Pole Found Home ‘Like Prison'

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30677, 17 February 1965, Page 9

Pole Found Home ‘Like Prison'

(New Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, February 16. A Pole who visited his homeland after a 20-year absence said this week it had been akin to going back to prison. Mr M. Gorzkowski—who left New Zealand on December 14 for a visit to Warsaw—said Poland seemed “like a foreign country.”

Mr Gorzkowski, bom and reared in Warsaw, was taken prisoner by the Germans, returned to his homeland to visit his mother. With difficulty he obtained a visa for the Warsaw visit. En route he travelled through many of the iron curtain countries. Among the changes he noted in Poland was the absence of amateur athletes. Not once did he see an athlete training on the road. Mr Gorzkowski was told they trained in stadiums during working hours—al-

though they were being paid factory wages at the time. He noted in Warsaw that people still queued for groceries, and farmers brought goods to town by horse and cart to sell on the black market. In the squares, Mr Gorzkowski said, people with suf-

ficent money to pay the higher prices bought their produce direct. He commented that in spite of “considerable pressure” to turn all farms into state cooperatives there still were many private farmers. In spite of tension and low wages, the people he met expressed themselves quite freely, and had their own jokes about the regime imposed on them, Mr Gorzkowski said. Mr Gorzkowski, who has a carpet cleaning firm in New Zealand, attended a conference of professional carpet cleaners in the United States before visiting Warsaw.