The women
There is no list of names. The women testified anonymously or by first name, and most of those who stayed in Italy never testified at all. We quote what was published, without embellishment, and keep apart what the women themselves said from what the press wrote about them.
Content note: descriptions of violence
What the press wrote in 1981
These are journalists' claims, above all Jan Śpiewak's in Antena, repeated by others. They were not proven at trial.
The clubs "under the charming names Rosa Pantera, Blue Notte, Omnibus, Moulin del Topo" were "brothels run by the mafia. At the entrance stood their man with a gun in his hand. For every act of disobedience he shot the girl in the ear, first the left, then the right. The young Polish women, who knew barely two or three words of Italian, had their passports taken on arrival. They paid for their costumes in kind."Antena, March 1981, as quoted by Helena Kowalik.[2][7] Elsewhere Antena writes that the guards "Franco or Mauro" threatened to shoot off an ear.[3]
"The girls took to drink, and most ended up as prostitutes on the motorway."Jan Śpiewak, Antena, 1981.[2][3]
In one of Mario Gaviraghi's venues Italian police found a girl strangled with a nylon stocking forced down her throat. "The mafia's calling card, for a victim who talked too much." That discovery led to his arrest.After Helena Kowalik, who cites the Italian press. The source does not give the victim's nationality.[2][3]
What the women themselves said
"There were five of us in my dance group. At the airport Camillo Cassaglia met us, a charming son of a bitch. We drove to the Omnibus, a little place near Florence. We did not know what this consumption meant in practice. Three girls in our group were unlucky, they got pregnant. In other groups it was even worse. One had her cheek shot through, of two all trace was lost. Nearly all took to drink.""Magda", aged 20, in Życie Warszawy, June 1981, in the article "Exploitation of man by man".[2]
"At the beginning it was hard. I even changed venue, but with the same owner. Because in the first one there was no dance floor, only booths like horse stalls. A table and a sofa in each. I would not go into those booths for anything, even though they paid 15,000 lire a night. More than once I was hit in the face for resisting. In the end the proprietario suggested that I need not go to bed with the guest, it was enough to get drunk with him. It was enough that the client drooled on me and groped me."Mariola from Rzeszów, eight months in Gaviraghi's venues, Ekspres Reporterów, 1982. She estimated about 700 Polish women worked there.[2][8]
She went to Italy with her husband, a photographer. As soon as she looked around the venue she told him: "we are in a brothel". She had one chance to sing for the guests. Because she refused to go into the booths she sat alone at a table for hours, sipping water. The owner of the Omnibus gave her passport back only when the contract ran out.Ewa G., Yoko Show troupe, talking to Maciej Piotrowski.[2] The couple C., who led the troupe, later claimed G. had slandered Cassaglia because he refused her a raise and a job for her husband.[2]
The Polish women working at the Omnibus admitted "that not much came of the dance performances, but they had nothing to regret either". They were "to sit at the table all night if need be and provoke clients into buying a bottle of champagne. Maybe it was not comfortable, but if you were nice to a client he gave you a foreign sweater or tights."Maciej Piotrowski's conversations at the Omnibus, 1981, after Kowalik.[2]
The women who returned "had clean records before leaving the country and are now treated by those around them as prostitutes. That is why they testify with such reluctance."Militia spokesman at the July 1981 press conference.[2]
Voices that complicate the picture
A record that left these out would be dishonest towards the women who gave them.
"We have learned that we work in a brothel, under the guns of mafia guards. This is a huge insult to us […]. Since arriving in Italy we have been free to move around the whole country; we do not understand on what basis it is written that our impresarios are criminals."Letter from Polish women performing in the Olivero agency's venues, passed by the Polish consul in Milan to ZPR and several Warsaw newspapers, spring 1981. "In the newsrooms the letter was put at the bottom of a drawer."[2]
Nobody made them do anything. The contracts drawn up in the ZPR office stipulated that so-called consumption was optional. She brought back "the best of memories".Bożena M., leader of the Lady Shic troupe. The reporter got her contact, and Ewa G.'s, from the militia spokesman, "on the good cop, bad cop principle".[2]
"I don't know why the papers keep digging this up. I went, I saw a bit of the world, I earned, I can buy a cooperative flat here. Otherwise I'd stand behind the buffet at the railway station in my town until retirement."One of the women who returned, Ekspres Reporterów, 1982.[2][8]
"Those propositions, Your Honour, were, to tell the truth, completely unambiguous. But such propositions have come my way, and still do, in Poland too, and I simply know how to respond to them."A witness at the 1984 trial, quoted in the memoirs of defence counsel Stanisław Zabłocki.[3]
The dancers of the Mette troupe, when their contract expired, extended their stay in Italy on their own, striking a deal with Olivero's competitors.According to ZPR director Nowotny.[2][3]
"We won't go back to Poland, unless dead."Headline of an Italian newspaper article about Polish women on contract, shown to the Kulisy reporter by the couple C. in 1981. The paper has not been identified.[2]
How to read this
Three remarks. First, the most drastic images, ears shot, an armed guard, the motorway, come from the press, not from the women's statements; the statements contain blows to the face, confiscated passports, pregnancies, drink, disappearances and one cheek shot through. Second, the consul's letter was written by women who at the time were still working in the venues described, and passed through an institution of the state that was party to their contracts. Third, some women knew what they were going to and decided it was worth it.
These accounts do not cancel each other out. The same offer reached women in very different situations. The law, including today's law, does not ask whether someone "agreed" when the agreement was obtained by deceit and the exit closed by taking documents.[12][16] The 1984 court found that "nobody forced anybody to do anything".[3] The reasoning behind that verdict takes up the Trial chapter.
Anna Dobrowolska shows one more thing: the way the communist-era press wrote about these women, including the word "Dziwex" itself, was contemptuous. It made them either naive victims or "whores", and in both versions took away their voice.[3][5][6] This site tries to give it back, as far as the sources allow.