The Latest at Goethe

Poland was an emigration country for many years and the “Polish plumber” has long been a stereotype in the debate about migration in Europe. Today, Warsaw itself is attracting ever more immigrants. What do the people who come from the east to the Polish capital city hope for? By Paul Flückiger

The Kiev-Warsaw Express finally squeals to a halt in Warsaw East railway station after nearly seventeen hours’ journey. Iron doors are unbolted; sleeper conductors with dark circles under their eyes and thickly applied makeup hop onto the weathered platform, then the first arrivals lug their bags from the carriage. Only one of them has a chic little case on wheels.

Alicja Michalowska remembers her first arrival in Warsaw on the Kiev train eleven years ago as if it were only yesterday. “I couldn’t bear to live in Ukraine anymore; just wanted to spend the winter in Warsaw, get some air,” the petite woman relates. She had paid the work placement people 250 dollars. Back then a visa wasn’t required. Yet, she had hardly arrived in Warsaw when her dream of a legal job was shattered. “They took me to the cleaners,” she says. Alicja did finally find work, at first as a cleaner and assistant cook. Today, she has her own small company in the same sector with five Ukrainian and Polish employees.

Big opportunities for little money

Almost everyone at the nearby Jarmark Europa dreams of their own business. A colourful snarl of metal booths has attached itself like a growth to Stadion urban railway stop. Long-distance coaches travelling from eastern Poland, as well as from Lviv, Vilnius and Minsk attempt to make their way through the crowded bazaar to the nearby bus terminal. “Stadium,” as the market is called in the vernacular, is Warsaw’s melting pot. It is dominated by Vietnamese textile merchants, but they have long been joined by black Africans, Chinese, Indians and Central Asians in the trade with cheap apparel. At the nearby Zielenecka tram stop, Caucasians hawk smuggled cigarettes, native Roma vend tablecloths, Polish farmers sell apples and the small-time hoodlums from the urban district of Praga, which brings the Jarmark welcome tax money, have specialized in mobile phones.

He wants everything to be above-board, the law is the law, affirms Sham Karthe. Two years ago the young IT specialist flew with false papers from Malaysia via India and Moscow to Warsaw, where he applied for asylum. He wants to stay in Warsaw, says the Tamil, who now enjoys refugee status. “I have better opportunities to open my own business here than in the expensive west,” Karthe explains. In Poland you don’t need a lot of capital to start a company; the only problem is dealing with the bureaucracy and paperwork. His friend Sivaranjan Vinayakamoorthi has found a solution to the problem: “I’ve decided to become Polish,” the Tamil says. “Another three years, then I can apply for a Polish passport,” he declares with a confident grin.

Eight percent of the official 1.71 million inhabitants of Warsaw are foreign nationals or stateless persons according to estimations from city hall; eight times higher than the national average. Every fourth foreign national in Warsaw comes from Vietnam, every tenth from Russia and every twelfth from Ukraine. They are followed in sequence by Swedes, Germans (a little over 3 percent of foreigners), Byelorussians, Bulgarians, Americans and Chinese. Only a few are properly registered and possess permanent residency status. The majority somehow manage to get by. Ukrainian Alicja Michalowska, for instance, spent years travelling to Lviv for one weekend every ninety days, where she spent one night in a hotel and then travelled back to Poland. Not until 2007 did she receive a residence permit for an unlimited period due to her Polish ancestry.

A mixture of waggishness and disdain

“So, Yellow, how many soup hens do you want today?” the seller asks a Vietnamese customer who is standing in front of the meat counter barefoot in spite of the wintry temperatures. The corner shop not far from the block of flats known as “Saigon” in Praga caters to natives of Warsaw, to Polish new arrivals – the majority of the post-war Warsaw population, by the way, since ninety percent of the city was destroyed by the Germans – and immigrants from Vietnam. Here, only a stone’s throw from the “Stadium,” well-situated merchants from Vietnam have rented expensive living space. Many of them have been able to advance from simple carriers to the owners of a number of market stands.

The first Vietnamese came to Poland in the early 1950s as part of “Socialist brotherly assistance.” Until 1997, a bilateral agreement enabled them to easily receive work permits. Those who arrived later usually immigrated illegally. These Vietnamese are all the more cautious in their dealings with strangers and form a closed society of which approximately 70 percent do not speak Polish. Nonetheless very few in Warsaw have bad things to say about the Vietnamese. They buy in their shops and admire their industriousness and good business sense. At school, Vietnamese children are considered particularly good pupils and many families even hire Polish nannies to promote their language skills. This willingness to adapt is esteemed. Still, the Vietnamese in Warsaw have to put up with a mixture of waggishness and disdain wherever they go. But, in the corner shop, an older saleswoman even learned a few words of Vietnamese on her own.

A new home

But, Jarmark Europa will soon be a thing of the past. The old marketplace on the top of the dilapidated Tenth Anniversary Stadium, which has been a fixed establishment for vendors from all of eastern Europe since 1990, had to make way for the construction of a new football stadium for the 2012 European Cup. Now, new access roads have to be built to the huge building pit and later a metro station will be constructed on the present site of the bazaar. The new infrastructure is being set up by international consortia, whereby not only many of the engineers but also the construction workers are foreigners. Due to the labour migration of Poles to western Europe there is a serious lack of skilled workers. That is why Byelorussians and Ukrainians as well as Indians and Chinese can easily find legal work here. A few thousand Chinese workers will begin work on a section of motorway between Łódź and Warsaw. There is already a Chinese school and Turkey also operates an international school in Warsaw.

Arun Barot from India estimates that about 2,000 of his people live in Warsaw, but hardly any of them are construction workers, according to the business graduate who is presently working in the catering sector. Within only a few years, Indians have conquered almost the entire textile trade in the suburb of Janki and Indian businesspeople are already major players on the Warsaw real estate market. Barot left his hometown of Ahmadabad, a bit to the north of Mumbai in the state of Gujarat, four years ago to study in the Polish capital. “Compared with other European capitals, Warsaw is very inexpensive,” he explains his choice.

After graduating, he stayed in Warsaw, which he already calls “my second home.” Barot dreams of owning his own Indian shop with textiles, folk art and foods. Unfortunately, bureaucracy in Poland is just as bad as at home. “But, I have my freedom here,” says the fan of clubbing, who enjoys the nightlife in Warsaw. “The people in Warsaw are so nice and friendly – especially the girls,” Barot raves and in spite of cajoling from family and friends in Ahmadabad he does not wish to return to India for the time being. “The only ones I can complain about are drunks and arrogant bouncers who gratuitously turn away dark skinned people like me,” he says. Yet, thanks to Bollywood hype in Poland, Arun is treated very kindly. The case could be the opposite for the Cologne immigrant Rainer Pauly.

Self-made woman

“I’ve never perceived any resentment due to the fact that I’m German,” the man in his mid-forties insists. “If you can speak Polish, you won’t have any problems here as a German.” Even today he is the one who usually talks to authorities rather than his Polish wife, Pauly explains, because an accent and a well-dosed brisk attitude gets you further than if you were a native. Pauly began working as a language teacher in Poland in the mid-1990s and then for a German bank – first for the lucrative pay of a contract worker and later for the local salary. “It was love that did it,” he smiles. In addition, he wanted to gather international work experience following his studies. Today, Pauly is a partner in the German human resources consulting firm PSP International. “You are nothing in Warsaw without Polish language skills, no matter how many academic titles you may have,” he states, affirming Aron Barot’s earlier claim.

Tamil Sham Karthe groans when he thinks about the Polish language. “People in Warsaw just aren’t used to foreigners,” he says. Bilingual signs would make life a great deal easier for thousands of residents of the capital city for little money. Otherwise, Karthe lauds, the people in Warsaw are really okay. Pauly, by contrast, describes the residents of the Polish capital as rather unapproachable and hectic. Life is easier for a foreigner in smaller towns, the HR expert is certain. “For my entire first year in Warsaw I cried into my pillow every night,” complains Tamara Loladze, who came to Poland’s capital in the 1990s in the midst of the Georgian civil war. “I came for a better life and I’ve been successful in that,” sums up the wine merchant whose shop has one of the best city locations. Just like Loladze, Alicja Michalowska gradually brought her family to join her in Poland as an antidote. “I would never have been able to become what I have on my own in Warsaw in only eleven years if I had stayed in Ukraine,” she says proudly.



The article originally appeared in the Goethe-Institut magazine with the theme “Dreams of Millions: Berlin, Warsaw, Mumbai.”