They all come for different reasons

Many came to earn money, others because of love, some didn’t have a choice. All started at the bottom, some climbed up the ladder. They are viewed as cheap manpower, but came to England for different reasons: the Polish.

During six years in Brighton Joanna Baraniecka managed to climb up the ladder. But it was not money that brought her to England. Joanna had an excellent job in Poland, when she suddenly fell in love with an Englishman. After a month they got married and settled in Brighton. Joanna’s parents, deeply catholic, disagreed with her decision and cut all contacts with her. Being well-educated, getting her first cleaning-job wasn’t easy. “My CV was too good. Why does a woman with a degree want to work as a cleaning person? They kept asking me,” Joanna recalls. One year later a friend found her a new job in an insurance company, but she did not get on with her colleagues, and quit after two months. “Once my boss told me the tea I had made tasted like dishwater. I didn’t understand it as a joke and it made me very upset. It was a cultural clash,” Joanna reminisces. Her husband started seeing other women, they got divorced, and Joanna was alone. At that time she was already in touch with the Polish community, where she met her second husband. “This time, it was done properly, in a church, and all my family came to the wedding.” Joanna found a decent job at American Express, which she has been doing until now. After giving birth to her first child, she plans to return to Poland. “I don’t want my children to grow up in England,” she explains. Johanna has not found the Brighton Polish community to be. “If you tell those massive guys with shaved heads from the Polish pub about coming to church, they would laugh at you,” Joanna describes.

The small Polish bar mentioned by Joanna is called Polska Strefa is located in Prince Albert Street in The Laines. Arthur, who is one of its regulars, concurs with Joanna’s claim. “I don’t believe in god. But I think these people who divide all in groups are just stupid. If I like somebody, I talk to him,” he explains, sipping from a bottle of Ziwiec lager. Arthur comes from a rural part of Poland, which suffers from the highest unemployment rates. But it is not the money that brought him in the UK. “I can take out my mobile phone and don’t have to be scared that someone will come and mug me. The quality of my life is better,” says Arthur after two years in Brighton. He spent the first few days sleeping on the floor at his friend’s place. However, their friendship soured, when Arthur’s friend asked him to pay rent which would have covered the whole apartment. “I didn’t understand it. We had been friends for fifteen years!” recalls Arthur. He was left on the street, hardly speaking any English, when he met James, an English bartender, who offered him a place to stay. Arthur has always gone through life the hard way and even in Brighton he often gets into fights with locals. “They come to me and tell me what the fuck I’m looking for. So I reply the same. But I never hit anyone first,” he points out.

Michal, a Polish student of musical production at University of Brighton, is the opposite of Arthur. He is an intellectual who grew up in the Polish cultural metropolis of Krakow. “I don’t hang around with Polish. They are not interesting for me. I don’t see a reason why should I speak with them here when I wouldn’t speak with them in Poland,” says Michal. However, his girlfriend Anna, is Polish. They despise both the church and the pub communities. “Are you being silly,” reacts Michael when I ask him to come to the Polish bar for a drink. The student loan supplemented by part-time kitchen work allows Michal to plan: he plans to use this money to pay the mortgage on a flat in Krakow which he will subsequently rent.

While Michal has endless possibilities, others did not have as many. “After the war was over, we would prefer returning to free Poland, but that just wasn’t possible,” says Wilhelm Kuker, a 79 year-old ex-serviceman. He came to England with General Anders’s second Polish Corps in 1945. Although Poland was freed from Nazis by the Russian army, Kuker and his family already had their experience with the Soviets. In 1939 Poland was divided between Hitler and Stalin, the Soviets deported his family to the Siberian city of Asino. “Here I saw children dying of famine,” he recalls. They were rescued by Churchill, who exchanged Polish soldiers with Stalin for weapons and food. Through Iran and Iraq they arrive in Palestine, where they received military training and joined British forces. “I was only seventeen years old,” recalls Kuker. While Europe was celebrating Russians as war heroes, he was already predicting another war: Against Soviets. “British citizens didn’t understand it. They called us fascists,” the Polish veteran laughs. However, the British government appreciated their military contribution. “We were offered British citizenship straight away, but being English or Polish didn’t make any difference. There was so much work, everything needed to be rebuilt.” Being already engaged to an English girl, he settled down in Brighton in 1946. His children are the second generation of Poles: doing more prestigious jobs, yet they hardly speak their parents’ native language. His oldest daughter is a secretary with the police force, the second has a garage business, the third is a security officer in hospital, and the youngest is a manager of estate agents.

“There is five thousand of them in Brighton and the suburbs,” says Tadeusz Bialasz, Polish priest. One of his duties is to hold Polish Sunday masses in Mary St. Magdalen’s church in Upper North Street. “We open new chaplaincies for polish people in areas where they never had been before. It’s spreading,” the Brighton priest makes it clear. “Because of the new workers.”

The last 2001 census does not mention any Polish minority because EU enlargement that allowed Polish nationals to work within the UK came only in June 2004. But why are there so many workers from Poland and not as much from other new EU members? “They don’t have their own priest. If they had a chaplaincy, it would be a lot of them. They don’t stay together,” explains Bialasz. 95 percent of Polish population is registered as Catholic, which is a quality that other - rather atheistic - EU newcomers cannot match. Is it these religious beliefs that are causing that young Poles seem to settle down easier than other nations? “They try to find a church, first of all. They come to the polish centre. And the centre is run by the Polish parish.”

Preaching in a foreign country often involves practical tasks. “English give me a ring that they would like polish workers. It is easier to be in touch with me,” describes Bialasz. A recruitment agency also comes to the Community center on Farm Road every week and hires workers. According to Mr. Bialasz, half of workers go back home, while the other half settles down. “They do simple jobs for a while, but then work in the offices, some of them in the bank.

According to Mr. Bialasz, half of workers go back home, while the other half settles down for good. Those who stay want to assimilate, learn the British accent. “Last year I baptized more than ten Polish children in Brighton,” notes Bialasz. Will they become Polish or English? Only Time will tell.