BUSH IN EASTERN EUROPE : Crowds for U.S. Visas Testify to America’s Allure in Poland

Just as President Bush’s official party was boarding a plane at the end of a two-day trip to Poland, Irena Kolosow, a 34-year-old kindergarten teacher from Bialystok, was standing outside the U.S. Embassy’s consular office here taking charge of another departure list. This one had 12,214 names on it, all hopeful applicants for visas to the United States.

“Do you know what number got in today?” someone asked.

“They got up to 4,500 today,” Kolosow said.

“And I must come here every day to check off my name?” someone else asked.

“Yes.”

“And how many people get in every day?” asked an anxious-looking woman, pushing through the dozens of others pressing for a look at the orderly rank of names and numbers in the limp notebook in Kolosow’s hand.

“About 500 or 600,” she said.

“OK, put me down. What’s my number?”

“You are 12,215,” she said.

In Line for Visas

If some travelers in the presidential party expressed puzzlement that crowds for the Bush visit seemed curiously small in the Polish capital, a partial explanation might be that so many Poles were otherwise occupied at the U.S. Embassy, waiting in line for visas.

“You are 12,216,” Kolosow was saying to the next applicant, who took the news calmly and wrote it down.

That number alone seemed ample testimony to the popularity in Poland of Bush and his message extolling democracy, free enterprise and the American way.

Or, in the words of Kazimierz Laskowski, 30, a truck driver, limbering up his English in preparation for what he hopes will be even more challenging exercise in the near future:

“America great! George Bush great! American job great!”

Laskowski probably has been coached not to utter those last three fateful words to the cold-eyed consular officers on the other side of the embassy gates, since such a declaration would result in almost immediate denial of his application. The gates of American opportunity, sweet words of praise for President Bush notwithstanding, do not swing open easily to Polish truck drivers looking for work.

Nevertheless, by the estimation of one member of the crowd Tuesday afternoon, 60% of those waiting to apply for visas intend, if their applications are approved, to stay in the United States and work, at least for a while.

“Sure,” said Donat Czerny, 22, “most people are going to work if they can.”

“Not some--all!” said a 38-year-old artist, Andrzej Martun, bringing a chorus of knowing laughter from the packed crowd at the iron bars of the consulate fence.

Tended by Polish Employee

The gate is tended by a Polish employee of the embassy who strolls about the interior courtyard and wields the removable latch-handle to the gate the way Frank Sinatra handles a microphone on stage. All eyes upon him, he moves as though centered in an invisible spotlight.

Although the crowd ranges from as many as a thousand early in the morning to several hundred by the time the consulate closes in the afternoon, not all of the 12,000 applicants are waiting on the well-trod pavement of Piekna Street, one of the best-known taxi drops in the city.

Rather, the unofficial and self-organized lists, kept in notebooks and passed hand to hand to reliable-looking applicants, maintains the official order of admission to the consulate grounds, where applicants then fill out the lengthy forms and wait for an interview by an American consular officer.

Out of 500 to 600 applications processed daily, about 200 are approved. The demand is highest now, in the summer vacation season, but the crowd outside the embassy is perpetual--and undeterred by rain, snow or cold. And, although it was hard to determine if the Bush visit to Poland stimulated a noticeable surge in the numbers, the visit of the President brought forth a clear feeling of gratitude and pride.

“I think it showed that Poland has another brother,” said Jerzy Grodziewicz, 40, a construction worker. “So far, we have had only one brother, the one to the east, the one that the world has thought we are chained to. After this visit, the world will see that we have other possibilities.”

“For us, this visit by the President is like rain in a drought,” said Martun, the artist.

Asked if he thought Bush’s promise of aid was disappointing to Poles who, seeking more, had hoped that Washington would bail Poland out of its economic woes, Martun said he was encouraged.

“Some people expected more, perhaps, but we should not expect a spray of money.”

Grodziewicz said that he is optimistic about reform in Poland but that the outcome of initial steps toward reform here--partially free elections and the presence of Solidarity in the National Assembly--will really be determined not in Poland but in the Soviet Union. “Bush himself will not be able to do much,” he said. “It has to end where it began, in the Soviet Union.”

Still, said Jan Puscian, a 52-year-old Warsaw mechanic, “people are very satisfied” that Bush made his trip to Poland. The trip shows, he believes, that things “will be better, for sure.”

Kolosow, still with a crowd of visa applicants around her, paused for a moment. She, her husband and daughter, she said, are hoping to visit her sister in Chicago, whom she has not seen for nine years and who recently gave birth to twins. Her husband put their names on the list Friday; their number was 9,000-something. It might be the end of next week before their number comes up.

As for President Bush, she was “pleased that he is interested in Poland and the Poles” but she was not sure the trip itself, and his promise of help, would turn the tide.

“We by ourselves should do more,” she said. “If we show we can do things by ourselves, we will be helped by ourselves.”