DW: Thousands of Polish nurses, caregivers and workmen leave the country for employment.
That has consequences: Many Polish children grow up without parents, who are gone for months or even years at a time.
Polish internet sites are full of stories from children who feel abandoned by their parents because they are working abroad.
They look for support on internet forums where they write about their fate: “Hi Dad, I’m already 16. It has been a year since you left. Every day I smell the shirt you left behind because it didn’t fit in your suitcase. It reminds me of you,” as Maria quotes from a letter she wrote to her father who is in England working as a day laborer.
Tomek, an 18-year-old, complains: “My mom went abroad when I was 13. She said she was going to Germany for a couple of months because she made so little in Poland. She couldn’t even afford to buy clothes here. She is still there. That makes me sad.”
Since Poland joined the EU in 2004, some 20,000 trained nurses have left the country, mainly to work as caregivers. Today there are 280,000 nurses in Poland; only 42,000 of them are under the age of 40. The average age is 51. In 2015, Poland had 5.2 nurses and 2.3 doctors per 1,000 citizens (in Germany, the ratios are 13 and 4.1 to 1,000). The country’s health-care system is chronically underfunded. It thus comes as no surprise that ever more personnel consider leaving.
The social costs of that situation, however, are massive. In 2007, three years after Poland joined the EU, 1,300 children were forced to live in orphanages or foster families because their parents were working abroad. Currently, it is estimated that Poland has roughly 100,000 “Euro orphans,” as well as a number of “Euro seniors” whose grown-up children work and live abroad.
