
* Oh, my God *
In 1966, 3 or 4 people chose a German language teacher in college. Until now, we only knew this language from war movies, where it rained densely “Hände hoch!”, “polnische schweine”, “schissen”, “scheissen” etc. We knew the war stories of the First and Second Wars of all members of the household and friends. We listened to the grandma of the legends about Krak and “Wanda, what Germany did not want”, we learned about Bolesław Chrobry crowned with a diadem by the befriended emperor Otto III, about the conflict of Grunwald and the partitions of Poland. We were amazed to receive the attention of our parents and grandparents that they considered German to be beautiful, and that Germany had large literature and music, although it was a nation arrogant and exalted; and in general Hitler was Austrian, adding his grandma with thought. We knew quite a few memories and applicable literature, but at any point we thought that it came from Western Germany, due to the fact that in the 19th century Weimar opposed the partitions and was something different than Prussia, although in the 20th century he landed with Thuringia in East Germany.
In the first course of the lesson, respective basic German phrases were given, respective words. We could not bear the hard accent of the talker with the words "their studies" and akin innocent phrases. We gave up German, but we left English, Latin, and Greek with Hebrew elements. We studied French earlier at home.
The nearest West is erstwhile Germany. 2 German states, GDR and NRF, until 1970, due to the fact that then, after Brandt's visit, the Polish press began writing German. Germany was the fruit of the post-war penal division of Germany by the Allies into 4 zones – American, English, French and Soviet, although Churchill advised the preventive bombing of Germany all 50 years. The first 3 became part of the German national Republic, the russian GDR state was formed. The russian Union introduced socialism, a strategy of “the happiness of workers and peasants” into the GDR. The Western Allies, in turn, were to teach the Germans democracy and peaceful attitudes towards another nations, banned the army, rebuilt their economy with Marshall's rich plan and created conditions for liberal development.
In the GDR, a associate of the russian Union's group of "nationals of folk democracy", it was a bit better than in Poland in terms of children's clothes ("self-growing" with a baby blouse) and food supplies, although coffee was highly nasty there. It was clearly worse in East Germany in terms of murderism; we frequently went to the Brandenburg Gate from the power side, watching traces of escapes of the Berliners to the west side. It seems that by then the West Germany had set up a large plaque on which they displayed the number of deaths among refugees. It was a 100 people. As it turned out after the unification in 1990, the energy society was consumed by an agent, organized oppression and informerry.
In 1972, Gierek on the wave of political change from December 1970 gave Poles a coca-cola, reconstruction of the Royal Castle, toilet paper and mass-accessed within the framework Sovjetzone passport cartridges to the East and the Balkans and wider access to passports to the West; the selected, rather numerous, could have received a passport with the right to travel erstwhile a year to the West and the right to acquisition $130 per stay, at a price 3 times higher than the authoritative course but half lower than the black marketplace course. present it is hard to imagine how this improved the feeling of freedom and belonging to the West.
The crucial thing was that you could leave the PRL for a fewer weeks. They put the seats of their small Fiats in 125p tents, inflatable mattresses, a spirit tablet and sleeping bags, on top of the trunk were bags or backpacks, in the trunk in front of the canned meat and pasta for a period of stay, something for sale on the place (in the Balkans a perfume “Perhaps” and sheets from Polish canvas, on the West crystals, Polish pure vodka, and as it succeeded, a couple of jars of caviar) so that he would “turn back” and hajda, to Yugoslavia, due to the fact that the cheapest, with his wife next to the driver and 2 children in the back seat.
There was besides a large deal of emigration of the youth to the West. It was slow, but it was calculated that during the 8-10 1970s about 1 million educated young people leaked from Poland, and counting 1981, erstwhile almost all passports were given to "the village of strana mira", it was possibly more than 2 million. Going to the West was a intellectual farewell to “socialism”, the anticipation to throw distant for a while, though for a period or two, the shackles of communist oppression, the culmination of long-term dreams of travel, freedom, and the place to yet fulfill them rapidly and in a way painlessly. This door closed the martial law for respective years.
In East Germany, all young Germans dreamed of moving to Germany, to West Germany, which watched Springer on TV, displaying an electronic paper on top of the company's tower in Kochstrasse, right next to Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlin East-West border crossing in the mediate of the city. Right after the reunification on October 3, 1990 (since then I had problem with my name date, I did not want to celebrate the day of German unification), it went to western Germany who could, leaving even rather good houses and giving allocated apartments to the authorities.
In Russia, Gorbachev's pierestroika was already there. In the winter of 1989, talks of a circular table began in Poland and the opposition Prime Minister came, in Romania they killed Ceausescu, and the German Embassy there issued mass Western German passports to East Germany, returning from holidays in Bulgaria and Hungary. After all, they were Germans too. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.
And so far, in the 1970s, there, in West Berlin, youths wanted peace. She hated war, acted in pacifist organizations. Vladimir Bukowski, a dissident in the USSR, even wrote a informing brochure entitled Pacific vs. Peace, indicating how much these movements are infiltrated and even inspired by the Russians.
Beautiful, fashionable, comfortable shoes, rested, well-fed and happy young people who were never Nazis (and their parents most frequently did not mention who they were in their youth), walked the clean streets of the rebuilt city, in 1945 razed to the ground by the Allies. Meanwhile, in 30 years after the war, Warsaw was inactive in ruins. They were active in protesting capitalism and fighting for socialism, discussing anarchists and terrorists from the Baader-Meinhof group of Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), or the Red Army faction, fought against the US and capitalism; they besides fought conventional marriages, women demanded freedom from the Kirche-Kinder-K cageüIf they have children, they have free relationships. There were writings for feminists who fought for freedom of choice for women and won the right to remove pregnancy, though under certain conditions.
Some of them drove their own, detached, ridiculously inexpensive cars, the kind of thing you had to hold on to the steering wheel so you wouldn't drop holes in a rusty floor. It cost a couple of them, a twelve night dishes at a nightclub. A car – a dream of all Pole who did not know the metro, but a ragged tram or bus, and for whom in the country the apothecary numbers of Augustine Mermaids and then small Fiat 125p were outside the sphere of any reality; in the free marketplace specified a tiny fiakik, in Poland a symbol of the debauched prosperity, but besides freedom, cost respective twelve good salaries and long stood mainly for artists and partyists.
This good and beautiful, kind young people who were raised on windowsills burned forbidden “grabs” of their own production, a symbol of Western dizziness with freedom. Transvestites “disclosed” themselves and worked in cabarets as dancers. Eternal students at endless consecutive scholarships, in civilians Sunday cooks and waiters, whose weekend work at all-night bars afforded peace in the commune and maintenance for the remainder of the week, mingled with transvestites, bald missionaries Hari Krishna and demonstrating Kurds, creating a colorful and friendly crowd. They hated the bourgeois lifestyle, which told families to change furniture and curtains all 3 years, throw distant the short-used washing machines and refrigerators, save and save all “mark” again. Poles then took these perfectly good couches, tables, armchairs and kitchen cabinets to Poland from the dumpster or from the street.
They discussed the fashionable book Alice Miller “When Walls of Silence” during these years, about the rights of the child, about the terrible fates of tormented children, from whom criminals like Hitler and Ceausescu grew. They sought out the causes of the horrors of Nazism in Grimm's fairy tales, which instilled fears and patterns of force in German children's stories about the witch, which burned children in the oven, and about the king, who imprisoned his beautiful daughter in a advanced glass tower so that no 1 could scope her. They reacted to the past of their grandparents and parents, who threw the Europeans a bloody bathhouse of the First and Second planet War.
The exhibitions poured out heaps of fresh and fashionable fabulously colorful clothes, and with food stores piles of seldom seen hams, a chain of sausages, red meat like communism, which in Poland was shortly to be on cards with 2.5 kg monthly allocation; French cheeses, Dutch, and coffee, coffee! In Poland in the second half of 1970. The authorities came up with a ‘brazilian’, a blend of real-grain coffee, any believed that with a crucial addition of birch bark, nevertheless they rapidly gave up this era. Cafés and confectionaries were frequently owned by erstwhile militia services that retired after 15 years of work and had peculiar property rights in a country with theoretically abolished private property.
A full fresh lifestyle was born. Freedom, freedom! Multi-person sexual communes, or at least friendly, grow a few-metre marijuana shrubs on windowsills of old midtown tenement houses in the American and French sectors. More and more parades of homosexuals, during which the most modern music, hanging six-colored rainbow towels on the balconies of their flats, was drumming on the streets, did not rise any peculiar reflections or questions about the cultural destiny of Europe. They did not surprise the tiny dark cinemas with pornographic films, mild compared to what those who were in Sweden were talking about.
Everything was great. all erstwhile in a while, the sound of the street was disrupted by a deafening roar glistening bright greenness of a tiny American tank, where akin young people sat, flashing with wonderful white teeth. In U.S. databases, you could get American toothpaste and shine.
In the 1970s, the European planet was inactive divided into two. Western and "socialist".
