6 - Rupture, 1945–1948

Summary

In the Wild West

All the wonders are:

A wench, a trough and booze

In daily supply.

—A song sung by Polish settlers in a Szczecin tavern, ca. 1946

The Uprooting

Pelagia Piechocka arrived by train from Poznań to Wrocław one evening in the winter of 1949. She was alone. “When I got out to the street,” she writes in her memoir, “it was already getting dark. Big, nasty snowflakes were falling on my face.” She took a tram to the street address she had, then she found the building and the apartment. A man opened the door. He said he was busy and told her to come in two hours. She walked out into the street with her suitcase in hand. The street was dark and cold. “I did not know what to do,” she writes. “I wanted to cry.”

Piechocka, who was forty-one and had worked her entire life as a domestic servant, had moved from city to city in the past: her employers always recommended her to someone else. This is how she changed jobs. But this time was different. She did not know anybody in the city. The piece of paper with an address on it was her only contact. The address came in response to a job advertisement she had placed in a newspaper several weeks earlier. Piechocka had decided to move to Wrocław because it was near a village that her only living relative had migrated to shortly before.

She was ultimately hired for the maid's job, but she was not happy in her new place in Wrocław. Everything was different. At her previous jobs she was treated like a family member and responded in kind. Her mistresses would give her old dresses and make her privy to family secrets. There were usually other maids around, and one could gossip and do things together. There were common excursions and adventures. In Wrocław, by contrast, nobody treated her like a family member. Nobody cared for her or was interested in her:

If I had remained in [Poznań], I thought maybe I would not have had this feeling that I have fallen into an alien world. ‘Am I not a human being or what?’ I often thought to myself. No more meetings with other servants in the stairwell.