By Richard Bernstein, New York Times
Published by the International Herald Tribune
France, March 1, 2004

WARSAW - Anna Melnyk's eyes moistened the other day as she recalled how, once upon a more innocent time, she dreamed of going to Italy to teach the violin but ended up as a cleaning lady in Poland instead.

"I wanted to see the country of Paganini," she said. "But I was afraid, because I knew that once I crossed the Italian border, I'd never come back to see my family."

And so, Melnyk, who comes from the beautiful, battered city of Lvov in Ukraine, came to Warsaw, hoping she would be able to teach the violin here, since that is what she loves and what she did for years in her native country. She does teach the violin to one young Polish woman and the piano to the two children of her employer. But mostly what Melnyk does is clean house, and in this she is like the thousands of other Ukrainian women who have come to Poland, legally and illegally, to escape a seemingly hopeless economic situation at home.

"I have some psychological stress over the fact that after working 18 years as a musician, I have to clean shoes and mop floors," Melnyk said, explaining her tears.

One might think of the movement of women seeking jobs across borders as an international migration far more extensive than the movement of women from Ukraine to neighboring Poland. Like other aspects of the vast world of migrant labor, the migration of cleaning ladies is a global phenomenon, a product of the relative wealth and poverty of countries. The movement is determined in part by the intricacies of visa requirements set by the rich countries that determine where people from the poor countries can legally go. That is what explains Melnyk's presence in Poland, rather than Italy or Germany, where Ukrainians do go, but without proper papers and only after paying a substantial fee to a "travel agent," or some people-trafficking group that helps them get jobs in the West.

There is an economic irony in this that is well-known to the cleaning ladies as they take their place in the larger world of migrant workers. It is that in countries farther West, especially Germany, most of the cleaning ladies are Polish, while in Poland most of them are Ukrainian. Poles, as future EU members, can go to Germany without visas; Ukrainians, not slated for EU membership in the foreseeable future, cannot, and to people like Melnyk, that makes all the difference.

"The Polish women make so much money in Germany that they can pay a Ukrainian to clean their houses in Poland," Melnyk said.

Maria Jakubowycz, Melnyk's fellow worker and best friend, interviewed with her in Warsaw the other day, is a former teacher from the Ukrainian city of Ternopil. Both women were married once and are now divorced or separated. Both have children: Jakubowycz has two sons with her in Poland, and Melnyk has a daughter, who is staying with her mother in Lvov. Both were unable to make ends meet in Ukraine. Both consider themselves lucky, if also unlucky.

Melnyk is grateful to have wealthy employers who treat her with kindness and have even promised to help her apply for working papers and a residency permit for her daughter to join her from Lvov. Jakubowycz managed to get her working papers a few days ago, and she has started thinking of studying psychology in her spare time.

"Once one of the women I work for asked me why I'm working as a cleaning lady if I have a bachelor of arts degree," Jakubowycz said. "She just didn't understand how such a thing could be possible."

"At the time," she continued, "I didn't react, but now that I remind myself, I am moved."

Both women have also managed to avoid being snared in one of the protection rackets commonly by run petty thugs from Ukraine, Russia and Poland, whose targets are Eastern Europeans working illegally in Poland - cleaning ladies, construction workers, people who trade in leather jackets or black-market icons, and others. The workers can often be found at a former sports stadium in Warsaw that is the site of a large, more or less unregulated daily flea market.

"I met people like that twice at the stadium," Jakubowycz said of the gangsters who prey on migrant workers. "They told me that if I'm working I should pay them in order to be more secure. There were no police so I couldn't complain, and, anyway, I would have been afraid to go to the police because I didn't want to call attention to myself. Anyway, I didn't pay anything to them. Maybe I was lucky. Now I don't go anywhere near the stadium anymore."

Both women also feel lucky to have come to Poland at a time when Ukrainians didn't need visas to get here. Because of Poland's imminent membership in the European Union, visas are now required of Ukrainians, which though they are free, could make it more difficult for future cleaning ladies to get into this country.

And both women, after being in Warsaw for three years, are beginning to feel that maybe the worst of their hardships is over - the loneliness, the disappointment, the absence of choice, the sense of helplessness.

"I listen to the stories of my Ukrainian friends," Jakubowycz said.

"Sometimes I even write articles about them in the Ukrainian newspaper.

"But it doesn't matter if I publish the articles or not. Thanks to these conversations, step by step we are losing our helplessness."