Rush west leaves Polish families in tatters

WARSAW, Sep 21: Pawel Wolko rarely gets angry. Director of an orphanage in western Poland, patience and tolerance are tools of his trade.

But recently, he has lost his temper as he has come face-to-face with a disturbing side-effect of migration -- mothers trying to leave their children behind in their quest for a better life in the west.

''I have screamed at a couple of these women,'' Wolko told Reuters by telephone from the village of Bierutow, 300 km southwest of Warsaw. ''I ask them what in God's name they are thinking.'' Since Poland joined the European Union in 2004, six women and one man have come to Wolko's orphanage to ask if they could leave their offspring in his care because they wanted to move abroad.

''Some have tried to give us reasons and make excuses,'' Wolko said. ''They say it is their business. But once they go, it becomes our business. Children are not toys you can leave behind.'' Wolko has found himself at the extreme end of a trend that is changing Polish society, sometimes radically, and prompting soul-searching about the human cost of so many Poles going west to seek their fortunes.

Around 600,000 Poles have migrated since the ex-communist country joined the EU, the government says. Some estimates put the number as high as 2 million, or 5 percent of the population, although that may include those who have since returned.

Many of those who leave end up in Britain and Ireland, which with Sweden immediately gave unlimited access to workers from the new EU states that joined in 2004.

The sheer scale of the movement has stoked fears in some countries that eastern European migrants will overwhelm public services and drive down wages.

In villages and towns across Poland, the cost of migration is also being totted up: sociologists blame migration for an increase in divorces, and this summer, Poles were shocked to read newspaper reports that two women had left their children at orphanages in southern Poland before leaving for western Europe.

Anna Giza, a sociologist at Warsaw University, said 40 years of communist rule had made Poles suspicious of institutions, causing them to retreat into tight-knit families. Now migration is testing those bonds. ''Some of these dramatic decisions, cases of mothers leaving their children for instance, show us how traditional ties are weakening,'' Giza said.

With unemployment running above 15 percent and wages in poorer regions as low as 0 monthly, even traditional families are considering a move abroad.

Andrzej, a photographer who declined to give his last name, says poverty prompted his wife Maria, 47, to take a job at a nursing home in southern England, even though it meant leaving their 22-year-old son Kamil, who has Down's Syndrome, behind.

''It's hard on us,'' he said. ''Kamil cries when she leaves. But she had no job here, no future. I can't blame her for going, even though I get depressed.'' Andrzej's situation is common in his native Bialystok, a city of 270,000 near the Belarussian border, where 14 percent of workers are unemployed, the average monthly wage is 2,220 zlotys (0), and winter temperatures drop to minus 30 Celsius.

So many have left Bialystok, some neighbourhoods are practically devoid of young people. Many move to Brussels, where shops now sell Bialystok's daily newspaper.

JUST FUNERALS

In Siemiatycze, a nearby city, officials have reported a surge in drug abuse and truancy among teenagers left with grandparents by parents who work abroad.

''We see a lot of minuses to migration,'' said Mayor Zbigniew Radomski. ''Children are growing up with grandparents instead of with parents.'' But some officials think it is healthy for Poles, who were separated from the West by the Iron Curtain for more than 40 years, to strike out and see the world.

''Living abroad makes you wiser,'' said Jan Dobrzynski, supervisor of the Bialystok region and member of the ruling Law and Justice Party. ''Poles abroad are gaining new experience and knowledge.'' The view may be somewhat rose-tinted -- Poland's consul-general in London said this month that up to 3,000 Poles were homeless in Britain, with some turning to crime, others to drugs or alcohol.

Other Poles have complained of bad treatment at the hands of unscrupulous employers in western Europe. Often, workers have no written contracts, leaving them vulnerable to abuse.

Dobrzynski, who describes himself as an optimist, says the wave of migration is only temporary.

''New firms are opening. I hope the majority of migrants will come back.'' The question of how many will return divides experts but sociologists say migration has changed some towns forever.

More than 1,000 people have left Perlejewo, a string of farming hamlets south of Bialystok, out of a population of 4,400 in a wave of migration that started in the mid-1990s and continues today.

Villagers talk in hushed tones about ''double families'', or migrants who have children both in Poland and abroad. In recent years, sociologists have interviewed schoolchildren here, reporting that some thought the capital of Poland was Brussels, the city where many of their parents work.

Mayor Krzysztof Radziszewski says migration is an inevitable consequence of family dairy farms being squeezed by the rise of larger, corporate farms.

His neighbour, Krzystyna Klepacka, a 55-year-old with three adult children abroad, said it made her sad to see so many go.

''Half this place has vanished,'' she said. ''We don't have births anymore, just funerals.'' But she is not against migration itself, and describes a willingness to move as part of an age-old Polish spirit.

''We Poles are a dynamic people,'' Klepacka said. ''We were occupied for centuries. Emigrating is part of our history. It's part of how we survive.''

Reuters