julka interview 1

Julka: How would you define how communism worked in practice, for you?

Marysia: So for me in practice it meant that going abroad and seeing the west wasn’t possible, right? So look, you could travel to East Germany [laughing] or to Russia or somewhere, but you couldn’t get to the real world and this world was only known through some messages, umm, maybe there was something on TV already, maybe not yet actually, uhh, through stories, through packages, cause there were these packages that people sent from abroad with all that colourful stuff. That was one thing, another thing was that, umm, you also had that, um, that jump, that there was nothing in stores really, oh, and this window to the world was Pewex, right? That was the only thing that showed you what was maybe sold abroad. So that, hmm. At my house we didn’t really, you know, battle communism, in a sense that, we didn’t organize underground education or printing of flyers, nothing like that. Umm, and the queues, queues for everything, that’s what I remember, you stand in the queue and there is nothing [in stores].
[…]
And the rationing, you couldn’t buy more than, for example, two blocks of butter if they already bought the butter. The whole family had to stand in line and each buy one block of butter.

Julka: Ok. Couldn’t just one person get butter for the whole family?

Marysia: No, well one person could maybe…there were restrictions, so you could get maybe one or two blocks of butter but not more than that.
[…]
Absurdities like that.