Well a very sweet old lady i know was born in the 1950s.
Unfortunately not only young people are like that. Most likely she was invested in solidarność or at least strongly supported it in the 80's and when that proven to be traitorous scam which caused incredible tragedy of capitalism restitution she just went into denial and refuse to admit she was wrong. I know tons upon tons of people like that. Also from the contex i get she do not live in Poland? Emmigrants are mixed bunch, but often either they simply lie because they weren't even part of those events (and the polonia groups in let's say Germany or USA is very anticommunist gusano bunch). I mean solidarnosc is still our biggest labour union despite being anti-union and scabbing strikes of other unions. That is some serious mental baggage. Also religion. Catholicism in Poland was always crazily anticommunist and more than ever after 1989, so religious people are truly lost case here.
If you were not in the party university was closed doors for you, she claims.
False.
She also claims that a friend of hers was arrested and tortured by the police for weeks for “being against the communists” (again, i dont know what that means).
Suuure, friend of friend of frien who hear something... more like one hour waiting at the police station got "slightly" heroised in the gossip. Very characteristic for Poland is fact that the amount of "anticommunist combatants" rise quickly the further from socialism we are.
She also claims that a friend of hers was arrested and tortured by the police for weeks for “being against the communists” (again, i dont know what that means).
There was problem in the 80's where 10 millions of solidarnosc members striked for months causing entire economy to a crashing crisis, especially that westerners after being more open in the 70's imposed sanctions in the 80's - very unfortunate for people like Gierek who thought to be the next Tito and tied some of our economy to western trade. But again, i remember those times and i was never hungry, and i was never buying anything on black market, though that sadly existed, mostly because just as Lenin warned, peasants were just petty bourgeoisie while workers were socialists, and they were always coddled by state and allowed to cheat the system. There were food stamps in the crisis for a time (not permanently) and you had to stand in queue in shop for sometimes quite a long time, but "no food" is just a propaganda lie. If there was "no food" there would be famine and population drop and we had a demograpic height in the 80's.
If you thought it yes, shes a liberal and quite anticommunist. I think this is because after PRL collapsed her standards of living went up significantly (from low income to middle income) thanks to her son being a successful scientist working in the west.
Ah yes, that explains everything. Poland was and still is severely braindrained since the 1989. As you can see immediately turning people liar and gusano, and creating a desperate need of validation. Same with the new bourgeoisie. The transformation went good for them, especially the ones who plundered the state property. Success for the few, suffering for millions, as usual in capitalism.
She found absolutely nothing, and when she asked for “communist merchandising/memorabilia” in the shops they looked at her like she was crazy or something.
Hahaha that must have been funny. You will find nothing just in shops. You can sometimes buy old books printed before 1989 and some antiques but if you want something new you must order it from abroad (aliexpress have tons of communist memorabilia). The same about books, since 1989 there were basically 4 communist books printed in Poland (Marx Capital - but only 1st book, Marx 18 brumaire, Manifesto, Xi Jinping Governance of China - also only first book and it isn't really a communist book - all in small amounts), so you have to get english books from abroad which is very expensive or use digital versions. And the language barrier to properly understand the text in case of books not in your language is still much higher especially in case of not being pulp novels but something like Capital.