Ruadhán Mac Cormaicreports from Poland in his continuing series, meeting families whose sons and daughters have gone to Ireland in search of jobs and higher wages Migration and the reinvention of Ireland
Larysa Skorczynska's story is her city's. Born in 1939 as the Germans rolled into Bialystok for the first time, her childhood was spent against the backdrop of constant turbulence as the city passed first from the Germans to the Soviets and then back again.
The Wehrmacht announced their return on a June morning in 1941 by driving more than 1,000 Jews into the Great Synagogue and burning it to the ground and, by the time Larysa was six years old, virtually all 50,000 Jews had been killed and Bialystok's population had been halved.
She watched as the city resurrected itself under Soviet rule and went to study Russian philology at university before becoming a primary teacher. In middle age she felt the tentative easing of the Soviet grip, the flowering of Solidarity in the 1980s and then the heavy collapse of the Soviet Imperium. She took her pension of €200 a month just as Poland joined the European Union.
Of emigration, she says, she knows a thing or two. It was late in the 1970s when her husband, desperate for money to finish the house they were building in Bialystok, left for the US with a single suitcase and talk of an early return. She never saw him again.
"I was about 40 years old and I became a widow," she says. "It was difficult because in the 80s everything was rationed by the government - meat, sugar, coal for heating the house.
"He called every five years, and when his grandchild was born, and he had better contact with my daughter than with me. We didn't have any formal divorce - we just stopped contacting each other."
Larysa never settled with another man and lives now with one of her two sons and his young family on the outskirts of Bialystok. For six years her eldest son Grzegorz has lived in Tuam, Co Galway, with his wife and two children. They're settled there: the children are at school and both parents have well-paid jobs, Larysa says.
Her son used to return home twice a year, but last year he didn't come at all. "I miss them. I'd like to have all the children with me."
Larysa's experience has been that of Bialystok writ small. Over the garden fence, her neighbour has one daughter in the US and another in Britain. The Markowskis down the road have children in Italy. There are others in Belgium.
"They have to leave - there are no jobs for them here. The parents stay here just because they are used to it, but those young people don't want to have to struggle to make ends meet like their parents do. They don't want to repeat that pattern."
Bialystok, a three-hour drive north east of Warsaw, is the historical capital of Podlasie, the most sparsely populated province in the country and - until the accession this year of Romania and Bulgaria - the second poorest region in the European Union. In parts of Podlasie, one in four people is out of work.
The city bears the marks of its hasty post-war reconstruction, the soaring grey towers giving the skyline the look of a gloomy barchart, but on its fringes are districts where homes are being restored in the traditional wooden style.
The vagaries of its border-shifting past have made Podlasie a multicultural mosaic of Poles, Lithuanians, Russians and Belarussians.
In the centre of Bialystok the towering Catholic churches are outdone, in elegance if not in number, by the onion domes of Orthodox cathedrals. Only a handful of Jews remain.
Although some new apartments and office blocks have been built in the past year and the local economy is said to be strengthening, there is a discernible shortage of young people here. Many have moved to Warsaw; others - one in five, by one estimate - to the newly accessible states of western Europe.
Among them were Agnieska (27) and her boyfriend Wiesiek (30), both of whom returned in February after a second year-long stint in Limerick. The couple, a teacher and an engineer respectively, moved to Ireland - where they could earn four times more than at home - in order to save for an apartment in Bialystok, but since coming home things have not worked out as hoped.
"It's hard to find good jobs here," says Agnieska. "They offer you very low wages at the beginning, when you're young and inexperienced. One has to be very experienced and have a very good academic background to get a decent job. In Ireland it's much easier - with less experience you can get a good job that is well paid."
The plan to buy an apartment has been scuppered by rising property prices driven skywards by foreign buyers looking to invest. In the past two years, prices have risen by more than 100 per cent.
"We had planned to buy an apartment here last October and it cost one third less than it would now. It's horrible. We almost got the apartment, but at the last minute we didn't," says Agnieska. When she recently saw a list of buyers for a new block of flats in the city, almost half had foreign names.
Like Agnieska and Wiesiek, who are reluctantly thinking of returning to Ireland, Miroslaw Wasiluk feels he has no choice but to remain in Thurles, Co Tipperary, where he has been working as a truck driver since 2004. Married with four children, he too moved to Ireland to save money for an apartment for the family he left behind in Poland. He had been making steady progress until last July, when he was diagnosed with cancer.
Thinking that the treatment would take only a few months, he elected to stay in Ireland to see it through. However his condition turned out to be worse than first thought, so he hasn't been able to work for the past nine months. His wife Barbara doesn't have an income, so coming home would shunt on to the family a financial burden he doubts they could carry.
"If I came back to Poland, I would only get €100 a month to support my children," says Miroslaw, who is home for a two-week visit. "In Ireland I get €1,500 a month for my children. It's a huge difference. Because I haven't worked in Poland for so long, I would get very little money from the authorities."
"If he wasn't ill, then we could afford the mortgage by now," says Barbara Wasiluk. "Before that, of course, we were thinking that he could come back and we could settle, but now we are uncertain about the future."
The exodus of skilled workers from Podlasie has left shortages in the construction and services sectors that are being filled in some places by migrants from Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.
"This is the basic problem," says Joanna Dargiewicz, a journalist with the Kurier Poranny. "So many skilled workers went to Ireland and other countries. My friend has a building company. He built a house himself recently, but he couldn't find anybody to put tiles in the bathroom. Some of his best workers went to Ireland and the UK."
There is no typical emigrant. Official data show that some 200 doctors - including so many anaesthetists that they're now in short supply - and 100 dentists have left Podlasie for western Europe in recent years. The majority are young and recently qualified.
Piotr Karpowitz's daughter Magdalena works as an architect in Dublin and hopes one day to open a bridal boutique there, her father says proudly. She has invested in an apartment in Bialystok and has her eye on another in Dublin.
"We stay in contact every day with Skype and a webcam. We are in Ireland every day - we can see what the weather is like and everything," Piotr says.
"Going abroad is a way of gaining new perspectives, gaining new ideas. We hope our daughter will build up her knowledge and then come back here."
Despite labour shortages in some areas, and the well-publicised efforts of Rafal Dutkiewicz, the mayor of thriving Wroclaw, to persuade emigrants to return, the official view is that recent migration will serve the country well over time.
That stance, argues Witold Sobkow, who returned to Poland last summer after serving as ambassador to Ireland for four years, assumes that most emigrants will return.
"I think the assumption is that most of those people will come back to Poland and they will invest the money that they earned in Ireland or the UK or in other countries, so it will also help to develop our economy, and also the assumption is that they will bring a sort of western organisational or managerial culture, which is good for Poland," he says.
Though many - professionals, in particular - clearly have no intention of returning to Poland, some speak of keeping a close eye on economic advances at home, and the speed of progress will determine how soon they return.
Salaries in construction and many professions are rising steadily. With €63 billion in cohesion funds allocated to Poland in the EU's 2007-2013 budget and preparations due to begin for the joint-staging (with Ukraine) of the European Championships in 2012, the building industry is in desperate need of labour. A welder who wouldn't have found work in Poland five years ago can now demand 7,000 zlotych (€1,800) a month.
Last year Larysa Skorczynska visited Ireland for the first time, to be there for her granddaughter Weronika's first Holy Communion in Tuam. She tells of how one day during her stay she visited a library and was struck by the pictures that lined the walls. They were of Ireland in the 1950s and the children, she noticed, were in their bare feet. How poor the place must have been, she thought. Perhaps the same transformation will happen in Poland, she suggests, "but it's a long-term process".
"Ireland has developed very much. I could see how people live - it's very rich. The Irishmen came back to Ireland and I saw that people in Ireland now live in little palaces. I'm 68 so I'm probably not going to live to see that moment in Poland."
Would she not consider joining her son in Ireland? "No, my roots are deep in the ground. It's very beautiful out there, but my heart would break. Poland is poor, but it's ours. It's mine."
[ changingplaces@irish-times.ie ]
Douglas Gageby Fellowship