At the age of 19, Boguslawa suffered one blow after another. First, her brother hangs himself. She still doesn’t know why. Three months later, her father dies of a heart attack. “Catastrophic. That was catastrophic,” says the 50-year-old, still visibly moved today, in broken German. Until then, she had lived carefree with her parents and two siblings on a farm near the town of Krosno in Poland’s Carpathian foothills. But then everything changed. Boguslawa’s sister got married and moved in with her husband. Her mother had been a housewife all her life and was already of retirement age. Getting by as a couple without her father’s income was tough. But at least, because they kept animals on their farm and were able to grow vegetables, they were able to make ends meet without much money.

Three years later, Boguslawa moved in with Arthur. She had met and fallen in love with him before and eventually married him. The two had three children, but Arthur quickly turned out to be an “asshole,” as Boguslawa says bluntly today. He drank a lot and beat his wife – but she put up with the marriage. For the sake of the children. In addition to raising them and keeping house, she cleaned in a hospital and helped out in the kitchen at wedding parties in the area. How did she put up with it all? “Had to,” she says pragmatically. When the children were old enough, however, she didn’t have to do anything. She filed for divorce and took off for Hamburg, where distant acquaintances promised her a place to sleep and a job. That was about ten years ago.