Ask “Our Man” in Warsaw-1/2025
Kindly airmail Polish/Polonian-related queries to:
Robert Strybel
ul. Heroldów 25/36
01-991 Warsaw, Poland
or e-mail them to: [email protected]
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Q: Is it possible to get a Polish passport if my grandfather was born 1937 in Grodno, Belarus, that was part of Poland until 1939. I have found only Belarusian documents. CONFUSED POLISH AMERICAN. Green Bay, WI
A: I don’t think that should be a problem, but it’s best to direct all questions pertaining to Polish citizenship to your nearest Polish Consulate General. Yours is in Chicago. They have all the up-to-date regulations at their finger-tips.
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Q: At my father’s funeral I received a gift of our surname’s history and it was the best gift I ever got. Recently I met a lovely Polish woman and think she would also appreciate such a surname history. How do I go about ordering one? How long does it take and what is the fee?
ANDREW KOTERBA, [email protected]
A: It depends on several factors, particularly whether the surname is correctly spelled and is it common or rare, i.e. how much time the research will take. Price is a $19 per surname regardless of difficulty a cut-rate $15 for each additional name you wish to have researched. For complete answers to all your questions please contact [email protected] Good luck!
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Q: My sister decided to apply for a Polish Passport which includes confirming her Polish citizenship. We were both born in Displaced Persons camps after the war. The application is complicated and cumbersome. Plus, there are fees involved and the process is slow. What would be the advantage for me to get a Polish passport? THERESE PENCAK SCHWARTZ, Westlake Village, CA.
A: The Polish passport would confirm your Polish citizenship. That in turn would enable you to travel freely visa-free throughout t he EU, live and work here, own real estate and set up your own company in any of the bloc’s 27 countries. As you have already noticed, the wheels of Polish bureaucracy turn slowly, so considerable determination and patience are required to complete the initial paperwork. Good luck!
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Q: You offer to research the meaning of Polish last names, but your own name does not sound Polish. My maiden name was Wojciechowski and friends and classmates used to call me Wodge.
SYLVIA M., Cheektowaga, NY
A: There’s a Polish saying “Szewc bez butów chodzi” (the shoemaker goes barefoot), and that may seem appropriate here. Strybel is fairly rare with only about 30-some users in Poland and just over 60 in the US. Its origin is far more challenging. There was once an Old Polish verb “strybać” (to slurp, smack lips loudly while eating), so initially the name would’ve meant “the slurper.” My son thinks it probably emerged as a Polish respelling of some such popular German surname as Striebel, Strobel, Strübel or similar. Both theories may be correct for different branches of surname bearers.
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Q: I am a psychologist* from India. Would you know of a good Polish lawyer that could help dealing with such problems as residence and work permits in Poland?
YOGENDER YADAV
A: A legal firm specializing in such cases is the Migrant Law Office, phone 48 516 772 516 (inside Poland omit the prefix 48), [email protected]
*psephology is the study of elections and voting.
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Q: Did you know Warsaw’s mayor had spent his senior year of high school at Cranbrook Academy?
RAYMOND BITTNER, Hamtramck, MI
A: I heard that he had studied abroad but I didn’t know about Cranbrook.* That may be where he picked up his excellent English and perhaps also his leftist views. Rafał Trzaskowski, the ruling party’s presidential candidate, passes himself off as a centrist, but he strongly supports the gender ideology, abortion, LGBTQ+ and other typically leftist causes.
*Cranbrook Academy is an upscale boarding school located in Detroit’s posh suburb of Bloomfield Hills. That is where rich people send their kids, as tuition for
the 2024-2025 school year is $35,000.
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Q: My father died a year ago and I am still sifting though the papers he left behind. Old powers-of-attorney, worthless stock certificates, mortgage papers from several homes, health histories, school notebooks, various receipts and boxes and boxes of family photos documenting my family’s history in the 20th and 21st centuries What should I keep and what should I toss?
JULIE ROBERTS SZCZEPANKIEWICZ, genealogist, family historian
A: That’s an extremely difficult question to answer. Even people just moving are faced with the decision what to take and what to bin. If you ever plan to write a comprehensive family history, then most of those items could help document various stages of your family’s activities. But what if you tentatively plan to write such a history at some future date but don’t know whether you’ll actually have the time, energy and health to do so when the time comes? Since no-one can foresee the future, it’s really quite a toss-up.
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Q: I have a new Polish doctor whose last name is Nerga. Is that a Polish name?
JOHN R. SZYMAŃSKI, Troy, MI
A: The Nerga surname is shared n Poland by a mere 26 people (14 of them in Warsaw), although there is no word in the language starting with the letters nerg-, and its origin is obscure. Somewhere down the line a k~g consonant shift probably occurred. A similar-sounding surname Nerka (the Polish word for kidney) is shared by 144 Poles. Due to a speech defect or rapid, sloppy pronunciation Nerka could have come out sounding like Nerga, someone wrote it down that way and thus it has remained for a tiny minority of users.
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Q. Is $600 a month enough to live in Katowice, Poland?
ILYA M.
A: That would come to around 2,400 złoty, meaning frugally you could only just get by. For comparison, the Polish minimum wage is from 3,500 to 4,200 zł, and the minimum old-age pension runs between 1,450 and 1,588 zł.
