Waking Up To Capitalism--A Modern Rip Van Winkle

Jan Grzbebski woke up from a 19-year-long coma, and he seems to like the smell of capitalism in the morning.

When Jan Grzbebski woke up after 19 years in a coma the Polish railway worker found himself living in the future.

The Soviets had disappeared. So had food rationing. The only thing that stayed the same was his doting wife, Gertruda. She refused to believe the doctors who threw up their hands after diagnosing her comatose husband with brain cancer and said he was likely to die within a few years of the accident.

....Communism collapsed. Their four children married and produced 11 grandchildren.

"When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere," Grzebski tells TVN24, according to Reuters. "Now I see people on the streets with cellphones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin."

Source

Check out this BBC video.

Communist Poland suffered under the "knowledge problem," like all strictly communist or true socialist economies. Without the straightjacket of communism, Poland has the opportunity to recover from a decades long nightmare coma of its own.