Płoszkowa

Płoszkowa emerges in brief but revealing scenes as a village observer who carries news between households and gives practical detail to Lipce’s poverty. Her attention moves from a cow being led to the Parish Priest’s bull to missing village funds, but her most sustained concern is the suffering of poor families and the indifference surrounding them. Through her, hardship is not an abstraction: it has frozen potatoes, an empty stomach, a sold quilt, and workless fields.

A village presence

Płoszkowa is physically sketched as a portly woman with a fat, red face, an appearance that accompanies her forceful manner. She accosts Hanka with village news and speaks readily in the company of other women. These small encounters place her within Lipce’s informal network of observation: she notices who is in trouble, what is being said about public affairs, and how one household’s actions are judged by its neighbors.

Her brief remark about a cow being led to the Parish Priest’s bull places her in the ordinary traffic of village life. The conversation unfolds during oppressive heat, when the people gathered at Agata’s bedside are subdued by the weather and the long murmur of prayers. Płoszkowa’s comment is practical and matter-of-fact, a contrast to the death vigil surrounding it; even in a scene marked by bereavement, the routines of livestock and work remain in view.

Work, hunger, and the winter crisis

Płoszkowa describes at least twenty hired hands in the village as desperate for employment. Winter has damaged the means of survival: potatoes have frozen, money is scarce, and some people eat a hot meal only once a day before going to bed hungry. The villagers had expected the Squire’s felling at Wolf’s Hollow to provide work, but the decision not to hire anyone from Lipce threatens to carry the hardship into a lean preharvest season. Her account makes the consequences of an employment decision immediate: without wages, households face hunger before the next harvest can sustain them.

The forest dispute thus appears in her speech not only as a question of rights but also as a question of livelihood. The anticipated work had offered poor villagers a way through the winter; its withdrawal deepens their insecurity. Płoszkowa’s emphasis on the hired hands broadens the picture beyond landowning farmers, showing who bears the cost when access to work disappears.

Bearing witness to poverty

Płoszkowa recounts two visits that expose the scale of the village’s distress. After sitting with Agata as the priest was leaving, she is summoned by Filipka, whose eldest daughter is believed to be dying. The family’s cottage is bitterly cold, its windows stuffed with straw. Everyone but one person is crowded together on bedding, the potatoes are gone, and the family has sold its quilt. They must beg the Miller for each measure of groats, because no one will lend or extend credit until harvest. Filipka’s husband is in prison with the other men, leaving the household without his labor or support.

Płoszkowa then goes to help Florka Pryczkowa, who has given birth and is ill, with no money saved and no one available to cook. Her fields lie fallow because Adam is also in prison. The newborn boy is described as strong, but his survival is uncertain: his mother is painfully thin and has no milk, while the family’s cow has only just come into calf. Płoszkowa links these individual emergencies to the wider absence of work and income among laborers, making the burden of imprisonment visible in the empty fields and weakened households as well as in the jail itself.

Criticism and judgment

Płoszkowa rejects the idea that poverty persists simply because no one can help. She contrasts the farmers’ preoccupation with filling their own stomachs or lending at the highest interest with the destitution of neighbors living close by. In her account, people leave the poor to Jesus and invoke divine order, yet protect themselves from hearing their complaints. Her criticism turns religious language into a measure of conduct: faith cannot excuse a comfortable refusal to notice suffering.

That concern also shapes her defense of Hanka when village opinion turns to Jagna’s expulsion. Płoszkowa argues that Hanka was not denying Jagna her land; she feared the trouble that might follow Antek’s return and did not want to keep a suspected thief in the house. The defense does not erase the dispute over Jagna’s place, but it contests the claim that Hanka acted without reason. Across these episodes, Płoszkowa serves as both witness and interpreter: she relays what the village knows, then presses listeners to judge hardship and household conflict by their concrete circumstances rather than by easy accusation.