Life in 1970s Communist Poland: Shortages, Censorship, and Survival

In the 1970s, my family in America maintained a lifeline to relatives in Poland. It wasn’t just letters (though those were heavily censored); it was packages of clothes with American dollars sewn into hems — a quiet act of defiance against the economic stranglehold of the communist regime, which at the time was firmly under the thumb of the Soviet Union.

When letters came back from Poland, they often looked like they’d been through battle — whole sentences neatly cut out, like someone had taken a razor to our conversations. It wasn’t paranoia. It was censorship, pure and simple, enforced by a government that answered directly to Moscow’s interests.