Where are the food queues, asks Polish man after 19-year coma

A railwayman from Poland has awoken after a 19-year coma to discover communism has been swept away and the shops are full of food.

Jan Grzebski, 65, was hit by a train in 1988 and was given only two years to live by doctors. But his wife Gertruda continued to care for him, and never lost hope that he would recover consciousness.

Grzebski, a father of four from Dzialdowo, northern Poland, who remains confined to a wheelchair, was in his mid-forties living under a regime of food shortages when he slipped into the coma.



Now that he has regained consciousness, however, he has observed that the dramatic transformation of the Polish economy and the invention of modern technologies such as the mobile phone appears to have done little to cheer his countrymen up. He had been living under President Wojciech Jaruzelski's regime of food shortages, and queues for petrol in a country which was almost completely cut off from the west by the Iron Curtain.

'When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere,' he said.

'Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin. What amazes me is all these people who walk around with their mobile phones and never stop moaning - I've got nothing to complain about.'