Poland

Now, Poland, there's a union town . . . er, country. So what's the Marriott Corp., that avowedly non-union hotel chain, doing opening the country's first Western-managed hotel? Just paying the workers at the Warsaw Marriott better-than-average wages while feeding them two meals a day - not to mention bringing in desperately needed foreign currency for the Polish government. The company's boost to the local economy also extends to the contracts it has signed with Polish farmers, fishermen and a brewery to ensure a steady stream of local provisions.

In an effort to calm Polish fears of a powerful, reunified Germany, President Bush yesterday told Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki that "Poland must have a voice" in any international decisions "affecting the fate of Poland. " Bush's statement - the broadest commitment the United States has made to a major Polish role in determining the shape of a new Europe - was made in a White House ceremony welcoming Poland's first non-communist prime minister since World War II. Talks later between Bush and Mazowiecki focused on Poland's fears that a reunified Germany might try to claim territory ceded to Poland by Germany after World War II. Moreover, Poland wants a greater role than it has been granted in international discussions about German reunification.

Poland is finding that introducing democracy and capitalism is easier said than done, according to Polish diplomat Zbigniew Kudas, who described Poland as a nation where events are changing faster than attitudes. Although change in Poland has become irreversible, Poles must now become accustomed to the complexities of elections and free enterprise, said Kudas, who addressed a crowd of 100 people at Camden County College last Wednesday. "You also have a transition of minds," said Kudas, first secretary of the Polish Embassy in Washington.

I came back three weeks ago after two years in Poland and was greeted as a returning war veteran. I wondered why until I read a Dec. 14 front-page headline. "A struggle for survival grips Poles" may catch the reader's attention, but it does not capture the atmosphere in Warsaw. In a sense it is equally apt for Philadelphia. I imagine there are mothers here who also cannot afford to buy winter shoes for their children. Sure, Poles have less than Americans. Acquiring simple things like toilet paper is an art and important things like an apartment for some seem next to impossible, but life is not "a struggle for simple existence.

Poland yesterday called the terms of a U.S. offer of emergency milk "arrogant and abusive," and countered with a pledge of 5,000 blankets and sleeping bags for New York's "many thousands of homeless who sleep in the streets. " The U.S. government has offered to send Poland 50,000 tons of powdered milk to replace milk that might have been contaminated because of the Soviet nuclear accident. But yesterday, Jerzy Urban, a spokesman for the Polish government, assailed a May 6 U.S. Senate resolution urging that the milk be distributed through Polish church and charitable groups, rather than by the Communist government, to make sure it was given out without political considerations.

More than a decade of struggle for freedom and democracy will bear fruit in Poland this year. Poland is getting cable television. Yes, it's cable television for a nation in which less than a quarter of the households have telephones but 98 percent have television sets, according to the joint venture that will build the nationwide cable system. Cable television for a country where the only two broadcast channels - both government-owned - each operates about 12 hours a day. And, true to the capitalist system their nation is adopting, Poles will pay a lot for the new service, perhaps as much as $22 a month in a country where the average monthly income per person is less than $200.

The Solidarity trade union movement, suppressed for years with its leaders sometimes imprisoned, now governs Poland after the abdication of the ruling Communist Party yesterday - a voluntary passage of power unthinkable only months ago. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, 62, the editor of Solidarity's weekly magazine and who was interned for a year during martial law in 1980-81, was asked formally last night to fashion a new government by President Wojciech Jaruzelski,...

President Bush this summer will make the first visit to Hungary by a U.S. president and will stop in Poland to show American approval of reforms in Eastern Europe, the White House said yesterday. White House officials said Bush would visit the two countries, which are at the cutting edge of change in Eastern Europe, in mid-July before heading to Paris to attend the annual economic summit of Western industrial powers. Bush might add Yugoslavia to his itinerary, the White House said.

Renee Wright began the spring semester at Bodine High School for International Affairs by teaching Eastern European geography to her 10th-grade class, and discussing how the new openness will affect the former Soviet bloc countries. On Sunday, the former student-teacher will start to find out about Eastern Europe firsthand as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in Poland. And she'll be making history, as well, as one of the first 120 Peace Corps volunteers dispatched anywhere in Europe.

When Dierra Poland was disqualified from the Group 2 sectional high jump - the senior forgot to take off her necklace before jumping - she was not the crestfallen teen that Deptford coach Bill Corsey expected to encounter. "She says, 'You know, Coach, maybe it was the will of the Lord for me not to high-jump but just to run the hurdles and win a state championship,' " Corsey said. Poland did just that in the Group 2 100-meter hurdles Saturday, even though the second half of her race didn't go nearly as smoothly as the first half.

BIALKA TATRZANSKA, Poland - Just a few years ago, winter was a dead season for the Kotelnica Mountain, quiet under a quilt of snow. Today, Kotelnica vibrates with activity from ski fans who flock to the new resort, one of Poland's trendiest. The transformation happened in just a decade and reflects the inventiveness and enterprise seen in Poland since a market economy arrived with democracy in 1990. People in this 17th-century village at the foot of the Tatra Mountains in southern Poland were making a modest living on farming and sheep breeding, with additional funds coming from relatives who had gone, in a long-standing tradition, to the United States for work.

WARSAW, Poland - Polish and U.S. officials are engaged in intense talks to determine the fate of a sensitive object: a barrack that once housed doomed prisoners at the Nazis' Auschwitz death camp and is now on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Poland is demanding the return of the artifact, which has been on loan to the Washington museum for more than 20 years and is an important object in its permanent exhibition. But the U.S. museum says the valuable object shouldn't be moved, partly because it is too fragile.

Wislawa Szymborska, 88, Poland's 1996 Nobel Prize-winning poet whose simple words and playful verse plucked threads of irony and empathy out of life, died Wednesday of lung cancer at her home in the southern city of Krakow. The Nobel citation called her the "Mozart of poetry," a woman who mixed the elegance of language with "the fury of Beethoven" and tackled serious subjects with humor. Most of the world had not heard of the soft-spoken Ms. Szymborska before she won the Nobel Prize.

Sister M. Melchior Lerch, 95, a visiting nurse and an administrator at a residence for the elderly, died Thursday, Dec. 15, at the Little Servant Sisters of the Immaculate Conception Provincialate in Cherry Hill. Sister Melchior grew up as Helena Lerch in Lodz, Poland. In 1935, she entered the convent of the Little Servant Sisters in Brzozow, Poland. She was an accomplished embroiderer of liturgical garments, a bookkeeper at a children's home run by her order, and later a superior at several religious houses in Poland.

'We told you so!" The statement was less a rebuke than a sad recognition among friends of an avoidable mistake. It came from a former Polish government official who early on warned that the Obama administration's "reset" of relations with Russia was repeating a historic blunder. His country and other states that had been given away to Hitler and Stalin, and then won their independence back with the collapse of the Soviet system, were again being surrendered for the false prospect of Russian support for U.S. policy goals.

One thought comes first about the overpowering Our Class : The cast and creative team at the Wilma Theater, giving the play a remarkable U.S. premiere, are serving more than audiences, or even the notion of theater. Their ample abilities strikingly honor the memory of 1,600 Jews who were marched by Catholic Poles - not invading Germans - into a barn that their attackers locked and set afire in a drench of kerosene. Our Class , by Polish playwright Tadeusz Slobodzianek, is produced here in its English translation by Ryan Craig.

WARSAW, Poland - Activists from Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia observed Poland's parliamentary election Sunday to learn firsthand how to hold the first democratic votes in their countries in decades. Rania Mbarki, one of five election officials from Tunisia, emerged optimistic about her nation after visiting two polling stations in Warsaw. "I want our election to show the will of the people, whatever it is," she said, adding that voter registration is high in her region of Tunisia.

Listening to the white-haired men and women on the screen talk about being forced into slave labor and watching their friends and family members be brutalized and carted off to concentration camps, it is easy to think these people could have been my parents, grandparents, or friends. That's just the point. These ordinary residents of Krakow, Poland, interviewed for a documentary film decades after the Nazi occupation of their lovely, historic city, are Everyman and Everywoman.

LONI W. LUPAK was a sought-after hairstylist in Frazer, Chester County, for 21 years. He didn't have far to go to get to work; he lived upstairs with his beloved dogs and cats. It was clear that Loni's popularity was not confined to scissors and curlers. A well-read man with many interests, he could discuss any subject with authority, and many customers sought him out for that reason. Loni, an immigrant from Poland who became a naturalized American citizen in 2001, died Thursday after a struggle of several months with colon cancer.

Aleksy Kowalik, 96, one of the three surviving heroes of Poland's first World War II battle, has died. Mr. Kowalik's daughter Jadwiga Bucz told the Polish news agency PAP that her father died Sunday in the southern city of Blachownia, where the family has lived for more than 60 years. Mr. Kowalik was among the 205 Polish troops guarding the navy's arsenal on Westerplatte peninsula, on the Baltic coast, who on Sept. 1, 1939, put up a fight against the German warship Schleswig-Holstein.