I lost my job because of Brexit

“I lost my job because of Brexit, so it was time to leave.” With this one sentence, first fluently in English, then a little haltingly in German, Bartek Truch succinctly summarizes what is actually a longer story. He has just brought the furniture to Görlitz from Great Britain, where he and his wife Anna lived happily for many years. Where their two daughters were born and grew up.
 
Bartek and Anna both come from the small Polish town of Lubań. They went to school there without ever crossing paths. It wasn't until Anna was already in the middle of her German studies and Bartek was working at the Skoda factory in the Czech Republic that they met and fell deeply in love in the early 2000s. “Commuting between our private lives and our workplaces was normal for us.” Soon, Anna took a job in Zgorzelec, Görlitz's Polish twin city. The Polish and German municipalities, separated only by the border river Neisse, jointly declared themselves a European City in 1998.
 
“I worked in a call center for German customers, which was obviously good for my language skills,” says Anna. Later, she crossed the river and worked on the German side, in an office and in the restaurant industry. Eventually, all the commuting became too much for them. They decided on a new place to live together. They chose Wroclaw/Breslau. Their job search was successful; Anna found a position in the back office of a bank, and Bartek traveled nationwide as a sales representative.
 
What wasn't quite right was their limited income at the end of the month and their desire for their own apartment. “The housing market is overheated; we couldn't find anything we could afford. That's when the idea came up to go to Great Britain to work for a few years.” Polish acquaintances in Sheffield had told them about the good earning potential, and so the English city of 600,000 inhabitants with its rich industrial history became their destination.
 
“It wasn’t quite that easy,” Anna Truch recalls, “finding a well-paid job. In the end, I had to go cleaning. My husband started as a construction worker.” Their ambition to succeed kept them afloat. “Working in a nursing home helped me learn English very quickly; otherwise, I would have been lost.” After a year, the two decided to get married. “The wedding, of course, had to be in Poland, with all our family and friends. After that, we didn’t want to go back to the island at all.”
 
In the end, however, their salaries lured them back to Great Britain. “And at some point, we just started living our lives there.” Two daughters were born, and their Polish and English acquaintances blended together. “It had really become comfortable.” As the Brexit clouds gathered ever darker over the country, things also grew colder for the small family. This continued until Bartek lost his job due to the increasingly difficult economic situation. “We thought about what to do and finally responded to the roughly one million calls from my sister Monika,” Anna laughs. Her sister lives in Görlitz and runs a hotel with her German husband. “And she always said, ‘If you come, you can start working for us right away.’”
The school holidays in the summer of 2020, which they spent mostly in Görlitz, were the deciding factor. And so were all the aunts. “For our girls, having such close relatives is a blessing. They are loved and spoiled by everyone.” Now it’s back to school for Bartek and Anna. “I’ve forgotten everything I learned in university,” says Anna. “And I have to learn everything all over again anyway,” says Bartek. “But I can persevere pretty well. The most important thing is to find a job soon. Anything at all, for now.”
 

Text: Axel Krüger
Photos/Video: Paul Glaser

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