Three years apart in age, the brother and sister grew up in a tiny village in eastern Poland, helping out on the family farm and going to church each Sunday under pressure from their parents. Today, the siblings, Monika Zochowska, 38, and her brother, Szymon, 41, are separated by a wide gulf opened by politics and outlook — examples of the many chasms cleaving Poland as it wrestles with the results of a recent general election that handed a narrow majority in Parliament to opponents of the nationalist governing party. Monika and Szymon stand on opposite sides of perhaps the deepest of those divides: the gap between villages and small towns, which voted heavily for nationalist forces, and urban centers, which gave overwhelming support to their more centrist and liberal opponents, notably Civic Coalition, the main opposition party.

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Persons: Monika Zochowska, Szymon, Monika Organizations: Civic Coalition Locations: Poland