Poland: Winter of death for impoverished

The past several months have witnessed Poland’s coldest winter in twenty years. The winter of 2005-2006 has recorded temperatures as low as -35 degrees Celsius (-31 degrees Fahrenheit). The social consequences, meanwhile, have been devastating.

Just over the weekend of January 21, 2006, for example, 27 people died, bringing the total at that time to an amount that far surpassed previous years. In the entire winter of 2004, for instance, 180 people perished. “This [amount of 2005-2006 winter deaths] is an exceptionally high number,” police spokeswoman Grazyna Puchalska told the Associated Foreign Press. “And the winter is not over yet.”

The deaths in Poland are part of a wave of cold weather fatalities, in Eastern Europe in particular, with hundreds also losing their lives in Russia, Ukraine and Romania.

Who are the individuals succumbing to these frigid temperatures? The vast majority are Poland’s homeless, whose number has increased rapidly since the official reintroduction of capitalist property relations in 1989. In an attempt to survive the extreme temperatures, many of these individuals seek refuge, often in vain, in unheated or makeshift shelters. Mostly between the ages of 35 and 50, 90 percent freeze to death after becoming drunk, falling in the snow, or falling asleep at bus stops.

Poland’s homeless population is composed of many different elements: divorced husbands and fathers, alcoholics, drug addicts, ex-prisoners, the long-term unemployed, and elderly people abandoned by their families because of expensive health care. Also included are those with psychiatric disorders, unmarried mothers rejected by their families and closest friends, women ill-treated by alcoholic husbands—in short any and all of those thrown overboard as Poland destroyed social protections and embraced the free market.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/pola-m11.shtml