Ruble Soars, Upstairs Downstairs, the old 1% and a Polish War Slave.
June 27, 2022 Volume 3 # 4
The Ruble Snaps Back.
This was a question in the New York Times Friday quiz. Which currency made the biggest comeback this week? I got it wrong. The answer:
It’s the ruble, which collapsed in the weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On Tuesday, it traded at its strongest level against the U.S. dollar since June 2015. It has gained about 35 percent so far this year, beating every major currency, and has more than doubled from its post-invasion low. The reason: high oil and gas prices. China and India are buying.
Scale is inverted; a rising line indicates a stronger ruble. | Source: FactSet | By The New York Times
There’s Nothing Surer, the Rich Get Rich and the Poor get Poorer
Maybe not. That song was written in 1921 when the rich were richer. The chart below show that at the start of the 20th Century the rich were much richer, especially in Britain and France. Death duties, taxes and two World Wars made things much more equal.
The outlier is the United States where the top 1 per cent have made a strong comeback since 1980. The richest Americans are right where they were in the 1920s. Either it is Ronald Reagan or the computer/Internet boom that produced so many billionaires. Take your pick. Probably depends on your politics.
What does it take to be in the 1%, by net worth?
Britain: £3.6 million. (US$4.6 million)
Canada: C$9 million. (US$6.98 million)
United States: $11-1 million
France: €2m (US$2.1 million. Dodgy statistics. It is probably higher.)
“With the exception of Switzerland, France is the country where the wealthiest 1% has the highest standard of living.” Study by Observatoire des inégalités.
Upstairs Downstairs
Britain was the most extreme 122 years ago when it came to who had money and who did not. In the last few weeks I have been re-watching Upstairs Downstairs, which I think is a much more accurate portrayal of Britain’s class system in the early 20th Century than Downtown Abbey. One comments, the other adores.
There is one episode where Mrs. Bridges, the cook, is Downstairs pouring tea for the maids and footman. She puts the milk in first and then the tea. Upstairs, Lady Marjorie is pouring tea, with the milk in second. Subtle.
Upstairs Downstairs is more like a stage play. The main scenes are mostly shot in the Morning Room, the kitchen and the hallway. I probably have the wrong name for that but then what do I know. There is a Canadian connection. Alfred Shaughnessy was the main script writer. He was a grandson of Lord Shaughnessy, made a Baron as one of the builders of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Alfred’s father died in France in 1916 and he was brought up in a household in Norfolk Square in London that was similar to the life in Upstairs Downstairs if not as posh an address.
There is a personal connection. A second or third cousin of mine (I can never figure these things out), Desmond Perry, played an Irish drunk in one episode who blackmails Lady Marjorie.
Desmond, who was on Z-Cars on British TV, among other things, was actually a vegetarian and a teetotaller, but he managed to play the Irish drunk quite well.
Liveable Cities and Hell Holes
The Economist published this list. I am going to go out on a limb and say I disagree with it, at least the two Canadian cities listed. Vancouver is beautiful, but a bit boring after you get used to the spectacular views.
It rains a lot. Decades of money laundering in real estate — detailed in the Cullen Report, out recetnly— make it too expensive for the average person.
Calgary is downright cold for six months of the year.
It is close to the beautiful Rocky Mountains. Both cities are great places to live but I can think of places I would rather be.
The least livable are wracked by war, civil unrest, extreme inequality, and environmental catastrophe.
A Strawberry as Big as an Egg
Essay of the Week
Another war related obituary I wrote for the Globe and Mail. This one is also a person I knew, Eddy Tomera. Many Poles came to Southern Quebec after the war. Almost all had lived through hell.
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The best years of Eddy Tomera’s life were in Canada, where he worked as a miner and a farmer, raising his family and a series of orphaned deer. His worst years were as a child slave-labourer on a Nazi controlled farm outside Hamburg.
The Tomera family owned a small farm outside Krakow in the southern part of Poland near the border with Czechoslovakia. Their lives were turned upside down when Germany invaded in September of 1939. After the Soviet Union invaded a few months later, The country was divided between the Soviets and the Germans and Krakow fell under German administration. Schools were closed across Poland and Eddy Tomera’s formal education stopped then.
When Hitler invaded Russia in June of 1941, the Nazis needed manpower to replace soldiers who fighting on the eastern front. The Germans swept towns and then the countryside looking for people to conscript as slave labourers.
In the fall of 1941, most of the Tomera family were ordered from their farm – which they never saw again-- and moved to a giant farm south of Hamburg. There were as many as 600 people working there.
Eddy Tomera was 12, just about to turn 13. His mother, father five sisters and two brothers lived in the same barracks type building. They rose at 5 am, started work at six and worked until sundown. Young Eddy was used to hard agricultural labour but not to the work he was assigned.
“He was terrified. He was put in charge of huge draft horses and giant oxen,” said his sister Ludwika Morzajew who was also at the farm. “If you complained you were beaten. If you were sick you were sent away and never heard from again.”
Each family member lived on a bread ration of 2 kilograms per week. Mrs. Morzajew described the bread as being rock hard. They also stole food, which was punishable by beatings or even death. The guards spoke German, though many of the guards were Silesian Poles who understood both languages.
The farm was liberated in April of 1945. The family refused to return to Poland since it was now occupied by the Soviets and there was little chance of them getting their farm back.
Eddy Tomera was now 17. He and his family lived in refugee camps in Europe, until he and his brother found work in Canada in 1950. The government insisted families come as farmers and single men as miners. Eddy and his brother worked in gold mines in Val d’Or, Quebec. They saved enough money to bring over the rest of their family in 1952.
The next year Mr. Tomera met his future wife Anna at a dance in Montreal. She too had a horrendous time in Poland during the war; her family was sent to Siberia by the Russians. The couple were soon married and they bought a 213 acre dairy farm in southern Quebec, a few miles north of the Vermont border. Mr. Tomera fell in love with the rolling hills, which reminded him of southern Poland, and the mountains on the horizon which looked the Tatra mountains along Poland southern frontier.
For about 15 years the Tomera’s worked their dairy farm, milking about 40 cows. His son Tadzeu said his father gave up when there were too many regulations about dairy farming. He carved off a slice of the farm on a high point overlooking Jay Peak in Vermont, and built a house.
Though he didn’t plan it, he became more successful as a kind of freelance farmer, running properties for city people who had moved to the country and were enthusiastic about farming but short on experience. On one occasion he had to rescue one of his clients, Thor Stephenson, from what could have been a nasty encounter with an Angus bull.
Mr. Tomera told Mr. Stephenson, who was president of United Aircraft at the time, “You stick to business and I’ll stick to farming. A photograph, taken by Mr. Stephenson just after the incident in the late 1970’s shows a glowering Eddy Tomera, rather than his usual smiling self.
It was around the early 1980’s that Mr. Tomera took up a hobby, caring for abandoned deer.
The first deer he looked after was a small fawn he found tangled in some wire. Its mother was gone so he bottle fed it and raised it until it was full grown. The animal was tame, and to show it was a pet, it had a red ribbon around its neck. Some hunters shot it anyway.
Over the years he took care of about a dozen deer. Police and game wardens would drop off orphaned animals for Mr. Tomera to raise. Many of them left and returned to the wild. After a while though, the government brought in some rules about keeping wild animals and Mr. Tomera gave it up.
Life around Mansonville, Quebec, was unusual in that it was possible to live just about your entire life in Polish. Dozens of Polish families moved there and the local cemetery is filled with Polish names. From time to time mass was said in Polish in the local Catholic church.
Mr. Tomera’s son Tadzeu works for Pratt and Whitney Canada in Montreal. On the job the language is French but for the past several years he has shuttled back and forth to Warsaw to help with a company project in Poland.
Eddy Tomera played soccer with a local Polish team, which allowed non-Polish speakers to play. He loved a game of pool, particularly at a local hangout called the Owl’s Nest, a place made famous in a novel written by one of the locals, Mordecai Richler, one of Mr. Tomera’s pool partners.
An affable man who always seemed to be smiling, Mr Tomera was reserved about a few things, such as talking politics. Free with his opinions at home, outside the house he kept his views to himself.
“It was left over from the war,” said his wife Anna. “He was very brave about most things, but he was very cautious and reserved about politics. He didn’t want people to know what he thought.”
In the 1970’s Mr. Tomera applied to the German consulate in Montreal for compensation for his time spent as a slave labourer. Germany paid him a lump sum of about $15,000 and pension of about $110 a month.
Edward Tomera was born on September 17, 1928 in the village of Chyzowski outside Krakow. He died in Montreal in August 11, 2005, after a heart operation. He is survived (as of 2005) by his wife Anna and their two children, as well as five sisters and one brother, the only member of the family living in Poland.