20 Cents Foreign Exchange Certificate

Bank Polska Kasa Opieki — PKO — issued these Foreign Exchange Certificates as a mechanism to capture hard currency inside Poland's closed economy. Foreigners and Poles receiving remittances from abroad were effectively required to exchange dollars, marks, or other Western currencies for these certificates, which could then be spent only at Pewex stores — the state-run hard currency shops that stocked goods unavailable through normal socialist retail channels.

The system was nakedly extractive: it kept real currency out of private hands while giving the state access to Western funds it desperately needed. The 1969 series was printed domestically by PWPW in Warsaw, unusual for satellite-state hard currency instruments of the period, which were often contracted abroad.