accepted. So people who didn’t have any other money than Polish were supposed to go hungry and not be able to buy anything? They didn’t set a deadline for exchanging Polish for Soviet currency. Instead, the banknotes were declared worthless from that same day on.76 There was a shortage of small change, so for everything that cost groszes the shopkeepers took a rouble. The inhabitants were angry at the authorities for not setting a deadline for changing Polish money but banning it immediately. Workers got paid in Polish currency on Saturday, and on Sunday they couldn’t buy anything with themoney. Large numbers of people who had a lot of Polish money began to flee back home, and so a trade in Polish currency began. At first 12 roubles were paid for 100 zlotys, and then, when emigration increased, the zloty went up so much that 150 zlotys fetched 112 roubles. This lasted until the Germansreplaced the paper money of the Bank of Poland with notes issued by the Bank Emisyjny.77 [13] Until that time, people made hundreds of thousands of roubles by selling zlotys, more than for dollars or pounds. Everyone was doubtful about the Soviet currency and the czerwoniec.78 Couldn’t the same trick be played with it? People coming from Russia to take up positions related that whenever the Soviet authorities felt like it, they declared a certain series of ten-rouble notes invalid in the same way as they had done with the zloty, sono one had any confidence in the Russian money.
I go looking for work. As an organised working man, I go to the profsoyuz79 to look for work. The union building is at 19 Piłsudskiego Street. I enter the main office, where there are various slogans hanging on the wall, including: “There is no place here for a Zionist-Trotkyist-Bundist strike-breaker and counter-revolutionary!” The administration tells me that they cannot allocate jobs to refugees, that I should go to the birzha truda,80 and if I want to findwork as a barber, I should go around to the barber shops and ask the owners for work. In a bourgeois state, a trade union would certainly not advise you to go to shops to ask for work. I repeat this to the chairman and tell him that I worked for years in the union under a different regime, and that every Friday
