Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak Peasants: The Story of Our Grandmothers

Translated by Katarzyna Byłów

CHAPTER 2

GRAZING

A rural child is only briefly an idler. Grazing animals is the profession of a child everywhere. In fact, children take to the fields everything that can be herded to graze: horses, cows, goats, pigs, geese; they keep an eye on ducks from the waterside and bring them back to the farm before nightfall. Anyway, from the age of six, a child is a domestic worker.

Maria Librachowa, Dziecko wsi polskiej (A Child of the Polish Countryside), 1934

In 1929, the newspaper Głos do Kobiet Wiejskich (The Voice to Rural Women) run a frontpage account of a female instructor who had been teaching classes on housekeeping skills in rural areas: “One autumn day, a seven-year-old daughter of the woman hosting me in the village arrived from the pasture weeping, frightened, sick. When her mother undressed her for bedtime, she saw that the bottom of the child’s shirt was covered in blood, and that the whole lower part of her tummy was also covered in blood clots. Upon closer examination, it became clear that the girl had been raped. The child was drowsy for a long time, as if dazed, but on the third day, despite the girl’s crying, her mother sent her out again to graze cows on a fallow land.”

Grazing animals or pasionka is a ubiquitous part of a peasant child. Woken at dawn, the child takes animals, usually a cow, to pastures, oftentimes going through the whole village. Once in the pasture, the child makes sure the animal does not wander into a neighbours’ land or run away. Late in the evening, the child brings the animal back to the farm. “There are villages, where all the children are slaves to cows, calves, sheep, horses, pigs,” as Pelagia Restorffowa, a social activist, fiercely opposing grazing by children, wrote in The Voice to Rural Women, back in 1928.

Everyone knows that some children, instead of going to school,  go to the pastures. Very young girls, several year old, usually start by herding small animals, geese and ducks, and as they get older, they take over their older siblings’ task of grazing cows. Kazimiera Długołęcka, who remembered her family as being quite well-off  (“we had floorboards and double windows”), used to graze geese from the age of five: “We grazed on a commons about a kilometre and a half from the house. They cut us a slice of bread, mum made a hole in it and put butter in there, covered it with another piece she had hollowed out, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and that was food for the whole day.”

Pelagia Restorffowa is vehement about it: “What are these groups of children doing, roaming the forests like this? What corruption, what villainy they are learning, how stunting it is for them, this mindless idle wandering, and girls and boys being constantly together, without their elders’ supervision, with no one to mind them or keep them in check – one can easily guess. Can a cow or a pig be fed in no other way than at the expense of a child’s soul? At the cost of irreparable loss of the best, the most beautiful years of a person’s life?” What she suggests is that the pasture is a place where children undergo sexual initiation. She says: “All debauchery is taught while grazing,” and then adds: “Grazing by children is an old relic that must be eradicated and, along with the spinning wheel, ard and other old things, must be forgotten as soon as possible.”

But it is impossible. The poorest families send their children to well-to-do farmers to work, even if just for food.

Village children meet at a commons, but the girls usually keep to themselves. “Throughout the summer, shepherd boys from different villages were constantly at war with each other. We raided each other, for no reason whatsoever, and there was fighting. Sticks, whips, stones brought from the field and, as a last resort, turf were all used as weapons. We rarely allowed girls to play, as we considered them to be inferior human species, because they were cry-babies, could not ride a horse and so on. The latter filled us with particular pride,” as an author from the Opoczno district recalled in his diary, published in the collection Młode pokolenie chłopów (The Young Peasant Generation). Another one described the ‘hullabaloos’ and ‘scrambles’ from which girls were excluded: “we would chase them away with a stick, as we thought them to be inferior, unfit even for playing. Anyway, that was the custom.”

Mothers wring their hands, for grazing transforms their children. A village woman from Miechów recalled: “As soon as they started grazing cows, they learnt to swear so much, it was awful to hear all that cursing. The rod would not help, they would run away to the fields like wild animals.” She finally found a way – for every swear word they used, the children had to recite Pater Noster ten times over. It worked.

Speaking about their past, many men romanticise grazing, but some also realistically describe what went on in the pastures. A man who had spent his childhood years near Puławy recalled: “Self-rape, raping girls, and things like that were the order of the day. Life on the pasture is one big moral swamp, in which the soul of a child is floundering, losing all human qualities, turning into a small animal that tries to impress another, similar creature with the sheer volume and the sum total of all those things which, in their view, stand for maturity or superiority. The pasture breeds thoughts of where to steal and what, what mischief to do and to whom.”

Another man, from a village near Jarosław, recalled that as a seven-year-old boy he had to take over his older sister’s tasks after she had been beaten while in the pasture: “On Sundays, one of the grazers would often bring a harmonica, or an accordion, and play, while the rest would grab each other in twos and dance. My older sister did not want to dance with one of the shepherds and was beaten by him. He threw her on the ground so forcefully, on a protruding root, that she fell ill for a while and was spitting blood.”

Pelagia Restorffowa suggested: “Why not hire some invalid or an elderly man as a shepherd to graze the cattle for the whole village. Why waste children and prevent them from studying?” “Why tie them to these cows’ tails?” she asked. Again, in vain. The village child was supposed to be a labourer.

In the 1930s, when smallholders cannot really afford to even buy matches, paying to hire a shepherd was unthinkable. Sending children to richer farmers provided a lifeline, saving the poorest families, having many children, from starving. The peasants seized the opportunity – why hire a shepherd when you can have a child working for you for a piece of bread?

In the interwar period, villages experience dramatic growth. Farmlands get divided among grown-up children. Within two generations, a large parcel of land worked by the father may turn into meagre plots. Never before had so many village children become wage labourers so early.

In the pastures, children suffer for yet another reason. Running barefoot on the grass, they bloody their feet. Mothers have their own remedies: “My mother often washed my feet, and then you had to pee on them and the next day all signs of injuries were gone.” Kazimiera Długołęcka also remembered the way in which her mother used to treat blisters on her feet, especially on heels: “First the skin thickened, then there was inflammation, and then, of course, an abscess. It was good if the mother noticed that the child was limping. A pig’s poo was applied, the foot was wrapped up, and it stopped the illness”.

Activists keep searching for a way to solve the issue of grazing animals by children. They suggest that, following the Czech and Danish custom, perhaps it would be possible to tie a cow to a stake, which could then be moved to a different place every day, and just let the animal graze on its own. The peasants find it inconceivable – a cow is way too valuable to graze unsupervised.

A daughter of rural smallholders living in the vicinity of Włoclawek, one of twelve children, keeps running, all day long, from one side of the meadow to the other to herd a flock of geese, her face sunburnt, her feet cracked, the child wearing the same dress and no underwear. She is five. At lunchtime, her siblings bring her soup: “Two potatoes and some groat with milk. I would also get a piece of potato pie. And that had to be enough until sunset. In the summer, when it was hot, I would bring a bottle of water, and when I finished it – I would drink from a murky pond where the geese were bathing.” But her situation was about to improve. Richer relatives took her in “to help with the children”. This was quite common in the countryside. The girls, several years old, were helpers at richer farmers’ households, watching over little children in exchange for board and lodging. However, in her case it soon turned out that she was expected to be a girl servant or dziewka, as girls working on farms were called. “I had to mind the children, graze the cow in a meadow by the Vistula river, chop wood, clean the house, feed the pigs and poultry, wash nappies and carry water. And only occasionally, I went to school,” she recalled later. When her mother’s brother, living in America, came to visit some time later, he saw her hands, scarred from chopping pine logs, and her legs, scabbed all over by the sharp grass blades through which she had to chase the cow.

„In America, people take care of children. I have never seen a child like this, there” her uncle stated in astonishment. He took her to Włocławek by a ferry to buy her a pair of shoes.

To the Poviat School Board in Przeworsk – A Request

The undersigned Jan Wywrota, residing in Hucisko Jawornickie, hereby declares that his house was burnt to the ground, he has two children and no shelter nor sustenance for himself and his children, he is forced to go and ask others to support him, that the above-mentioned, having no one to leave with his young children, he recently took in a servant sent by his relative Paweł Pilawa – Katarzyna Pilawa, the daughter of Paweł and Anna, who is fourteen and in the fourth grade of the school in Hucisko. The above-mentioned asks the Great School Council in Przeworsk to exempt Katarzyna Pilawa, the daughter of Anna and Paweł, from school, as he is unable to send her to school and we need her to provide service and care for the young children.

Jan Wywrota

Hucisko, 20. II. 1930

Jan Wywrota’s signature – slanted, uneven letters – suggests that he was an illiterate man and asked a municipal official to write this official request for him. Less than two weeks later, the school inspector in Przeworsk granted his request, and Katarzyna Pilawa was able to continue serving the family. We do not know whether the girl, who by the age fourteen had only reached the fourth grade, ever studied again. Nor can we be sure that she had been fed by her relative, since the house burnt down and the man had to ask for food to feed his own children.

A village girl must, first and foremost, be a good worker if she is to be useful. Otherwise, there is no point having her around, which she is bound to feel. As soon as she is able to walk, she learns her role as a toiler. In the popular pamphlet titled Przy kądzieli. Pogadanki dla kobiet o ważnych sprawach (Spinning Yarn. Women Talks on Matters of Importance), written by the folk teacher Antoszka in the second half of the 19^th century, and still widely read in the interwar period, rural women could find the following advice: “As soon as three- and four-year-old girls grow up a bit, it is necessary for them to take care of their clothes, toys, their father’s and mother’s shoes, to carry sticks, potatoes and etc. to do tasks. The older ones, four- and five-year-olds, should help with house chores: let her sweep the floor, scrub the table and the bench, wash a bowl, carry wood, feed the hens, herd a piglet into the pigsty, so that she slowly gets used to work.”

For the first few years, before the child becomes ‘economically significant’, nobody is really taking care of them. At best, the child is minded by a sibling only a few years older. Things become tricky, if the child does not yet have a sibling.

In 1925, when the father of Marianna Sekieta from the village of Anielin near Łódź left to work in the mines in France, her mother had to take over all the work on the farm, so she started taking her several-month-old daughter into the fields. Using a piece of cloth and sticks, she made a makeshift crib, in which the child would lay all day long. The sight of such a crib, rocked by the wind in the field, is far from unusual; women call it bujka – a ‘rocking cot’.

One of the two daughters of Marianna Wujak (née Sekieta), a doctor, recalled: “It was autumn, the baby fell ill with pneumonia, but no one considered asking for a doctor. People thought – well, that is her fate. They put a little shroud over the baby, as it seemed that nothing could be done.”

Indeed, children die in almost every family, so often that one simply had to come to terms with it: the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.

Marianna’s daughter continued: „But then everyone was surprised to hear the baby crying beneath the little shroud, announcing to the world that life had prevailed”.

From then on, her mother kept growing as a healthy baby, and when she turned five, she took over the care of her one-and-a-half-year-old brother. Throughout her life, the girl recalled the moment when her little brother had run out of the unfenced yard to find himself straight under the hoofs of horses galloping by. She was lucky – she managed to catch him just in time. In 1933, it became clear that her childhood had so far been carefree, after all. She was eight and her parents decided to send her into service at a rich farmer’s household. From then on, she had to work for food.

Marianna Wujak’s daughter described had it worked: “Mum was obedient, polite, hard-working and responsible, so she was fit to be sent into service at another peasant’s farm. Her main duty was grazing cows, but she was also cleaning, sweeping, feeding the poultry and minding the children. Grandma was getting some meagre money for this and mum was getting food. She was poorly fed. The farmer’s wife would bake bread for the whole week. Unfortunately, it was not the delicious, organic bread, but a kind of clay-like dough that in a week’s time was too hard to even bite. They used to be fed bread with slices of boiled beetroot.”

Over the next four years, the girl would serve at three different farms. She was already twelve, and still could not live in her parents’ house. A servant is needed from early morning till late evening. But then, she developed an eye condition, common in the Polish countryside – the so-called Egyptian ophthalmia, potentially blinding, if untreated. Her mother found out about it from the farmers’ neighbour and took Marianna home. Physically neglected, malnourished, the girl would sneak to drink sweet cream from the top of milk jars. It took her a long time to recover, she started menstruating at the age of seventeen. Her daughter lamented: “She went school at eleven, but three years later, the occupation started and that was the end of her schooling. The path to climbing the social ladder had been shut.”

In 1939, Zofia Lipina described the horrific fate of children serving on village farms in Kobieta Wiejska (The Rural Woman), stating that the dire conditions of service were “a hidden, festering wound in the village social life.” Rich peasants usually employed a girl servant, a farmhand and a shepherd, while less prosperous peasants only employed a girl servant or a shepherd. “Mostly, servants stay in pigsties, stables and attics and there is no room for them in the house. Servants are fed little and with little care. Farmers cook fancy delicacies for themselves, while the servants are being fed scraps with no regard for their hard work.” According to Lipina, she had been to a house where the farmer and his wife were having cooked, hot dinner, while the girl servant was taking care of the pigs’ and cow’s waste: “They told me that she never joins them for a meal, because she doesn’t like hot food, and only eats it cold.”

Farm servants worked for meagre earnings, since parents of the young shepherds and farm girls were afraid to ask for more, and many of the children were orphans. Rural servants were not insured, no sickness fund contributions were paid for them as was the case for servants in urban areas. According to Zofia Lipina: “People who are exploited, who simply do not count, toiling so hard that it makes them stupid, push on with their sad lives, incapable of protesting when others harm them. Barely big enough to leave the cradle, off they go to serve yet another farmer.” She called on village women to start taking care of their servants: “It will pay off a hundredfold, as they will become our friends and not enemies, who secretly, in their souls, hate us, as they often do now.”

Village girls, if not gainfully employed, are gradually tasked with more and more demanding jobs, many of which are beyond their physical strength and stamina. If a girl’s constitution seems robust, people do not hesitate to make her work even harder.

Janina Krasucka from the Białki village in Mazovia recounted: „I started doing laundry when I was twelve. We would take bed linen and clothes to the ditch, put a wooden board across the ditch to stand on, and then do the laundry using washing paddles*. I was small, so I did not have to do so much laundry as my sister did, as she was stronger. She had to redo my work, as she was bigger.”

Soon, she would face new tasks, including ‘working the horse’ in the field, together with her siblings. This phrase, bizarre and obscure to those who know little about the farmers’ work, appear frequently in family stories told by village people. It relates to the situation of poorer families who, not having a horse of their own, had to borrow one from a richer farmer. In return, the family would work the farmer’s field. It was usually as follows: when Janina Krasucka’s father needed to carry potatoes from their field, the children would go weeding the field of the farmer who lent him the horse. Such exchange of services and interdependence were part of the village community rules, and it would be difficult to survive without them. And when you are poor, you have to work even more. That is where children become useful.

It took Sophia Turkiewicz*, an Australian film director, may years to finally come to Oleszów (now Oleshiv), a hilly village in the western part of Ukraine, which used to be part of Poland before World War II. She first tried in 1976, as a graduate of the Sydney Film School. “When I was young, I learned the art of storytelling from the story of your life,” she would say years later, in Once My Mother, a moving documentary about her mother. The film also features old recordings, so we see both of them: the thirty-year-old Sophia shooting scenes with the still-young Helena Skwarek. A slim woman, wearing jeans and a striped T-shirt is pointing the camera lens at her mother, stirring something in a pot on a gas stove.

“Do you think your life has been extraordinary?” Sophia

asks. Helena smiles. “I love you too,” she replies.

But soon, Sophia stops documenting her mother’s life. “Your stories are a burden,” she explains.

The decision to revisit them comes almost thirty years later, when she comes to see her mother at the John Paul II Village Residential Care near Adelaide, and realizes she is losing her. Sophia starts filming her mother again, but their dialogue proves even more difficult. She shows her mother a photograph with two young women, smiling, in flared skirts from the 1950s.

“Do you remember who is in this picture?” she asks.

“It is you,” is Helena’s answer.

Their conversations develop in two languages. They both switch from Polish to English (in italics) and back, sometimes in mid-sentence.

“No. That’s you, when you were in your twenties.”

“Ah, when I was young… But I don’t look like myself,” she ponders for a moment. Then, she adds, sighing: „What a life it was, wasn’t it? ….Scattered.”

A bit later Sophia arranges to film at the Goodwood orphanage in Adelaide. For her, that was where everything started.

“It was here that I learned to love you and I hate you, in equal measure. Over the years, I play my role of a dutiful daughter. I played my role well, but some part of me remembered, that you had abandoned me. My head and my heart were at war. In my heart, your crime made no sense. Mothers don’t do what you did. Now, I ask myself: did I judge you too harshly? And did I really know you at all? Maybe there are answers in the film I once abandoned.”

That was when she set off for Oleshiv, a Ukrainian village, thirty kilometres from Ivano-Frankivsk. She arrived there with her husband, Stephen Scheding, as a cameraman, in 2007. On a dirt road, they are greeted by an old woman with a hunched back, wearing a kerchief and supporting herself with a stick, and by a crowing rooster. The visitors from Australia attract much attention, more and more local residents come to see them. Soon, they find Helena’s family home. The wooden peasant house, desolate and gloomy, appears to be a dwelling from the bygone era: with its ceiling, green walls, a blue cupboard, a wooden bed, some embroidered cloth and holy pictures handing on the walls.

Sophia paces the dark room thoughtfully, as if it were a museum. “I feel strange in this house. I know for you it means only sorrow,” she says to the camera, and after a while, seated at an oilcloth-covered table, she adds: “I wonder, is this the home of your own birth, where your mother died a few weeks after your arrival and your father when you were only six.”

When she is back in Australia, Sophia shows the footage from the house to her mother, who says: “My parents… I don’t remember anything because I was still a little baby when my parents died. I wished to see my mum. But I never saw her.” Watching her daughter’s film, she learns that her sister Katarzyna was killed by the Soviets, which the people of Oleshiv reported to Sophia. They explained that when the Soviets came, the girl tried to run away. But they got her. During her conversation with the locals, Sophia mentions a name: Nahirna, the surname of Helena’s uncle.

Sophia: „I remember stories of your uncle. He made you work on his farm.”

Helena: „He didn’t want me. He had five children, and they all went to school. Just I did not go there. I think I was hating him for that. And I think I would be a very good student at school, if they did give me a chance. When I was older, I thought I am no one. Because everybody went to school, and I did not. I could not write my name. I was so embarrassed. I don’t know why. I am still embarrassed now, because I did not go to school. I want nobody see me when I write my name.”

The daughter’s camera focuses on the mother’s official documents. Instead of a signature, we see three fingerprints. Above then there is a signature, Skwarek, as if written by a child who is just learning to write.

Helena: “I was nine or ten when my uncle threw me out. He said he didn’t have place for me there. I did not know what to do, where to go. When I was hungry, I stole some bread, something. Then I just didn’t have anywhere to sleep. I waited for the nightfall and then I would go into some shed, because I was afraid. See, I was growing up in the streets. With no people, with nobody….Yeah.”

“What happened?”, Sophia asks.

“Nothing happened. I leave village, and go to the town.”

Sophia, speaking off camera: “You leave and never return. You leave with no documents, no evidence of your existence.”

For the next five years Helena lives as a street urchin in Stanisławów (now Ivano Frankivsk). Like many others in her situation, she becomes a servant, which provides her with room and board. In September 1939, when the Russians take over that part of Poland, she happens to works in a bakery. Her main task is washing the dishes, but the baker’s wife dislikes her, and keeps scolding her. One day, she slaps her so hard, that there is blood coming from the girl’s nose. The girl needs someone to protect her. She reports the incident to the Russian soldiers. They come and arrest both the baker’s wife and herself. She is incarcerated, and two months later, along with other Poles, deported and sent to a gulag. This is the beginning of her five-year journey through Uzbekistan, Persia, Rhodesia, right down to Adelaide.

She is to experience horror, but also great love and a terrible betrayal. Great happiness, too, when in a refugee camp in Rhodesia, she gives birth to Sophia. She chooses Australia as their destination, although she had initially planned to emigrate to Great Britain. However, she is now a mother, and her child is illegitimate – and the world is ruthless towards such women. She is not wanted there. For the same reason, she cannot find work in Australia, and without a job, she is unable to support her child. Faced with a dramatic choice, she decides to leave Sophia at an orphanage. To reclaim her, she then marries a man who later becomes aware why she had chosen to marry him.

Her path to an honest, resentment-free relationship with her mother, leads Sophia through rebellion and withdrawal, accompanied by shame. “You are uneducated, you don’t speak English. I don’t want my new friends to see me with you,” we hear her confess in the movie.

In fact, it was only when some communist friends at the university had made Sophia realise that her mother’s life was indeed extraordinary, she saw Helena as a potential protagonist in her movies. Since then, she has used motifs from her mother’s life in her scripts but felt that the story she was telling was neither entirely sincere nor complete. Eventually, Sophia visited Oleshiv, researched successive stages of Helena’s life, and was finally able to conclude: “You’re a woman who was once sent to hell, but have left it with love in her heart.”

The trip to Oleshiv proved transformative, altering more that just the overall picture of their complex relationship. “Before then, my sense of who I was occurred somehow in a vacuum. I had no family connection to any past generation beyond that of my mother. I had a stepfather and two brothers in Australia but there were no links back beyond this one generation. There were no surviving aunts or uncles, no nieces or nephews, no grandparents in our family. When my mother spoke of her own mother, it never occurred to me she was speaking about a woman who was my grandmother. I’d never even called her my ‘grandmother’ – it was always ‘your mother’ when we discussed her. Now here I was in the village, tramping through the fields and along dirt tracks that my relations had also walked along. They suddenly became real. I could imagine them. They were no longer abstract ideas. For the first time I understood what it feels like to have a generational past” – she wrote in a postscript piece about Once My Mother.

To the School Inspectorate in Przeworsk

The undersigned orphan Stefania Jamróz kindly asks to be released from [illegible] School because I am an orphan with no father and no Mother when my father and mother died I was 6 months old and my father and mother died of spotted fever within one month and I did not know my father or mother. I was raised by strangers, only attended school up to the second grade, and now I have to serve, I cannot go to school because who would give me clothes, shoes and food.

So, I am an orphan with no Father and no Mother and I am 15 years old, please kindly exempt me from School.

3.09.1931, Hucisko Jawornickie

Tuberculosis, dysentery, typhoid and lack of healthcare decimate families. Children are left to fend for themselves and mostly survive by going into service in exchange for subsistence. Stefania had been living like this for years now, but the education inspector requires her to go to school, although there is no chance she will be able to study, no matter how much she wish to. Apart from Stefania’s application, we also have a statement from the school principal from Hucisko Jawornickie, confirming that she had only been attending school for a year because “as an orphan, she is continuously doing service”. He states that the girl’s request should be granted, as he understands she cannot study if she has to be a servant to survive. Half-orphans’ situation is barely any better. Widows and widowers soon start a new family. For the children, this generally means even more loneliness, and sometimes hunger.

Often each spouse has had their own children, sometimes more than one, and soon their new children join the family, so people say: “We have children that are mine, yours and ours”. If the arrangement is not symmetrical, and only one of the spouses has children, these are treated badly by their – literally evil – step-parent.

The parents of Helena Rabenda, born in 1923 in Wola Skrzynno (today Wola Rudlicka) near Wieluń, had bought a plot of land that resulted from land partitioning*, but it turned out that the land was mortgaged and thus worth little. Her father then set up a shop. And kept drinking. Then, Helena’s mother passed away. “It is hard to understand death when you’re ten, or even when you are older. She was lying there, in the coffin, and I thought she was going to stay that way, but when they took her away. I knew then, that it was true and that I would never see her again. I had a v. good and wise mother,” Helena wrote years later. “My father re-married next year. He took a wife thirteen years younger than himself. […] He would often beat her up. She would run away. Then she would come back. Naturally, it was all my fault, as it was because of me. When I got my first period, I didn’t know what it was about. I was ashamed to tell my stepmother, so I wrote her a note. Little by little, I became secretive, distrustful, enraged. My father kept drinking more and more,” she recalled.

Her school certificate, issued by the three-year primary school in Radoszewice, suggests that Helena studied diligently, getting ‘very good’ (for general conduct, religion, women’s handicraft, physical exercise) or ‘good’ (mathematics, including geometry, natural sciences, geography) school grades. But further education was out of the question – she had to earn money. She was already fifteen. Just in time to become a maid in a bourgeois household. One fourth of such maids at that time was fifteen or younger.

Helena had no problem finding a job. Her stepmother sent her to Częstochowa. “I have a vivid memory of the dark room, and about fifteen of us, candidates and the ladies who came to pick their housemaids. One of them picked me. The house, where I was to work was large, immense. The family had a factory of sorts, they manufactured religious statues. Both the lady and her husband suffered from bad stomach and were on a diet. Every day, they would eat unsalted groat soup. I was told to cook, clean and go shopping. Obviously, I had no idea how to do it. I was fired after one month. I got another job, much like the previous one. The lady had a shop in Jasna Góra, she traded in devotional objects.”

The job was tough, and it required girls to lead a nomadic life in the houses of strangers. Helena’s father decided to send her to her relatives. She was to help with the chores. Still she was family, so her situation was bound to improve.

However, from Helena’s diary, one she begun to keep while staying at her aunt’s house, we learn: “Auntie in a very foul mood […]. We have not yet spoken a word to each other. When later I approached her, the auntie was sour and our conversation tiresome. For the hundredth time, I thought to myself – when shall I have my own roof over my head. Oh, it is hard to depend on someone else’s favour.”

Helena Skwarek, Stefania Jamróz, Helena Rabenda – the most disposable of those who were at other’s disposal. Stories of such girls were not reported in newspapers, their fate was too universal and trivial. Their life – a constant struggle to survive. The sooner they were to understand this, the better.

Translated by Katarzyna Byłów

* Washing paddle, or kijanka – an elongated piece of wood, the oldest tool for doing laundry in Poland. Washing paddles were used for heavier fabrics, while thinner ones were washed by hand.

* Sophia Turkiewicz – born in 1946, is a film director known for feature movies and TV series, including Silver City starring the Polish actress Gosia Dobrowolska.

* Land partitioning (parcelacja) – division of larger landholdings into plots that were then put for sale or as usufruct to smaller farms.

***

Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak, Campesinas. Una historia sobre nuestras abuelas

CAPÍTULO 2

EL PASTOREO

El niño campesino muy pronto se convierte en un parásito. En todas partes, el pastoreo es un trabajo que hacen los niños. Pastorean, de hecho, todo lo que se puede pastorear: caballos, vacas, cabras, cerdos, gansos, vigilan a los patos junto al agua y los sacan del agua por la noche. De una manera u otra, el niño, desde los seis años, es un trabajador doméstico.

Maria Librachowa, El niño del campo polaco, 1934

En 1929, la revista La voz de las mujeres rurales publicó en portada el testimonio de una instructora que estaba impartiendo en un pueblo un curso de economía doméstica: «Un día de otoño, la hija de siete años de la señora en cuya casa me hospedaba, llegó del prado llorando, asustada, enferma. Mientras la desvestía para que se fuera a dormir, la madre observó que la camisa estaba toda ensangrentada por el bajo y la niña tenía sangre coagulada en el bajo vientre. Después de mirarla más detenidamente, quedó claro que había sido violada. La niña estuvo todo el tiempo adormecida, como aturdida, pero al tercer día, a pesar de sus lágrimas, la madre la desterró de nuevo al erial con las vacas».

El pastoreo es el destino habitual del niño en el campo. Se levanta al amanecer y lleva a los animales al prado, por lo general, una vaca; a veces, la pastorea por todo el pueblo. Allí vigila que no se meta en la linde del vecino y que no se escape, y luego, por la noche, la lleva de nuevo al rancho.

«Hay zonas donde todos los niños son esclavos de las vacas, los novillos, las ovejas, los caballos, los cerdos», escribe en 1928 en la revista La voz de las mujeres rurales Pelagia Restorffowa, activista social que lucha obstinadamente contra el pastoreo infantil.

Todo el mundo sabe que algunos niños se dedican a pastorear en vez de ir a la escuela. Las niñas de edad temprana suelen empezar pastoreando animales pequeños, como gansos o patos, y luego, cuando crecen, sustituyen a sus hermanos mayores en el pastoreo de las vacas. Kazimiera Długołęcka, que recuerda a su familia como bastante rica («teníamos suelos y ventanas dobles»), pastoreaba gansos desde los cinco años: «Pastoreábamos en un prado común a un kilómetro y medio de casa. Cortaban un trozo de pan, mamá le sacaba un poco de miga y, en el hueco, le untaba mantequilla; luego lo tapaba con la miga que había sacado, lo envolvía en un paño de lino limpio, y esa era la comida para todo el día».

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[Pie de foto]: Niño pastoreando vacas en un campo de rastrojo, 1933

Pelagia Restorffowa despotrica: «¿Qué hace toda esa tropa de niños deambulando por los bosques? ¡Semejante escuela de degeneración, maldad y embrutecimiento! ¿Qué les enseña ese vagabundeo absurdo y holgazán, y ese continuo contacto de las niñas con los muchachos, lejos de la mirada de los adultos, y sin el cuidado ni el control de nadie? Es fácil de imaginar. ¿Es que a esa vaca o a ese cerdo no se los puede alimentar de otra manera sino a costa de la salud del alma del niño? ¿Al precio de perder irreparablemente los mejores y más hermosos años de la vida de una persona?». Restorffowa quiere dar a entender que, en los pastos, los niños se inician en el sexo. «El pastoreo es una escuela de todo tipo de libertinaje», afirma, y opina: «El pastoreo es una anacronía que debe erradicarse junto con la rueca, el arado y otras cosas del pasado que han de caer en el olvido cuanto antes».

[Fotografía]

[Pie de foto]: Algunos niños pastorean en vez de ir a la escuela. Las niñas de edad temprana suelen empezar pastoreando animales pequeños, como gansos o patos, y luego, cuando crecen, sustituyen a sus hermanos mayores en el pastoreo de las vacas.

Pero no, no desaparece. Las familias más pobres entregan a sus hijos a los campesinos más ricos y, de esa manera, consiguen al menos lo necesario para comer.

Traducción: Teresa Benítez Rodríguez