PiS stronghold: In Godziszów, a village near Lublin, the ruling party received almost 89 percent of the vote in the last parliamentary election.
Image: AFP
Łuków is a typical small town in eastern Poland. Twenty years ago the post-communists were the strongest force there, today it is firmly in the hands of the PiS. What happened?
vAll that can be seen at the old distillery in Burzec is the high brick chimney. Bushes and trees are overgrowing what may be left of the buildings. It can’t be much, because the people from the village took them down stone by stone in the early 1990s and turned the bricks into money. Before that, they drank the supplies of liquor that they had found in the distillery’s storage rooms. Burzec celebrated for two weeks, says Sławomir Skwarek.
At that time he was the principal of the elementary school in the former manor house across the street. The distillery had survived two world wars and communism, but it did not withstand the radical economic reforms that followed the end. “After the state farm was dissolved, everything collapsed here,” says Skwarek. Many of Burzec’s children came to his school hungry and poorly dressed. He observed how families lost cohesion and the village community began to fall apart. Some were lost in the lack of prospects that had gripped the village. Others found a way out by having the men work far away from women and children in Warsaw or Poland’s industrial areas.
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