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/ 31 January 2008

Polish man struggles to return from the dead

Piotr Kucy (38) from the city of Polkowice in south-west Poland was wrongly identified by authorities last August as a drowned man, only to show up a few days after his own funeral. Despite pointing out the fact that he was alive to government officials, Kucy still remains dead in official records, stopping him from working and paying social insurance.

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/ 25 January 2008

It’s official — Polish post is slow as snails

An IT worker, after receiving a letter on January 3 that was sent on December 20 as priority mail, calculated that a snail would have made it even faster to his home than the letter. Daily Gazeta Wyborcza said Michal Szybalski calculated that it took 294 hours for the letter to arrive at his home. He also said the distance between his home and the sender was 11,1km.

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/ 10 January 2008

Man runs into his wife at brothel

A Polish man got the shock of his life when he visited a brothel and spotted his wife among the establishment’s employees. Polish tabloid Super Express said the woman had been making some extra money on the side while telling her husband she worked at a store in a nearby town.

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/ 27 September 2007

Communist tour becomes offbeat attraction in Poland

Clad in a dirty blue overall, the young man planted his feet squarely on the floor of the stifling bus, raised his megaphone and hectored the passengers: "You stinking capitalists!" Headed by the ageing 1960s bus, the rattle-trap convoy of communist-era vehicles, which also included a couple of Trabant and Lada cars, lumbered off to the heart of what was once the showpiece of the People’s Republic of Poland.

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/ 3 July 2007

Auschwitz museum lab keeps victims’ memory alive

More than six decades after the Holocaust, the museum at the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau has turned to ultra-modern technology to ensure the legacy of Nazis’ victims is never lost. The challenge was how to preserve masses of suitcases, shoes, eye-glasses, human hair and other poignant reminders of the lives of those exterminated under Hitler’s ”final solution”.

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/ 9 June 2007

Fairytale awakening after 19 years

September 4 1988 was a day like any other in late Soviet-era Poland. Weary queues formed outside grocery stores. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the head of state who attempted to crush the anti-communist Solidarity movement, led a debate on the theme ”sincerity for sincerity”.

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/ 17 May 2007

Polish premier’s mum holds the purse strings

Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski revealed on Thursday that he doesn’t have a bank account and instead hands his salary over to his mother. "I still don’t have a bank account," the 57-year-old conservative premier said in an interview with the weekly news magazine, <i>Wprost</i>. "I’m not joking. I keep my money in Mum’s account," he said.