20 east

The end of the world is nigh! Britain is about to be hit by a nationwide soft-fruit drought because all the Poles are going home, or just don’t fancy living in cow sheds any more.

With thousands of workers from Poland and other eastern European countries returning home to profit from their own booming economies, the reluctance to join the annual picking bonanza is being held up as evidence of Britain’s dwindling attraction as a destination for migrants willing to accept low wages or undertake unskilled jobs.

Good for them, I say! Poland sent you its poor, its tired, its huddled masses yearning to be rich and what did you do to them? You made them do all the crap jobs nobody else wanted and simultaneously sank the GBP. Now they’re coming home. Surprise, surprise!

I must say I’m deeply impressed at how all these fruit and veg growers managed to plant at least 50,000 tonnes more than they used to (one assumes) on the basis that all this cheap labour was available. Emphasis on the “was”. Short-sighted, perhaps, to plant so much in the expectation that all the Poles are going to hang around?

Of course, the crisis is not restricted to Summer Puddings and Wild Berry Crumbles. Oh no, it extends into the arena of home improvements too. Britain is about to be be flooded by a sea of dripping taps with people climbing atop half finished houses to wave at rescue helicopters that are busy ferrying Poles back home.

Despite its brain drain, Poland’s economy has been growing at a rapid rate – some 22 per cent, cumulatively, in the past four years (twice the rate of ours). Unemployment is down to 10 per cent (half of what it was four years ago). Wages are rising, as is the strength of the Polish zloty. A pound was worth more than seven zlotys when Poland joined the EU in 2004, but today it’s down to under four and a half. That’s a whole lot less of a reason to stay to do our plumbing and fruit picking. The editor of a London-based Polish newspaper recently said she thought that if the pound fell to three and a half zlotys, 70 per cent of our Poles would pack their bags.

I think it’s certainly time for Poles to get those bags out of the attic and freshen them up a little! Also for Britain to review that policy of restricting access to Romanians, Bulgarians and the like.

Assuming there is a mass repatriation (is that the right word?), I wonder what long term consequences this might have on Anglo-Polish relations, also on British immigration policy in the future. This must be the first case of “locust-immigration”. They come in swarms, they take what they can, they leave.

You will tremble at my voice:
Grunwald, swords, King Jagiełło!
Cutting through the armor,
as the gale howled and blew;
mounds of corpses, mounds of bodies,
and the blood flowed in a river.
That’s it is! The work of Giants:
Witold, Zawisza, Jagiełło,
there it is! On the battlefield
armor gleams in the trenches,
javelins, and broken spearpoints,
shafts driven through bodies,
a dam of corpses, a dike of corpses,
a mound made up of knights..

Translation: Stanislaw Wyspianski: The Wedding by Gerard T. Kopolka, Ann Arbor, Ardis, p105, (1990)

The Battle of Grunwald, or, according to the Germans, the 1st Battle of Tannenberg, took place on July 15th, 1410. Whilst the battleground was pretty spread out, the final action took place close to Grunwald, circa 200km north of Warsaw on the way to Gdansk.

It is a moment when Polish forces, helped by Lithuanians and others, defeated an enemy (Teutonic Knights) in a great battle, one of the greatest battles of medieval Europe. It goes without saying then that there are not many Poles who do not know some details of Grunwald. I can’t say it is universally seen as a great victory because there is at least one Pole who sees it as a defeat but you’d have to ask him for the explanation.

In the same way that Poles go crazy about Małysz or more recently about Kubica today, the artists and poets of the past went equally crazy about Grunwald, pumping every last gramme of patriotism out of the thing. As examples; Wyspianski’s poem is at the top of the page and below you can see Matejko’s painting of the battle.

At this size, or even the larger version (click the picture) it’s hard to make much of it. That’s because the original painting is a whopping 4.26 m high and 9.87m long! You can find it in the National Museum in Warsaw, it’s worth a look. You can read more about understanding the painting at this site.

So, big battle, loads of dead people, yadda yadda, blah. If you were to visit the battlefield today, this is what you’ll find:

Almost at the parking area you get a short introduction to the scene

There’s a place you can buy imitation shields, dead knights or sword shaped lollipops.

On the way up to the monument is a pile of rubble that is apparently an old Grunwald monument that used to stand in Krakow but was demolished by one or other bad guys and has now been artistically rearranged on the battlefield.

There’s a nice sculpture of knights on the look-out

and a model of the battle. Zosia here is busy taking on the Teutonic’s single-handedly using only the power of her pink raincoat!

There’s a small display area under the mound

with things like this to see

Finally, my own nod in the direction of Polish patriotism, the sun shining through the Polish flag

I must say I was surprised not to see the flags of those nations who helped Poland win the battle, Lithuania at the very least. Perhaps that’s what the empty flagpole is for? (The second flag is the EU)

You can see all the Grunwald photos at larger sizes in this gallery.

Enjoy your trip!