Polish Adoptions Seen As Righting Romanian Wrongs

In his battered brown attache case, Bill Pierce brought files on 51 Polish orphans with him to Chicago last week.

He used the word ``files`` in a loose sense: They were fact sheets, some connected by paper clip to the picture of a smiling child. Many of the dossiers hadn`t been translated into English yet.

Each told the tale of a Polish child with no home or family.

``The boy wants very much to have his own family home,`` said the file of Sylwester, a 10-year-old, ``to have somebody close forever.``

Pierce, president of the National Council for Adoption, is recently back from Poland and touring the United States, hoping to find a home for each of the children in his files. His first stop was Chicago.

In each city, Pierce will visit several adoption agencies, promoting an experimental method of international adoption developed by the council, an umbrella group for 120 private agencies across the United States.

Pierce said his plan is the first to use a list that contains a country`s complete roster of adoptable children. He hopes international adoptions will become easier as a result of the streamlined process.

He also hopes that his plan helps prevent the black-marketeering, fraud and adoption frenzy that occurred when Romanian orphanages were thrown open after that country`s 1989 revolution.

The debacle all but shut the lid on Eastern Europe`s orphanages, for neighboring countries feared the negative media coverage that Romania had received. Rumors circulated that Westerners were adopting children to train as servants.

Only now are the doors beginning to open again-and Chicago-area parents may be among the first to benefit.

Chicago, with the largest Polish population of any city outside Warsaw, is a natural destination for many of the Polish orphans-all of whom have been passed over by families in their homeland, Pierce said.

``The Polish government just doesn`t want a whole lot of people swarming over Poland like they did in Romania,`` he said. ``I know that spotted around (America) are a lot of Polish-American families who will adopt these kids or at least some of them. My hope is that after a while it is possible for organized, very carefully managed working relationships like this to be seen as a good model.``

He said the program could lead to stronger ties with other former East Bloc countries.