Von Sibylle Hamann, Bernhard Odehnal .
Von Sibylle Hamann, Bernhard Odehnal .
<In earlier times, the Gorals were independent, self-reliant farmers in the mountains of southern Poland. They remain a proud people but today they seek their fortune in Vienna, Rome or Glasgow.
A wedding is being celebrated up in the mountains. The mother of the bride has been in a state of excitement for months. She has deliberated at least a hundred times which place to order the wedding cake from and whether the fire station is large enough to accommodate the celebrations. She is concerned that the bride is too thin for the magnificent white folk costume. But all her attempts to feed up her daughter in the last moment are in vain, for the bride is also nervous, far too nervous to eat. For weeks now there has been something to arrange every day. Constantly there is something to worry about; there are regular visits from relatives, to kiss, to congratulate, to drink schnapps and to ask how they can help. For weeks in Czerwienne, a small Polish village at the foot of the Tatra Mountains, there has been a festive family state of emergency. At times the bride sighs that it is all too much for her. But in the end she is very, very happy. For everyone has come – which is the way it should be in a large Polish family. There are eight brothers and two sisters. A ninth brother died at the age of only 25 of a heart attack, on Christmas Eve six years ago. Before she opens the celebrations in the fire station with a dance, the bride will drive to the cemetery and lay a wreath on his grave so that he is someway present at her big day. The little sister, the youngest of the eleven children, still lives with her parents. All the others have gone out into the big wide world. It is only for a special occasion that all the brothers and sisters come home together. For Czerwienne does not have much to offer to a large family that needs money and a perspective. The view of the High Tatra Mountains is wonderful. Since Bollywood film production teams have started to come here, this mountain panorama is even known in India. The slopes are lush and green, in August the flowers in the meadow blossom in all imaginable colours. Here a cowbell rings, there sheep bleat. Czerwienne is wonderful to look at and for the last two years it has even been a part of the EU. But there is no work here. Poland is a part of Europe that has yet to face great structural changes. About 25 per cent of the population here still lives from farming; the average in the EU is only five per cent. In contrast to Western Europe, “farmer” here does not mean the “manager of an agricultural business” but a way of life that one knows from fairy tales and children’s books. In the morning the two cows are milked by hand, then the chickens are fed. The farmer’s wife picks the cucumbers and pickles them, the farmer cuts hay with the scythe and takes it home by horse and cart, and in the evening the five sheep are sheared. There is always enough to eat in the farms in Czerwienne, but one cannot earn more than pocket money here. Neither pickled gherkins nor homemade curdled milk can compete with the highly subsidised products from French farm factories that line the shelves of the supermarkets. Zakopane, the capital of the southern Polish region Podhale, is known for hosting international ski-jumping events and from the Nordic Sports World Championships. The town has applied to host these championships again in 2011. The High Tatras are not as deserted as people in Western Europe might suppose, the mountain range – the only one in Poland – is relatively small, and when 38 million Poles are in search of rest, recreation and nature, the ski slopes and mountain walking paths can become quite crowded. In tourism it is possible to earn some money, at least seasonally, as a waiter/waitress, ski-lift operator or – like the bridegroom – as a musician in a folk group. But this is all. The brothers of the bride of Czerwienne are all sturdy, strong, ambitious lads. Each of them owns a pair of traditional trousers made of embroidered white felt. They have each learned an honourable craft. Several of them, like their old, moustachioed father, have become carpenters. On the hills of Czerwienne houses are still built entirely of wood, just as they were 200 years ago. There is a long and proud tradition of carpentry and joinery in the area. And there are enough trees. Nevertheless, there is not enough for the carpenters to do. The father himself had to leave so that he could feed his children. In the 1970s he went to Turin and worked in a factory there. He only came home once a year to see how much his children had grown and to produce a further one. When he was old enough, the eldest son, now aged thirty, followed his father. He is also a carpenter. Today he lives with his wife and two children in Rome. The third son went to Udine, the fourth to Vienna, the fifth to Glasgow. In contrast to their mothers, who stayed at home, the women of the younger generation also leave. Girls here were always willing to work, and like almost everywhere else in the world, they are a little more flexible than men in discovering ways of earning money. When there is not enough to do on the farm they travel the 390 kilometres to Vienna to work as cleaning women. They can always return home in time to help the aging mother with the washing and ironing at the weekend. Work migration, including the routes travelled, is organised simply but well. Almost every day private cars or small buses travel the stretch between Zakopane and Vienna. You register with your friends for a certain date and then you are picked up from your home. It is not an easy journey, the road is an old one, full of curves with a lot of trucks that travel through Slovakia, but it is shorter than the stretch from Zakopane to the Polish capital Warsaw. Often commuters travel at night to save time. The trip costs 30 euro. The bride also lives in Vienna and works as a cleaner for nine euro an hour. She has been doing this for several years, professionally, without any feelings of embarrassement and without any kind of sentimentality. She tries to work efficiently and economically, to live cheaply, to save as much as possible, also to learn German and to acquire a few small additional qualifications that she might be able to use later. She has perfected her services to such an extent that her clients can rely that in almost any situation the work will be done. When she is away for a longer period, she employs a friend from home to replace her. She trains the friend herself about the particular wishes of the clients and their apartments and sends her off with a cleaning plan and a set of keys. This is the kind of service that one might long for from the customer service centre of a large company. In earlier times these women had to return at least once every three months to Poland in order to renew their tourist visas. Today, as EU citizens, they can stay legally in Vienna but are not granted a work permit. The Austrian government wants to delay opening the labour market to people from the new EU states until 2011. If she has a toothache or breaks her leg, she has to travel home. She is insured – privately – in Poland. The bride is an independent, single-minded woman – she has the kind of determination generally ascribed to people from southern Poland. They are called Gorals and speak a dialect that is influenced by Slovak and see themselves as a mountain people, very different to the Poles of the plains. The Gorals have always been proud of their independence, and when they migrated five hundred years ago from the Balkan region to the Tatras, they did not accept instructions from the Polish or Austro-Hungarian rulers. Their hero is Juro Janosik, a franctireur of the 18th century, who like Robin Hood took from the rich and gave to the poor. But in contrast to the rebel of Sherwood Forest, Janosik was captured and, after the most appalling tortures, was executed. In the mid-19th century, the Gorals rebelled against the rule of the Habsburgs, and their peasant revolution could only be suppressed with considerable difficulty. This rebellion is commemorated in a small museum on the Slovak-Polish border. The Nazis saw in the ambitiousness and determination of the Gorals a certain similarity to the Germans, and in fact in the Second World War many of these mountain dwellers fought on the side of the occupying forces. But this was all a long time ago and people do not like to be reminded of it. But the persistence and the pride in being a little different to the “normal” Poles have survived. A little better perhaps, a little more individual. Here people still play old fiddles with gut strings. Here they sing loudly, passionately and in strange harmonies that, to the ears of city dwellers, sound unfamiliar and off-tune. The traditions have survived the work migration of two generations – which is more than many other European cultures can maintain. The young people still have their folk costumes in the wardrobe and they wear them regularly on feast days, to go to church and for weddings. They still say when visiting their parents that they are “going home” – even if they have long since established a family of their own elsewhere. It is the generation of the grandparents that holds everything together: the mother, who runs the farm, looks after the great-grandmother, the chickens and the holiday guests in the rented accommodation. On Sundays she insists with iron will on the family going to church. In summer the house is full. For most of the grandchildren are there, who are brought from all parts of the EU to visit their grandmother when the schools and kindergartens are closed for holidays. So that the parents can save the cost of a child care centre, so that they have a little more time to work. And, naturally, so that the children do not forget where they come from. They all know that this is no permanent arrangement. That commuting will eventually change to emigration, that the Gorals will sometime or other become Austrians or Italians, that the great-grandchildren will forget the language, sell the old home that they inherit and perhaps never come back again. When the family is together the different degrees of distance can be compared: the stronger the integration in another place, the greater the distance to the old home. Those who have just left recently, still work illegally abroad and are just building up a stock of clients. Those who already have a steady job, have moved up in the hierarchy and leave the illegal occasional work to the relatives that follow them. After years of living legally in Vienna, some members of the family have moved into municipial housing apartments. Others are considering where they should send their children to school – and almost of all of them have opted for Austria or Italy. And someday or other the application for citizenship will be submitted. At first they will emphatically (and guiltily) affirm that this step “doesn’t really mean anything”. But eventually it does mean something and Poles will then have become Austrians. Although: the Tatras do not let everyone go. They are simply too beautiful and the inhabitants are too individual to allow this to happen. On a hill above Czerwienne stands a new house in the old style – a plinth of stone, with a solid timber structure above and a roof with a pointed gable. In three directions there are views of the mountains, the meadows all around are radiant with the colours of wild flowers. This house was a surprise gift for the bride. The father and the nine brothers built it in only three months. This was a mighty achievement that required all the means and strength of the relatives and the bride could not believe her eyes when, as she was being taken by horse and carriage to her wedding, she saw it for the first time. It seems the family wants to be certain that one of them stays here in Czerwienne, at the foot of the High Tatras. And indeed the bride will return, in a few years when she has earned enough money in Vienna to furnish her house properly. At least this is what she has promised.