20 Cents Foreign Exchange Certificate; small size

Bank Pekao's foreign exchange certificates were a deliberate instrument of socialist Poland's hunger for hard currency. Issued to Poles receiving remittances from relatives abroad — primarily from the United States and West Germany — the certificates allowed the state to capture those dollars and deutschmarks at the official rate while giving recipients scrip redeemable only at Pewex, the state-run hard currency retail chain. Pewex stores stocked Western goods unavailable anywhere else: Levi's, whisky, electronics. The certificates thus functioned as both a currency control mechanism and a rationing tool dressed up as a privilege.

The 1979 series coincided with Poland's deepening debt crisis; hard currency inflows from the diaspora had become economically critical by that point.