A new life in Nelson | Jarek Pole

Imagine barrels of cabbage so large that children jumped into them barefoot and stomped on the vegetable to make sauerkraut, like grape growers once made wine. Jarek Pole doesn’t have to imagine.

As told to Britt Coker.

I was born in Poland. In a small town of 55,000 people called Bełchatów, in the middle of Poland, about two hours south of Warsaw. I never saw the ocean until I was 16. I left Poland when I was about 26 and started living in Hungary and then moved to Spain, then Paris, France and then New Zealand. I came here eight years ago.

Poland is a flat country, we have mountains in the south. It’s about 40 million people. After the Ukraine war over 2 million Ukrainian refugees were accepted in Poland and almost treated as citizens. I am very proud of my people for that.
You can see next week’s weather on the horizon, so it doesn’t change as much as it does here. Most of the time it’s cold and it rains. The summer is from June until August, so three months of summer, and half of the year you don’t see the sun, pretty much. The sun goes down in the winter around 3.30pm.

The Polish are very generous people. The hospitality is at a completely different level. If I go there, and I see any of my cousins or aunts at their house, the table is usually right away full of food and it’s an insult not to eat it. It’s an insult not to actually put lots of food on the table. They’re generous amongst friends; they’re very curious about foreigners and treat them like their own brothers. Between themselves, Polish are not that nice, definitely Kiwis are much better. For example, here pretty much anyone in the city path walks would say, ‘hi.’ Even to a stranger. Its not like that in Poland.

Poland was between Russia and Germany for about 1000 years and that’s a very unfortunate position to be. My father’s generation was the first one that did not experience the war. Every other generation experienced war for a thousand years. So, you can imagine the generational baggage the nation carries.

The religion in Poland plays a big role in people’s life, we are Catholic. Here the religion is much more about the community than the faith, at least that’s my own vision. When I was a kid, pretty much everyone was in the church on Sunday.

I go to Poland every one or two years and I take my daughter (10) with me. Although she doesn’t reply in Polish, she understands everything I say, and when she goes to Poland it takes her about a week for her brain to switch and then she starts talking Polish. The aim is not for her to be perfect in speaking Polish, it’s for her to have a certain flexibility in her brain later on so that she can use those neural pathways to learn better. She speaks Hungarian as well.

Kiwis are much more friendly to each other and much more pragmatic. I think it’s also historical; if you are all on the island, if everyone knows each other then you have to be nice to each other to survive.

The Polish don’t beat around the bush and that was one of the learnings when I left Poland, to be indirect. I found it sweet [the New Zealanders’ polite way of interacting], once you acknowledge that, once you are fine with that, but you need to learn when yes means no and when yes means yes.

We wanted to move away from Paris [to raise a child]. I didn’t want to go to Poland, the climate and cultural things. I didn’t want to put my kid in Polish education system. It’s an old traditional way, a lot of discipline and I didn’t want my daughter to go through the same thing I did. It turns out that New Zealand is not only great from the nature point of view, but it’s amazing for bringing up kids. There’s much more learning from play, much less discipline that is based on fear.

We have this perception [of Nelson] of white and conservative, but when you start speaking to people on the street, most people have an accent. So there are lots of migrants with diverse backgrounds and I love that. A mix of cultures and mindsets which is really healthy.

I do spear fishing, tramping, kayaking, classic Nelson. There’s quite a vibrant Latin dance community that is growing right now, salsa and bachata. Latinos have an ability to create very rich music and quite complex music which for me personally sparks a lot of joy when I dance. And you don’t do it by yourself, you do it with another person, so when you start dancing with the partner, joy can be shared, and it can be shared right away because people feel the joy very easily.

We have a small Polish community here. There’s 40 or 50 of us. We meet often, and every year we have Christmas at Rabbit Island. The classic Polish dish is probably not something you would enjoy much. It’s called bigos and is made from sauerkraut. We have a short summer and so much winter, this is the way we preserve food for ages. I remember us harvesting cabbage, shredding it and having these big 200 litre barrels. The kids were actually walking on the cabbage to get the juice out before fermentation.

I feel 30% Kiwi. I feel like it’s my home. But I’m very much Polish and I’m also carrying inside the cultures of where I have lived for a long time.

I think this is for every migrant, when you leave and you decide to go somewhere else, you disappear from the lives of people that are important to you. So there’s some sort of grief and sadness that you have to face because that connection is missing, but eventually you stop becoming who you are there because the language defines also the way you think, and the way you behave, at least I believe that language cuts the reality into different pieces. So somehow becoming someone else that you started your life with, and when you go back to your motherland you realise are not the same person. There’s some kind of loss of identity in it. And part of becoming a lifelong migrant is to understand that it comes with the package, and accept that.