A Pole apart.

• Author: Zelenko, Laura
• Position: Daniel Sztyber is thinking of doing business in Poland

Yearning for the good life, Daniel Sztyber fled Poland. Now he thinks success might lie where he left.

The night of Nov. 30, 1984, Daniel Sztyber, his wife and their two sons left communist Poland. They carried four illegal passports, two small bags and $1,500, their life savings.

Seven years later, it might seem that Sztyber -- pronounced "Shtibber" -- has begun to reap the rewards of capitalism. His Charlotte company could gross a quarter-million dollars this year. He owns a small house in Pineville, a pickup truck, two cars and a boat. He has a son in Duke University's pre-med program.

But don't talk to Sztyber about the American dream. He has borrowed heavily and run up large debts on credit cards, something he never saw back in Poland. In September, he had liabilities of $120,000, a fair portion from starting up, then shutting down, a copying business. Before he closed the 2-year-old shop this year, Sztyber lost $30,000. Afterward, his wife had to take a part-time job at a cafeteria to make ends meet.

Though he lives a fairly good life, enjoys liberty and is pursuing happiness, Sztyber hasn't found what he expected in America. As a white-collar emigrant, success, in his view, is still a long way off. "I don't rest," he says. "I don't have surplus money. We try to live month to month."

Sztyber, in fact, might have been better off in Poland, where he was a government trade specialist and financial consultant. When he left, he was living in a comfortable condo on a salary about 10 times that of the average Pole.

Just as his homeland has had a hard time adjusting to the demands of the open market, so has Sztyber. Growing up in the shelter of a state-run economy, he has had to learn the hard way that free enterprise is rife with risks as well as rewards.

Born in 1947 on the brink of a new era of Communist Party rule in Poland, he was the son of Zygmunt Sztyber, a tailor who was among the small class of craftsmen and farmers who continued to work independently in Poland after the Communists took over. While 80% of Polish business was state-owned, there was still more autonomy for establishing private farms and other small enterprises than in most Eastern Bloc nations.

The Sztybers lived in Piszczac, a rural town of 3,000 near the Russian border. "At that time, he was considered a capitalists," Sztyber says of his father. Still, they were poor. He remembers times when his family had only bread to eat. Their house was large, but it was bitter cold in winter. Zygmunt Sztyber put his six sons and two daughters to work sewing on buttons or patching holes.

Unsure of what to study, Sztyber took the advice of one of his brothers and tried business. He attended university in Warsaw, studying economics. He learned English, German and, of course, Russian. He graduated in 1970, just as Poland was entering a decade of debt-funded prosperity. While the country was trying to construct a viable economy, its workers were building a strong trade-union movement.

Sztyber stayed out of Solidarity and, he says, steered clear of the Communist Party. Instead, he focused on his own ambitions. But that took him inside the...