Down and out in London
By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - 0 Comments
Many of those struggling to get by in the British capital are former immigrants from Eastern Europe
When the European Union expanded its borders eastward in 2004, more than half a million Poles took advantage of the newly opened border to pack up and move to Britain. They were joined by thousands more Czechs and Slovenians, and after the EU expanded again in 2007, migrants from Bulgaria and Romania.
Many thrived. Suddenly traditional English pubs were staffed by servers with Eastern European accents. The new arrivals were so ubiquitous in the trades that “Polish plumber” became a catchphrase.
Inevitably, however, thousands have also floundered. Estimates vary, but a disproportionate percentage of homeless in London are from Eastern Europe, most of them Poles. And when they do stumble, they fall harder than the locals. Migrants who have not worked full-time for more than a year do not qualify for many social assistance programs, such as housing benefits. Last year, a charity worker found homeless Poles roasting rats. Continue…
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The trouble with 'double genocide'
By Erica Alini - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 22 Comments
Efforts to equate Nazi and Soviet atrocities open old wounds on both sides of the old Iron Curtain
AKG-images/Newscom
A recent decision by the European Union has evoked the ghosts of horrors past. Last month, the European Commission rejected calls by countries in Eastern Europe to criminalize the denial of crimes perpetrated not only by Nazi but also Communist regimes, reviving a highly contentious debate over whether Soviet atrocities can be equated to the Holocaust. Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic argued that Soviet crimes “should be treated according to the same standards” as the Holocaust. But due to a lack of consensus, the proposal was rejected, though it remains under review.
The idea of a so-called “double genocide” law that links Nazi and Communist crimes concerns some Jewish commentators and Western countries. Critics paint Eastern Europe’s lobbying efforts as an attempt to rewrite history by focusing attention on its role as a victim of the Soviets rather than as a collaborator in the extermination of Jewish minorities during the Nazi occupation. Anti-Semitism, critics say, is alive and well in Eastern Europe. Lithuania, for instance, has shied away from trying some suspected Nazi war criminals, and waged a controversial campaign to investigate alleged crimes committed by Jewish partisans during the Second World War.
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Awful food, commie cars and the bad old days
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 5 Comments
German consumers are hearkening back to a simpler time, a time before capitalism. Sound familiar to anyone?
Travelling through Eastern Europe a few years ago, my companion and I took a tour of Nova Huta, the Krakow suburb that had been designed by Stalin as the ideal proletarian city. Our guide was Mike, an excitable 30-year-old in camo pants and a flat-top who had ditched his law career when he realized the old ladies selling potatoes in the market made more than he would.
Mike drove us around Nova Huta in a rickety old Trabant, pointing out various totalitarian sites, then took us to his rented apartment, which he had tricked out with all manner of Soviet-era furnishings, artwork and appliances. It was all very authentic. It was all very crappy.
This was my first experience with Ostalgie, a neologism that is a mash-up of the German words for east and nostalgia, meaning nostalgia for life in the GDR and the other countries of the former Soviet bloc. Ostalgie is a phenomenon driven by the conviction that while socialism was often difficult, life was in many ways better. Fear and suspicion may have been the background radiation of daily life, this view goes, but the old Communist societies were more egalitarian and had a greater sense of solidarity and common purpose.
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Dogs are victims in a scary war
By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 36 Comments
The magnificent Ovcharka
Looking at life from a dog’s point of view can refocus matters great and small. Take the Berlin Wall, which crumbled 20 years ago. Thousands of dogs policed that wall and just like that they were all out of a job—some 7,000 of them, apparently. The guard dog of choice was the Caucasian ovcharka, which coincidentally is a dog I hope to add to my two Hungarian kuvaszok if I am up to it. Some people rescue homeless dogs; I look for native East European breeds who share in an ersatz Jewish identity to this extent: in that part of the world, historically speaking, someone will try and do them in.The wall fell and West Berliners feared packs of ovcharkas storming into the city. Given the dog’s size (up to 90 kg) and its heritage—tearing the throats out of wolves and escapees alike—I can’t blame them. Just a month earlier, after brutally repressing demonstrations before the October visit of Mikhail Gorbachev to East Berlin and fearing more, the murderous Stasi chief Eric Mielke stated, “I will now . . . show that our authority still has teeth . . . [demonstrators] are cowardly dogs . . . they will run like rabbits as soon as they’ve seen our dogs.” Continue…
