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Human ‘Leftovers’ an Embarrassment in Poland

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

Behind the gleaming shops and fancy restaurants scuttle the garbage-scroungers, the homeless, alcoholics, drug addicts and others who have no place in the new Poland.

No one knows quite what to do with them, only where they are not wanted.

On Feb. 1, the most visible helping hand in Warsaw was withdrawn. The railroad station closed a charity bath and kitchen where they could clean up, eat some cabbage soup and bread, even get a change of clothes.

The unwashed who live, and sometimes die, in the station’s warren of tunnels did not fit the image Warsaw chose to present to travelers. Railroad officials said they could better be cared for someplace else, but did not say where.

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“They want to push these people out of the station and they think they will solve their problems that way,” said Marek Kotanski of the Monar charity, a campaigner for Poland’s new outcasts. “I think my country now is the very model of hypocrisy.”

One winter afternoon, 25 men and women in tattered coats lined up outside the kitchen next to the station’s sour-smelling garbage bins for one of the last hot meals.

Most were homeless, but some were pensioners who can neither adapt to the new Poland nor afford it. The general mood was as raw as the wind that lashed exposed hands and faces.

“Where will we go?” asked a middle-aged man with a mustache and a bright green beret who identified himself as Kazimierz, a resident of the station for three months. “This was the last gathering point for us.”

“Some of our officials consider garbage more important than people,” said Marian Czekalski, who ran the kitchen for Monar, Kotanski’s charity. “They would like to build new concentration camps and put these people in them.”

Reliable figures are hard to come by, but Poland’s homeless are thought to number tens of thousands--a new, growing social problem.

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For most Poles, the conversion from communism to capitalism of the last three years has meant greater opportunity and more available goods. But it also has brought soaring food and housing prices, 13% unemployment and cuts in social spending that have thrown many into poverty.

Those waiting for soup that day said there was no work in winter and that in summer, migrants from the former Soviet Union took the low-paid farm jobs.

Warsaw’s Central Station is sandwiched between the Marriott and the Holiday Inn, new hotels that cater to foreign executives and well-off tourists.

Jerzy Zaleski, manager of the station, argued that the location makes it a “calling card” for the city, but the bath and kitchen attracted derelicts. He said the permanent homeless population had grown from 60 to 250, and passengers complained of harassment and crime.

So he closed the kitchen and padlocked the bath, a cramped but warm oasis with several shower stalls, changing rooms for men and women and a supply of donated clothing. Kotanski pleaded in vain for an extension.

Zaleski said Monar broke several parts of the agreement signed when railroad officials permitted the bath and kitchen to be built a year ago in an unused storage area near the garbage bins.

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The agreement allowed 20 meals a day to be provided to people who came for baths, but Monar began feeding 200 people daily, creating congestion near the garbage cans, he said.

Kotanski, a sociologist who has built one of the Poland’s few charitable networks over the last decade, said the technical objections were a pretext, that Polish society simply does not want to be reminded of the needy.

“They hate me,” he said of the railroad officials.

Homeless people who live in the tunnels say they have been wronged.

“None of us steal. If we did, would we be standing in line for a bowl of soup?” asked Marian Siekierski, a bus driver for 42 years who said he cannot live on his small pension.

“There were thefts here at the Central Station even before the bath,” he said. “The difference is, now they have us to blame.”

Many who came to the bath were alcoholics, drug addicts, runaways or mentally ill. Dr. Waclaw Krawczyk, who volunteered his service twice weekly, said most had relatives with whom they could stay, but preferred living rough.

Kotanski spoke with pride of breaking the cycle of homelessness for some of the people.

“When these people were cleaned, deloused and dressed . . . they regained their dignity,” he said, and some moved into rural “colonies” run by Monar.

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“What is the sense of closing the bath now that it is already built?” said Czekalski, director of the kitchen. Monar had spent $20,000 on it, he said.

One denizen was philosophical.

Mieczyslaw Barwicki, 65, surveyed the others in the line and said: “They will cope. Look at me. I’ve been eating out of garbage bins for years.”

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