E-VITA

I remember the moment when I received my passport – a document which is so obvious to hold now or it is not really necessary to use when you travel in the EU countries, but in the 70s and 80s it was almost impossible to get. First of all you had to fill all the different forms and hand them to a militia officer (there was no police at that time) at the militia station. They checked you in and out, you had to queue long long hours (I joined the queue at 5 a.m.) and then they put on the information boards the lists with the names of people who were lucky enough to get the document which was viewed a spark of hope and made you feel you were not really living in prison.

There were two types of passports – one allowed to travel to communist countries (Czechoslovakia, DDR, Hungary etc.) and the other was ‘a normal one’ with a text on it printed in Russian ‘all countries of the world’. Of course it was much more difficult to get the later one and it was not to be kept at home; after you came back from abroad you were obliged to call to the militia station, they asked you different strange questions and your passport was left there.

I had my passport allowing to travel to Germany where my relatives lived. I visited them several times in the early 90s. It was like a different world to me – shops such as ALDI and LIDL were like luxury islands for me and my friend who travelled with me. I was truly shocked and stunned by the abundance and variety of goods, colours of the city, nice cars people were driving and clothes they were wearing… Every next time I went back to Germany the differences were less and less explicit, times were changing, Poland was undergoing transformation and the difference between west and east were becoming less obvious to me.

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