A unique undertaking that goes far beyond procedures and forms to obtain citizenship.
By Roberto Martínez
Jonathan Jablonski He is a 24-year-old Argentine young man who one day had a fabulous dream, but he did not stay with what he had imagined in his mind, but rather he set out to make his vision a reality.
What is the point of dreaming or imagining achieving something if the possibility of materializing it is not activated later? Movement generates emotion and he moved and acted in such a way that he managed to create his company. «My Polish Passport» first, and position it later.
Thanks to its initiative, thousands of people renew and obtain the documentation that accredits them as Polish and European Community citizens, as well as rebuild their family tree and reconstruct their family history. In dialogue with The Digital Canillita, Jablonski talks about his entrepreneurship.
How was the idea born? What led you to think about a tool that provides solutions to people who want to live in Europe, and also helps them know their origin and that of their ancestors?
My old man processed our Polish passport for me and the whole family when we were kids and he was very dissatisfied with the whole process, which took years. When we wanted to renew our passports, we were told that the things we had were inadequate. There was quite a mess and I understood that what people like us needed was good advice.
In what year did this happen to you?
It ended in 2006, a long time ago. And I wanted to renew it 4 or 5 years ago. They told us that it was inadequate, that it couldn't be done, that this or that was missing, that the management that previous managers had done was insufficient. I had to redo it, practically renew my citizenship to be able to have a passport because, otherwise, it wouldn't be of much use to me. At the same time, a friend in college – I studied Business Economics at the Di Tella (Torcuato University) – wanted to become a Polish citizen, and I gave him the list of managers that were given at the embassy, a list of recommended professionals. He called and it also seemed inappropriate, they responded to his emails a month later, two months later, if they even deigned to respond.
So you did the procedure for him?
Yes. He told me: «Why don't you, who recently managed your own citizenship, do it for me? I'll pay you $2,000.«. That's how it all started. I was studying at the Faculty and I took it as an opportunity. Dreaming of what we are now came later. The truth is, for us there was also a time when we had a reduced staff that could easily take a month. I received an overwhelming amount of messages, I began to work between 16 and 18 shifts every day and I had to do everything myself. At that time he was 19 years old.
What steps did you take to get started?
I partnered with someone who had worked at the Polish embassy in Argentina and knew everything inside. Then I moved to Warsaw, for an exchange. I came back, completed all my studies and returned to Poland, where I stayed for a year and several months. I met my partner – she is Polish – and that's how the company began to grow. I went to Belarus, where my ancestors come from, I got to know the town where they lived and I started to make a network with local archivists, also out of curiosity. I thought a little about the business, but at the same time I wanted to do everything possible to find my family and I achieved it. Along the way I built a work network to which we added professionals who currently work for us: we have archivists in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus.
Under dependency or with another modality?
They are like contractors or freelancers. We already have established contracts with the value of each procedure and what they have to do. And they also provide added value. From my family they found that my great-grandfather had 20 hectares in Belarus, surprising things. My girlfriend and I returned to Poland, we started adding people to the network and she programmed the entire website for me, because she is a developer. He set up the website and automated everything, helping me lighten my workload. Some time later we broke up with my partner because he wanted to take only the simple cases and I understood that each person had the right to access citizenship. For this reason, we take advantage of every document that is given to us to carry out each procedure.
Do they miss a case or do they catch everything no matter how strange it is?
We do not guarantee one hundred percent success of the searches because I have cases of people who were born between 1880 and 1890 and we have to find documents that, in addition to being between 140 and 160 years old, may have been lost during the First and Second World Wars. I cannot guarantee that the documents exist, but we do search through our archivists for an average of 5 months. They are serious people, with decades of experience in the field. They all speak Russian, Polish and Ukrainian. There are cities, like Lodz, where searches are one hundred percent effective.
Hard times
With the war between Russia and Ukraine, the context will have become complex for the team of archivists, especially for those who operate near the conflict zone.
On the team we have Alissa, who is Russian. She was doing a fundraising campaign to which we also contributed from the company to buy special medicines for war wounds. She lives in Poland and works in our office, but feels she must help and goes to the border with Ukraine. One of the things he did was host a mother with her two children, one 3 years old and the other 14, in his house.
How valuable.
Then he hosted a Ukrainian boy who lived in Holland for one night and traveled via Poland to kyiv to fight. She was so distraught with this whole situation that she wanted to burn her Russian passport. We asked him not to do it until we process his Polish, in case the war gets worse and he has to leave Poland. She tells us: «I don't want to be Russian anymore, I'm so ashamed«.
And she is an example, but there are surely more tense situations.
Yes. We have a Polish girl who had a birthday and donated the money she was given to buy toys for children who were refugees from the war and receive them in a living room in her house. There is a lot of solidarity.
What does it tell them? It must be difficult to manage communication these days.
I am responsible for the well-being of my team. I told everyone to take the money out of the bank, to have cash and to have a valid passport. If Russia advances westward, I will tell them to drop everything and come here. Here we would resolve that they go to a hotel if necessary. We are constantly aware of what is happening.
It is a very difficult situation.
Ukraine's archivists are not working now, for obvious reasons: some have been able to migrate to Poland and others are fighting on the front lines. An employee of ours, named Dasha, keeps in touch with them as much as possible, but it is very difficult to keep in touch minute by minute. Although searches are paused in Ukraine, we work fully in Poland, Belarus and Lithuania, the three countries where we have the greatest presence, and we carry out searches at the request of people who reside in England and Germany and hire our services. We have daily work and direct contact with the court, which is in Warsaw
Can you cite any success story?
Yes, Guillermo Borger's, former president of the AMIA. We gave him citizenship, because he had no papers and we had to do a search in two countries. We searched in Germany for documentation proving that his family had been prisoners in concentration camps during World War II, family members who had not renounced their Polish citizenship. And in Krakow, his place of origin, we found a huge sheaf with more than twenty pages of different documents.
A lot.
Yes, we found requests for passports from his father and his grandfather, that is, from his father when he was young and from his grandfather; his voting record, and we found many photographic documents. He is very happy with us: he had tried four times without success to obtain his citizenship and was able to achieve it thanks to our company.
Therein lies the company's vision, then. It is the possibility of giving the opportunity to each person.
Our vision is that all those who can exercise their blood right have access to citizenship, whether with us or with any other company. We offer a free initial consultation service. We think it is really important that everyone understands their roots and can benefit from the work their ancestors did. Many of those people fought in World War I; We have many clients who have fought for the Polish army in World War II and there are people who don't even know those stories. These searches provide added value to each person by knowing and learning a lot of things about the past of their grandfather or great-grandfather, about which they knew nothing.
To illustrate in data the support you provide to each person who contacts you, what is the sphere of influence of “My Polish Passport”?
We are the largest company on the entire continent, because there are no others that make Polish citizenship. Not in Chile, nor in Paraguay, Colombia or Uruguay. In Brazil I think there is one, but it is small. We have 2 offices, one in Buenos Aires, with 13 employees, and another in Warsaw, very close to the respective courts.
What do you feel?
A very great pride. I'm happy with what I put together, it wasn't easy. I dedicated a lot of time to it. There were days when I worked between 16 and 17 hours, with the entire weekend included, without a social life, because doing this work responsibly takes a lot of time. Today we do just over 400 citizenships per year, but in Argentina alone there is a universe of 1 million people who can access it, located mainly in settlements in Santa Fe, Misiones, Chaco, the Federal Capital and the province of Buenos Aires. We are not stopping with what we have done, we want to continue helping people.
Digital Bobbin
Tags: Citizenship, PolandSource: El Canillita Digital
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