(3 of 10)
Quarters for Lovers. In Warsaw's wintry grey days the sun is seldom seen. The facades of houses are pocked with shell marks, and the ruins of war are wherever the visitor looks. The people of Warsaw do not look. Hurrying by in their fleece-lined topcoats and heavy boots, the women often wearing slacks and boots, they are too busy struggling to live. There are long queues for buses and trolley cars. There are endless day-long queues at the meat and bread stores for the basic food available: round loaves of dark bread and long Polish sausages. The cafés of Warsaw are crowded.
For that mysterious elite which inhabits all Communist cities there is the Rarytas Restaurant with soft lights and music, where dinner with wine costs 400 zlotys ($100 at the present exchange rate, a week's wage for a better-paid Pole). At the Kaskada, a smoke-filled vodka joint, there is Dixieland music, and at 2 a.m. the proprietor, according to a Warsaw magazine, "discreetly removes the drunks and lays them out in neat rows on the sidewalk." Gasoline is rationed, taxis hard to find, and there is a coal shortage.
Poland's housing problem may be Europe's worst. For every room there are 1.8 people. The only hope for newlyweds is a proposed "build-it-yourself" development project, called romantically "Quarters for Lovers Without an Apartment." Complaining that government ministers get all the good houses, the newspaper Zycie Warszawy recently described 16,000 families quartered in unheated barracks at Jozefow, gave special mention to the case of Jozef Grajka, who lives with his family of five in an outside toilet.
Anarchy. Poland is a police state which in the past few months has lost most of its police, and the result is an increase in both freedom and anarchy. People no longer whisper in Poland, or try to convey a world of meaning with their eyes, and there are fewer darted over-the-shoulder glances before opening a conversation. But the country's production has never been lower (except in wartime), and the harvest never looked worse. Farmers accustomed to work under the eye of the U.B. (security police) are leaving much of the potato and sugar-beet crop in ground this winter. Thousands of collective farms, no longer under police supervision, have been abandoned, their equipment and animals stolen as farmers hasten to rebuild their own farms. In a country which normally imports up to 1,500,000 tons of grain a year, and where the worker spends 90% of his wages on food, a food crisis threatens. The situation is worst in the western lands, formerly German, where the Polish farmers brought from the east have never felt at home, and the collectives, built around the old Junker estates, have never prospered despite credits and tax exemptions.