This week, we’re featuring two conversations relating to the so-called Green Border in Podlaskie region of eastern Poland, on the Belarus border concerning topics of migration, repression, militarization, nationalism and solidarity among residents and people on the move into Fortress Europe.
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First up, you’ll hear Alex, a member of the feminist anti-repression group, Szpila Collective, about the H5Poland case of 5 activists facing charges for aiding people in need in what could be a landmark case in Poland and Europe. More at Szpila.BlackBlogs.Org or on Mastodon: @Szpila@kolektiva.social [ 00:01:34 – 00:15:08]
Then, you’ll find a chat with an anarchist who grew up in this border region and returned in adulthood and whose affinity group does solidarity with people on the move through the Białowieża forest. [00:19:58 – 01:32:18]
To hear past interviews about this border, check out our chat with two folks from Grupa Granica, or other chats where we’ve covered / carried chat about the border at Calais, the Mediterranean, the Balkan Route, Australia or the US / Mexico border.
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Featured Track:
- Help4Dunkerqe by Ratajkovsky
H5Poland Transcription
Alex: Hello. First of all, thank you for having me here. My name is Alex, pronouns she/her, and I am a member of the Szpila collective, which is a feminist anti-repression group with anarchist roots based in Warsaw, Poland.
To let you know what Szpila actually is, we are a group of girls whose aim is to provide legal help for people who face different kinds of repression because of their political activity. We support groups like anarchists, anti-fascists, and anti-authoritarians, but also the LGBT community, women strikers, student strikers, sometimes tenant movements, or people who protest climate change. Since 2021 we also supported people who are active on the Polish-Belarusian border and providing humanitarian aid. What we basically do is we run a phone line available 24/7, where people can call in case of arrest, interrogation, or upcoming trial, and we link those people with lawyers, and sometimes, because in our group, we also have a lawyer, we defend people in court ourselves. We also support them with solidarity campaigns and spreading information about repressions. Basically, that’s why I’m here today to talk to you about one of the upcoming trials.
TFSR: That’s great. Thank you so much, Alex, for being in conversation with me. I really appreciate it. We’re here to talk about the H5 case in Poland, whose trial will begin this autumn. Can you give us a rundown of what happened in March 2022, who the activists were that were arrested, and the people that they are aiding?
A: H5 comes from five people who face serious criminal charges, and their trial will be run by the court in Hajnówka city in Poland.
Maybe we should start from the beginning. As you may already know, since 2021 there has been a humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, where the new immigration route has been open. Since the very beginning, the Polish state’s response was actually only violence, pushback, and building a wall, and the only help was provided by the local community, some NGOs, and collectives who appeared at the spot at the time. For me, this is one of the greatest examples of solidarity between people with so many different backgrounds. On the other hand, of course, it was never really welcome by the state, and there were many examples of repressions and criminalization of humanitarian aid.
One example is the attempt to implicate aid workers in organized crime groups, or accusations of helping to organize illegal border crossing and this is also the context of the H5 case. Their story begins on March 22, 2022, when the border guards stopped two cars, and in those cars, they found four volunteers providing humanitarian aid on the border with Belarus. Those were very different people, but active on the Belarusian border. Some of them were also active on the Ukrainian border, also providing humanitarian aid. When they were arrested that day, the prosecutor actually requested to put them into pre-trial detention, but the court luckily did not agree with this request. At the same time, the property of one resident of the Podlaskie region was searched. That was the situation in 2020 and at that time, the prosecutor wanted to accuse them of organizing illegal border crossing. But in December 2023, the prosecution changed the charges and added a fifth person to the case. It was this resident I mentioned before. Since that time, the five have been accused of aiding those who illegally cross the Polish border by providing them with food, clothes, shelter, and transport inside the country, which means to the next village. It’s absurd because they. Got charges, literally for helping people who might have died in the forest, and now, according to Polish law, they face up to five years in prison.
TFSR: I want to go back to the specific charges that folks are facing. But you mentioned that this is a deadly situation for the people that are crossing and that this is even a short distance that people are being accused of helping folks pass between villages.
Can you talk a bit about the experience of people crossing the border, from what you’ve heard, where they’re coming from, where they’re passing through, and where they’re going? What kind of conditions and dangers do they face as they travel through Poland towards their destinations.
A: People who try to cross the border with Poland come from very different places. Sometimes they come from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and many, many more. More information about them can actually be found in reports published by different organizations from Poland. But what is important is that many of them have actually fallen into some trap made by the Belarusian regime and the business of smugglers advertising to them that “the eastern route is safe and fast.” Especially at the beginning of the crisis, many people were unprepared for the conditions in the forest, the swamps, and the winter temperatures. That’s why those conditions were just too hard for them. And even if they asked for asylum in Poland, because many of them have asked for that, but from the very beginning, the border guards have never accepted that, they have just pushed them back to Belarus, very often destroying their phones, and taking money from them. We have some examples of violence reported on both sides, the Belarus side and the Polish side.
People who provide humanitarian aid on the border meet people in very different conditions. Most of them are hungry, they face cold, they have been beaten, so many different things can happen to them. But also, most of them almost lost their hope, because even if they ask many times for asylum in Poland, very often it’s not accepted. The border guards pretend that this application was never filed, and they are just pushed back again to Belarus. The Belarus side is forcing them to cross the border with Poland. It’s a circle all the time, and some of them spend months in the forest.
TFSR: It’s not like there’s a lot of food available in the forest. That’s pretty incredible. But from what I recall from the conversation with folks from Grupa Granica, there is a legal responsibility for the border guards on the Poland side to start processing someone for their asylum claim if they make the claim, right? It’s just them not following their own rules.
A: Of course, it’s actually the law on the European level as well. It’s not only the Polish law. Even more so, in law there in Poland, there is a law that obliges you as a person, every person, to provide assistance when someone is in danger. If you do not help, the court may sentence you to up to three years in prison, and meanwhile, those who actually save lives on the border face a higher penalty for saving the lives.
TFSR: One of the sticking points that I’ve heard is the accusation that the five people are accused of personally gaining or profiting from the acts of helping people on the move, which seems to equate them with smugglers or human traffickers. I know that, in the Mediterranean crossing, I’ve heard that sometimes the person at the head of the boat at the moment gets the extra [legal] charge. But can you talk about this accusation and how it interacts with the political situation around the border now in Poland?
A: There is a difference between the situation in Poland and in the Mediterranean because there people who are on the move are also forced to run the boats and here we have a bit different situation because we have just forests and swamps around.
But the charge in the H5 case criminalizes aiding for the purpose of financial or personal gain. The prosecution claims that the H5 help the refugees for personal gain, but what is more important, not their own gain, but that of the refugees. These charges sound completely absurd, and in my view, the H5 case is designed to intimidate humanitarian aid workers. It is also intended to portray humanitarian organizations in a really negative light and produce this wave of distrust and lack of public support for their work. This is what the law and justice government, which ruled Poland till 2023 did in the past. But it’s also the same as what this new government is doing. The new government, which many people hoped would help improve the situation, but actually now we can see that nothing has changed.
TFSR: Does this case stand alone? I know it’s been going on for a few years already, or are there similar cases ongoing in Poland?
A: We are aware that it’s not just the case of Poland. For many years, Fortress Europe has been using strategies to criminalize humanitarian aid in the Mediterranean, in Calais [France, crossing to the UK], but also we know a similar case in Belgium, for example. Poland is just another chapter of the story, and we, as a solidarity group, want to spread the news that now we’ve just faced the very same risk as people acting in other parts of Europe and the world. The H5 is not the only case like this in Poland, but the first one that is actually going to the court. We are not really sure when will be the first court hearing, but we suppose it will be in the late autumn. I think the verdict of this trial will be very important for other cases this in Poland.
TFSR: There’s an upcoming week of solidarity actions called for September 13th through the 20th. How can people show their support? How can they take action and raise the issue around the case? Where can people learn more?
A: We really want to spread the news about the case, so any action that will promote this case, any solidarity action, any info event, any text or talk like we have today is really welcome, and it will be really appreciated. When you visit Szpila’s website, which is szpila.blackblogs.org, or our account on Mastodon , you can learn more about Solidarity Action Week, and also you will find information on how to contact us. If you want to organize, for example, some event or info talk, of course, according to the fact that we are in Europe, and most of you are in the US, in your case, maybe only online meetings will be available. But if you are interested in anything like this, just let us know.
TFSR: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Good luck with the case. Thanks for being in touch.
A:Yeah, thank you so much for this talk.
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Podlaskie Transcription
TFSR: Would you please introduce yourself with any name, pronouns, location, or political affiliation you’d like to share with the audience?
X: I think, like the name or the nickname is not important. I’m a part of one of the groups and the basis that was organized here in the territory along the border with Belarus. We started this project in late 2021. Providing a specific geographical location is not really relevant. We are definitely not in the hot spot, not in the area of ancient forest exactly, but we are kind of close. My political background would be the anti-prison movement. That was my main work for the last few years.
TFSR: We’re speaking right now in terms of solidarity with migrants or people on the move and around the militarization that is going on. Just as I promised, I would ask follow-up questions. How did you find yourself shifting your attention from prisoner solidarity or anti-prison work to a focus on freedom of movement or human rights in this manner and then also borders? Does it feel like a shift, or does it feel like it’s the same topic for you?
X: It’s almost the same thing. It also requires me to change a bigger part of my life, because I was based in a big city before which was the center of my activities—not just political—but also life activities. With this work, I moved to the countryside, where I have lived for already more than two and a half years. At the same time, it’s those two things, and a lot more topics that are actually around this situation here. It’s an intersectional fight. For sure it’s a kind of continuation.
One of the main factors was the urgency of this situation, but at the same time, I also felt that people are criminalized here, they are detained, and this situation in terms of the justice system that we have in our societies, is much harder for those people, because they are completely excluded from the order that we have in liberal democracies. I would say that this is a fragile and excluded group. For sure, that was one of the main reasons why I decided to change a little bit the scope of my political work. At the same time, the really important factor was the fact that I come from this region. Now, I work in a village in a region that is like 20 kilometers away from the village where I was born, where I grew up, and spent more than half of my life. I had the feeling that I was barely involved in any political work in this region, without some small exceptions. In these terms, it was really important for me. The impulse was for sure that this is the region where I grew up, but then I discovered many more layers related to this too.
TFSR: In the last conversation around this general region, from the Polish side of the border with Belarus, I spoke with a couple of activists affiliated with who are under the umbrella of Grupa Granica. They were talking about the misconception that the fact that the people are crossing through the so-called green border with Belarus is somehow a new thing, but that border, being a porous area, has been imposed on the people who have always traveled through. As governments have changed over the decades, even those states in the area have changed greatly, but I wonder if you could talk a bit about the politics and the sociality of the culture of that region and how the border plays into it.
X: I agree and disagree. In a way, the migration to this border is a new thing, how it is now, the amount of people who are trying to cross. I would also disagree with it because it happened before on a smaller but not only smaller scale. There were situations where there were many more people who crossed. There was this situation of mostly Chechen refugees from Russia who were trying to get to the European Union and who were stuck in the border city of Brześć. Many of them were also refused or coerced at the border to accept the will for international protection in Poland, which was illegal. I think it was in 2015. There were already court cases happening, that have proved that.
There is also another situation that isn’t known well and it happened in 2014. There was an Ice Hockey Championship in Belarus, and to bring the people for the audience, the regime suspended the visa regime for many countries in the world. What we know from the comrades in Belarus, is that there were a lot of people who used this opportunity to enter Belarus and tried to get into the EU. At that time the regime was in a deal with the EU, so because of financial support, and transfers of huge amounts of money, they would still control the migration. So what we know from comrades in Belarus who were in at the time in prison is that at that time, the people, if they got caught, or those who didn’t come back after the championship, they’d end up in regular prisons. And it wasn’t just a few people. It’s really hard to estimate how many of them were in this situation, but it wasn’t just a statistical mistake. It wasn’t just a few people. It was, I would say probably some hundreds, but it’s also really difficult to estimate. So I could agree and disagree.
When talking about the situation now, we refer to the history, to the situation that happened here in the times of the First World War when the German army was going to the east. Then, the huge population of this territory—the ancestors of the people who are living here now—went into huge migration, where millions of people were going deeper into the Russian state. It had a specific historical name, and we had in the families the memories of this migration because many people didn’t come back or died on the road. So we have these historical memories, and the topic of migration was present in the population here. Recently, with these situations, but also there was, of course, a huge migration of the Belarusian people in 2020 after the uprising. Even before, there were some waves. Each time when there were elections in Belarus, there was a repression wave starting just before and ending maybe one year after. There were two years that you could survive there, and then the situation was repeating. There were some waves of people migrating here from Belarus. So, I wouldn’t say that the migration itself is super new here, I would just say that maybe the circumstances are slightly different.
I also completely disagree with the language that is used to describe the situation as the hybrid war or the hybrid weapon—it’s super dehumanizing. If we look historically at military conflicts, migration was always the way that was used to get rid of the people, to rule the land. It’s just like the fucking modern word to dehumanize the people who are right now here in this situation.
TFSR: Just to clarify—the hybrid war idea is the idea that, for instance, Lukashenko is consciously trying to drive migrants, refugees, and people through the border to destabilize Europe. In a way that sounds like a replacement theory. Is that right?
X: I’m not a politician, and ethically I don’t want to be a person who will speak about politics, but for sure that was expressed by him after the 2020 revolution in Belarus. EU put sanctions on the state, and at that time he said: “If you don’t take those sanctions away, I will stop controlling migration on this border”. He was and he’s still actively participating in that. It’s a bigger topic and some investigations are being made around it. Some people who are materially profiting out of this whole procedure, offering to come here and pass the green border, are close to the regime. We don’t know how is that working on the Polish side. I think, that it also could be a criminal thing. The whole business on this side could also probably be connected with the people in power in this state. So, yeah, we don’t know.
I wouldn’t talk about the politics. I would just say that we also had in this territory the catastrophe of the Second World War as in the whole of Europe. One of its results was the Geneva Convention. It’s not perfect, for sure, but it was the answer of our ancestors—our grandfathers and grandmothers and the people who survived this nightmare—to protect the other generations and the civil societies to not end up in a situation like that. I’m really surprised that we live in a world that is talking so much about human rights and tries to suspend that. As a generation, we don’t have, in my opinion, the right to decide that we want to suspend this legal act. This is also a really big obligation, and no one has the right to do it because they feel like the situation is a little bit more messy. It’s modern, but it’s also not modern. It was always like that. We just use the new words to name that.
TFSR: You have mentioned coming from a village not far from where you’re organizing. Talk about your relationship to Podlaskie, about the area and its culture.
X: As I mentioned at the beginning, I was born here. I grew up in a really small village, still in the time of a socialist system here, or state-ruled communism. I have a few memories from that time. My family was running a small farm, my grandmother didn’t work, but my grandfather had an occupation. The generation of my parents was the first one, where the woman started to work, and my generation was the first one that graduate, even the university. I mean, I had university, and some of the members of my family too, but my parents didn’t graduate high school. Life at that time was pretty tough, but at the same time, it’s important to picture how it changed with each generation.
In the socialist times, there was a huge transfer of massive numbers of people, economically and socially. People moved to the cities, they got regular jobs. That is my background. I don’t feel, and never felt, national identity. It is, first of all, because my family is in a religious minority. My grandmother, from the father’s side, she never spoke Polish, but the dialect of the region where she was living. Same for my parents—they are still using it with the people that they know can speak it. There is another factor that made me build a stronger relationship with the region itself, not just the region of Podlaskie in Poland, but the region where I am—a geographical part not really divided by the border. It was through the high school education that I took. I graduated high school with a curriculum, where we have a bunch of Belarusian history and the language. It happened as it would to a person who was just constructing the world-view for himself exposed to the situation that you learn the same stories, the same history, but from the two perspectives, which sometimes are completely opposite. For example, the things that we’ve been learning through Polish history about the unity with the countries in the east while in their history it’s more like occupation. It gives you also the idea of how oppressive was the concept of a nation and the state itself.
Later on, I learned (not in a really conceptual way) about the identity that exists here. Many people were living in the villages, and most of them in the 19th century still, especially the ones in the east, in the territory of today’s Belarus or Ukraine—they’ve been serving in a serfdom, while the aristocracy was of the Polish-Catholic class or origin. Most of those people had barely moved from their villages, so they didn’t identify themselves, actually with any nations. There was this identity of being from here and using the local language which is now a dialect that is being used here and differs from village to village. That’s the way I build my relationship with the region. I forgot about that when I moved out of here, and the time spent here now after coming back really reminds me of that. It also gives me new perspectives on the modern political ideas about post-national identity. When I first heard about that, it was for me an academic concept. Maybe that would be fine for the people who migrate from their different continents and countries to live in the multicultural societies in the big diasporas, where they cultivate both worlds, that of where their family is coming from, plus the societies they are members of or are living today. For me, it was many times pretty abstract. I felt that it couldn’t completely relate to that. And the coming back to this background, to reality that I have learned from my childhood, and with a little bit of help with my education, I felt that it’s possible, and it’s not so abstract or academic. This is how the world was functioning before the modern nation-states were founded. Many other communities didn’t really have this national identity, especially if you’ve been in poverty. If you have to struggle economically each day for your living conditions, you didn’t fucking care about the state, the flag, the anthem, and wars that some people are doing in the name of that.
TFSR: Would you talk about the sort of work that you do in solidarity with people traveling through the region that you come from? Are you part of a group in particular or a network that you want to name, or is it just sort of unaffiliated and impromptu?
X: I’m a part of a small group that is grassroots-organized. The main impulse for this group was that we have had access to the place where we could start our activities and bring some other folks who would like to support that in this region, because, not only me, but also other people are coming from here. On one hand, we had the feeling that we don’t feel the necessity of being a formal member of anything, but at the same time, one of the things that I really admire here is the sense of the common. We cooperate with other people, with other places like this, or slightly differently organized, with some organizations too, because the short-term goals are more or less the same. What is also important is that besides the organized groups or organizations, there are also the individuals from the local community. Actually, they are the people who have started this work. Initially, there were no outside NGOs—these groups which all of the things started from were made by those people who first worked individually or organized with those that they knew. It’s them who have started to do solidarity work. And when we came here, we didn’t feel that we support them with this work, because they’ve been here before us, and they would manage without us, without the NGOs and organizations. Of course, the work would not be so efficient and not as well-organized, but there are still people who are committed to that and continue with it for the third year. It’s really important to notice that, but also to be aware of it at the same time. I don’t want to say that it’s a massive movement.
The general feeling in this region is anti-migration and Islamophobic, far-right like the right government that was in power when the situation started. It was elected by the people here. They win in this region, so you can say those are the general feelings, but this is also the kind of area that you could work on. The work that I did before, was in groups and communities that consisted of people pretty much politicized the same way as me. This project, and this activities it’s different, it was more difficult. It was difficult, but also amazing, to get out of your bubble and start to work with people who sometimes have different opinions, but at the same time, you share the same short-term goals, like supporting directly people here, despite the difference in the bigger ideas that you would have about, let’s say, if the border should exist or not if the state should exist or not, etc. We felt that by doing this work with the people, we don’t want to actually put this leftist politicized agenda that they are not familiar with, but rather through this work, finding the opportunities to talk about things. Mostly we talk about the things in relation to the daily work that we do, so we don’t have abstract political discussions, but sometimes some situations require some bigger discussion about why we are here, why we do this work, and why we want to do it in some particular way and not in the other way.
TFSR: When I spoke to the other people who were identified as affiliated with Grupa Granica, they talked about, doing accompaniment and helping people file for asylum status, or going and doing deliveries of food and clothing, by getting an alert on their phone and then going and visiting folks and giving them aid. What sort of work does your group engage with on the ground? You’re also having conversations with folks around you, whether they’re moving or not, which is great, but what does that work look like?
X: I would not say anything new that the people didn’t say yet. Most of the work that we do, it’s pretty much the same. We and the people that we cooperate with mostly agree on the way to do this work. It’s based on the experience, which means that we also learn from our experiences. We are here and other small organizations too because when it started and with the passing months, there was no response from any NGO or any state structure that was supposed to respond to this situation. There wasn’t any other humanitarian organization in Poland that would decide to come here. It’s also important to remember we are trying to improve our skills to be able to support people better, and in a more professional way, with regards to the medical needs that the people have, or the way we run conversations with the people and such things. At the same time most of us, and not just us people here in my group, but also even the people who actually could be called now the humanitarian workers—I think no one of us wanna do that. We came here because they didn’t come. This is important. We do mainly the same stuff because the same people are approaching us. We respond not as much to the specific needs of the specific people, but mainly regarding the territory they are on. We are trying to think about it from a little bit bigger perspective—like, the approach that we have to the people that should take individual situations into account, but at the same time, mostly, we don’t have enough capacity to support people, especially in the seasons where the number of crossings was huge.
In terms of material support, for a long time, there was a lack of things. The supplies that we give to the people in the forest were collected, not just in this country, but also in other countries. We are trying to give the same treatment to the people that we meet, of course, taking into account the individual situation. We are trying to not treat the people that we meet way better than those we don’t, just because these are the people that we meet. I think it’s important. Of course, this work was changing, because it’s a third year, and the situation on the border is dynamic. Some stuff was done before and it didn’t work, or it’s not needed anymore. From this year on, there was way more legal support given to the people, it happened also because for a short time, there was a chance that their requests for international protection would be accepted, and they would be able to get into the procedure. For a really long time, it was impossible. The state and all of the uniform services have been violating this basic human right.
So we do some specific things. Maybe we are also keen a little bit about the way we do that. For the last two and a half years, none of us was in a labor relationship to this work. This is important for me, not just from this dogmatic point that I will not do the political work for the money, but I couldn’t imagine myself in a situation where I have folks who are hired and folks who are not, which leads to a situation where the things that we expect from each other are different. If we need to respond to the call, for example, we would say: “Okay, this guy is getting the money, so he’s supposed to go”. At the same time, and we have felt it ourselves how damaging this work in the long term is. It took us a long time to be able to say that we don’t have capacities to do that specific thing and we are just tired. It’s really important for us that the people who do this work with us, actually have a space to express the difficulties with going for the intervention work and doing things in the field, and that they do not feel obliged or really pressured to do that, and if they will not go then people in need wouldn’t be supported. Of course, there is pressure, but we are also trying to create a space for people to openly talk about their day-to-day personal situations. We also felt that if you really don’t want to go, and you will go, it could not work for anybody. It will neither work for you, nor for the people who you are trying to support. This approach is present in our place, and it’s important for us. The physical work is almost the same.
TFSR: That makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate you expressing that, because burnout is real. And also I think, as you said, there is an important intentionality to it. If you need to make a boundary, don’t just blame it on the fact that you’re not on shift right now and not being paid. If you think it’s important to do, then do it for the right reasons. It is hard to exist in society without wage jobs, though, maybe it means that you just do something else for money, other than the thing that you really care about, which is what I do, and a lot of the people that I know.
You mentioned the chain, and how dynamic of a situation the border can be. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the changes that you’ve seen leading to the increased militarization of the border from the Polish side, and how this changed, or is it changing the villages around the Green Border?
X: A few important factors in these last three years shift a little bit. The general approach of the state to uniform services, but also engaging people to the support work and the stuff that we do. I think it’s important to mention the escalation of a war in Ukraine, that made complete change. The general feeling that this situation started half a year before Russia invaded Ukraine, was what I said at the beginning—that Lukashenko was trying to make another deal with the EU. When it started no one really connected this to Russia so much—that’s the first thing. The second side of it was, that a lot of people from civil society, but also the people who’ve been engaged here, move their interest to the Ukraine. The feeling of necessity at the beginning was that it was a massive number of people who needed support. That was that kind of work at the beginning, also done with the support of the people who were doing the support for the migrants here. Here, among some of us, we had the feeling that we didn’t want to move our interest to the border with Ukraine because there is work here. It still needs to be done, and we don’t have the capacity and resources for everything. When I saw the massive movement of just regular people who were going by private cars to the border and picking up the people, I felt that it was a good decision. At the same time, I felt that those people were doing the same thing that we do here. We are supporting the people who are escaping the wars. That’s just life situations. It’s caused by the same state, by the same imperialists, but here 100 kilometers from the border crossings with Ukraine, we are treated as criminals while doing this work, when all of the people who show up and show solidarity with the Ukrainians are being publicly treated as heroes. Our state also really benefited from how the support for the Ukrainian refugees looked like at the beginning. This situation shows the racist background. It showed how we treat refugees and migrants, the situation on the border with Ukraine itself showed that too. The people who didn’t have Ukrainian passports, the Black people, and the people from the Roma community, they weren’t treated the same as the people who had Ukrainian passports. They faced really big difficulties in leaving the country on the first days of the war, and of course, later with the whole policy that the EU and the national states introduced to support people who escaped to their territories, like Social Security, was given only to the people who have had Ukrainian passports. That was the really important thing.
In the last months, the important factor was, that there was an incident with the soldier who died at the border because he was assaulted through the fence from the other side by someone with a knife on a stick. To this day no one knows who did that. Of course, there was an investigation, and it’s scandalized. They say that they have some information that it was a migrant person and so on. This incident happened at the beginning of June, after which they immediately introduced quite the same exclusion zone that existed at the beginning of the situation here. The attitude of the government is to give the right to the soldiers to be fucking assholes again and violate all of the rules and showed the way how their so-called service should look to the civil society.
TFSR: Do you mean expanding the requisite state service in the state, in terms of changing how “service” looks?
X: To be aggressive again to the civilians. Officially, they get more and more power. The exclusion zone was made again to protect them when they committed violence and crimes against the people on the move on this border. Also, lately, in the parliament, there was a legal act that legalized the procedural use of weapons for the soldiers on this border, so now they can easily use guns which is a dark thing. Also, if you connect this with the fact that in August we had 17,000 soldiers here, mainly from an unprofessional army, like teenagers who two years ago had been shooting on computer games, and now they are here without any serious preparation regarding estimation of danger or being prepared to respond to stress situations and stuff like that. I think it’s getting really scary here.
TFSR: Where are all these soldiers going to be, or where are they being kept? And how has that changed the shape of the demographics of those small villages that often made their money off of tourism in the area?
X: I think especially for the region where the National Park is and the last piece of ancient forest in Europe is, and that is the forest that has still natural processes ongoing since 10,000 years. This forest was also damaged, not just historically, but also in modern times, both by the far-right, but also by the so-called liberal government. They cannot do anything to keep this forest in a way that will still be valuable to the people who will live here in the future.
For this place, the bad times have started with the Covid. The situation with the border continues and there was no serious response from the government to address the fact, what you just said, that a lot of people actually live here from tourism, and this is how this territory should be transformed, to offer and create such a work for the people if we want to protect this forest, a the same time keep the economical justice and offer something to these people, instead of just closing the factories or the industry complexes here. That didn’t happen, and then the army arrived, and I wouldn’t say that it has reduced the economic losses of the people who live from tourism.
Actually, it seems really scary. I witnessed a lot of situations here, especially in 2021 and 2022, but it’s still present. Those people, those soldiers, they come into the supermarkets with the car, and many of them enter to do the shopping with machine guns. They use public space with heavy guns, they are damaging the local roads, killing also the protected animals. This national forest is known for the introduction of European bison. Some of them got killed already by the army trucks because soldiers drive with no regard for the rules that the civil society is under. In front of my house, they drive at least 70 km/h when the limit is 50. There is a lot of damage done by their presence. There was this scandalous situation that they have been living in a sports hall of one of the primary schools in one of the villages. Right now they’re trying to build some new facilities and bases in this region to have a more and more army here.
TFSR: More than any other interview that I’ve done in the last 15 years that I can think of, I’ve seen anonymous online comments about the last conversation that I had about work around the border in Podlaskie, referring to antisemitic conspiracy theories like this “work with refugees and with people on the move is funded by Soros” and things like that. Obviously, in that anecdote, and I have no idea where those people are coming from, but there’s a lot of anti-immigrant and Islamophobic and anti-Black and other sentiments that are all tied up in this, antisemitic, xenophobic framework that is in a lot of European and North American culture. We’d had an interesting conversation at one point. I wonder if you could talk about your insights into Polish legacies from the World War II era and any parallels that you’re seeing now with cultural, political, and repressive relationships directed at migrants and other political Others, as how that parallels with, for instance, historical anti-Roma or antisemitic violence that has happened in Poland.
X: You need to look in the past, even the school books, but probably you should go a little bit deeper, because, that information vanished from our memory somehow. We have mentioned a little bit about antisemitism in Poland before the Second World War. In general, history is constructed in a way that we have to be good, the others are bad. Maybe some people made some mistakes, but in general, we’ve been heroes or victims. There were no other good positions in history. I think the Polish history is a really good example of that. If you analyze what was happening in Poland before the Second World War, it would be very similar to the way things are communicated now, for example in the context of the situation on the border with Belarus. The people are dehumanized in the same way. Islamophobia is not just represented by the far-right, but also by the conservatives, and the so-called liberal government, which is liberal maybe in terms of economy, but in terms of other things, it’s pretty conservative. It is serving to the far-right. Before the election at the beginning, this government was presenting how shocked they were about the response of the far-right government to the situation on the border. Right now they respond even more harshly in different ways. Just before the election and then after have also started to use this dehumanizing, xenophobic, and racist language.
For a person who was raised in a society like the village that I grew up, in the city I was living mainly in this area in for half of my life, had around half of its population consisting of Jewish people [before the Shoah]. I didn’t have adults or older people in my family that I could speak [to] about that. For sure, you realize that the grandmother who was taking care of you when you were young is actually the person who has lost half of the population from the place that she was living in, and the town that I was living in shared the same fate, and later when I moved to Warsaw, the history of in Warsaw was pretty much the same, but in a way bigger scale. The whole thing of the Holocaust is more known to the people, but at the same time, it was this thing organized by the German Nazis, or Nazis that got to power in Germany at that time. That happened also with the acceptance of the other political factions, except the communists and socialists, because they’ve been the first victims of of this regime when they get the power.
Now in Poland, we actually don’t have such a political spectrum. The political party that calls itself left, they’re almost doing the same acclamation for militarization protecting the border. Maybe they don’t use so much the language that was used by the other political options, but actually, they do not actively oppose that politics. Symbolically, when there was this voting about the use of guns outside of procedures, so the soldiers that do that on this border would not be prosecuted, not all of the members of this political left party were against that. There were just some who were. It’s important to mention how the parliamentary left changed with the years. 80 or even 40 years ago, the political spectrum was completely in a different place. You realize that you are really close to another big catastrophe.
For us here, and for the people who are trying to get to the EU through this border, this catastrophe is happening already. The whole of the feelings about all the antisemitism before the Second World War was done by the Nazis on the Polish territory, but there was a good ground for those things to happen here, and of course also in the other countries, where the Jewish population was exterminated on a massive scale. In the ’90s, when you grow up here and you live in a town, they tell you that this is a multi-region where you have Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims, and in this discourse, they are completely erasing the history of the Jewish people here. That was weird, and it’s weird still. Now this recognition of the civil society on this territory, and their active responsibility, because there were those cases that people participated, they did the mass killings of Jewish people, just right after the war finished. It’s really scary. We are really close to a situation where those things can explode, especially if you just look at what’s going on in the UK these days, I think we are just a small incident away and these things could happen not just here in this region, not just in Poland, but also in other countries. I think Germany and France could be quite the same, and the other countries. It’s really, really scary.
TFSR: I’m coming from the US myself, the US culturally has not dealt with its history and ongoing anti-Black sentiments, settler colonialism, and anti-indigenous roots. So as you say, when the soil is prepared to take the seed of antisemitism, xenophobia, or Islamophobia, it spreads really quickly, in a frightening manner.
My follow-up question to this is that you mentioned doing work in the community like that, the work that you came to do in that region was in support of preexisting work that locals were doing to support people on the move, and having these interactions with people generally is important, and doing the work shows people the humanity of the people that you’re working with. Having interactions with people that are on the move oftentimes, does a lot to expand people’s humanity and, let’s say, their sense of justice. That’s hard and slow work. I wonder if, in light of, for instance, the race riots by the far right in the UK and Ireland and other places—do you have insights into pushing against the cultural tide of xenophobia and militarism? Do you have any stories that you can share that can serve as examples of where you’ve seen a positive work actually undermine that sort of racism?
X: I will just shortly come back to the last question because I think it could be a bridge to this one. Growing up in this society, in this nation, we’ve been taught all the time that colonialism it’s not us because we never had the colonies, that we didn’t exist for more than 100 years, and exploiting the people wasn’t counted, never mind the serfdom that was building the state in previous centuries, and so on and so on. We could tell those stories to ourselves and our kids, but I think that with the fact that when we decided to enter the EU and to be part of this and be one of the few most exploiting post-colonial powers in the world, we benefit from it as individuals and as a society. Me, of course, totally too. We need to be aware that we have joined the post-colonial power that is keeping the post-colonial order in this world. We also need to be aware of the consequences of that.
So, I wanted to come back to your last question, and a bit to the militarization. The militarization comes in the form of the whole propaganda about the war, that it’s almost on our territory, or that will have a war with Russia in two years, that we have to prepare for that, like we need to put more economy into army and producing stuff. That was done in 2021, and I think that it was a successful action. It’s mainly how it works—those kinds of things just scares the people, and they can accept the social cuts, spending on those preparations the budget meant for social things, because that is secure physically. This is what the situation is doing, and what the politicians are doing. This is the theme that is repeating in history over and over again.
My question to these politicians would be—what did you do to bring us to this situation? No one is up to taking responsibility, and there is no discussion in our societies about that. How did we end up here not just as a country that could be in a risk of military aggression by another state, but also in terms of the bigger structures? It’s important to start to speak about the way this world is organized. It’s not working. The situation that we have here in Europe, for the first time we feel the things that were going on in most of the world for the last 80 years. The conflict was inspired or supported by the Western world, communist imperialism, or Chinese imperialism. For 80 years we’ve been living in kind of a bubble, pretending that it doesn’t concern us. Maybe not the whole of Europe, but in Poland right now, we feel that the end of this time is coming to us too, and the response to it is xenophobia, militarization, and building up the borders. It’s like when you have diarrhea, you will not treat it with toilet paper, you need to take the medicine and address the reasons for it, not the bad situation that you end up with. The things that you mentioned are actually just cleaning the surface. It’s so populist.
If you are in Europe now, and you start to talk about, how bad is militarization—you are a fucking Russian agent, or whatever. There is, in this sense, a modern thing, how you can limit the freedom of speech in Western societies through using this modern language of a hybrid war, infiltration, or such stuff. Of course, there are those people who are doing that, but there is also no space for other opinions and perspectives. This not giving us any chance to move forward—we will be stuck in the place where capitalists and Western imperialists want us to be.
In the end, I would also say, that I had migrants in my family—from the generation of my parents. One of my uncles, just before he died, came back from Iran, where he had actually spent most of his life. From the other side of my family, there was my aunt, who still in the 80s was still sending us postcards from the place that she ended up in, which was Uzbekistan. She was living in Tashkent. I remember that because I was interested in Polish migration. There were a lot of movies, for example, this documentary from Iran, made by Mehdī Nāderī, where he explores the situation of Polish massive migration during the Second World War to Iran, and how it was supported, not just by the people, but also by the State. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future if I will be recognized as a Pole by the majority of countries in this world, because the people who we have at this border come mostly from the Middle East, quite a big part of Asia, and the majority of countries on the African continent, if I would be recognized by them as a Pole and therefore a fucking aggressor. I do feel that even if I question my national identity, I keep this passport, I use this privilege, I am a member of a privileged society in this world and I think this also comes with some obligations.
I would like to be in a community where we will not invest in marketing campaigns to convince the people how amazing a country and nation we are, but actually with the money that we pay to advertising agencies we could accept all of the people who we had here. It’s really difficult to estimate how many people have come here in the last three years, but I wouldn’t say that it was more than 100,000. If you compare it to more than a million people from Ukraine that we actually accepted in the first days of the war, it’s nothing. If I start to think about how inefficient, also economically, the thing that we do actually is, in comparison to if it was organized by the system. People wouldn’t have to use the stuff that we give them for one day only. Cause now, and after another night with the rain, they need to change places and leave the stuff again. Stuff like that. We are really facing and challenging this whole concept of humanitarian support given by the Western countries, and all of the contradictions and the failures of capitalism too.
TFSR: Is there anything that I didn’t ask about that you want to say here at the end of the chat? If people don’t live near the border, are there any places that they could go to, organizations or movements that they could learn more from, or where they could donate, where their donations would actually go further? Shops without Borders was one of the listed things in the last chat -that’s an immediate, material way to help folks who are crossing, right?
X: There are various ways to give support to the organizations. The way that they do like to be supported would be also if people felt like coming here, that could be possible. I wouldn’t publicly share any contact to us, but we could be reachable through you. So if any people listen to that, I just want to say that we know folks from the States. We work together with people from No More Deaths from Arizona here. Some other people from other continents are also coming here. Of course, this place, is one part of the Western world supporting the people from the other part of the world. For all Western citizens it’s still pretty safe to do that, compared to the people from countries that don’t have strong passports, or their states are not recognized as allies, and so on. It’s not just about saying that Westerners have economic possibilities, but also we had this reflection about who actually can come and do this work and who cannot. We invite all of the people, we’re trying to make this space accessible for everyone, also in economical terms. That could be done. Our place is mostly based on fundraising that we do, but we do not do it really openly, so there is nothing that I could share in terms of how we could be supported. Nevertheless, if someone wants, I think they will find a way to get to us. It would be nice to receive the support from farther places.
This village where we live is really at the end of the state, but also the end of one imperialist structure, which is the EU. We are pretty isolated, also from the other groups. We have contact, mostly with the folks who are coming here. It’s always nice if people are reaching us with any curiosity or questions or just cheering us up, that means a lot.
TFSR: Cool. People with medical skills, with Arabic or French or Polish language skills would be pretty helpful. Not to limit who would come to visit you… Is that helpful? Are there any other skill sets that you’re looking to get?
X: For sure, if you have the hard skills, like the medical or driving license, or some languages—that of course will be helpful, but as I said, at some point, we are here because the humanitarian NGOs didn’t show up. Some of the people are trained to do that, have these hard skills, or also language skills and some other. We are not expecting that people will have really specific skills. They could not have any of them, and it’s still fine. In the end, we believe that this work shouldn’t be done at all. We want to live in a world where such work will not be needed at all. This is also like the questions that we have—how do to navigate when getting to the endpoints of the work that you do, to the many contradictions? Even if you are educated, or you know about the Western society’s humanitarian approach. It’s sometimes really difficult to do stuff completely against it, but it’s worth trying to question the things and try to do them slightly differently, to not accept this order for what it is. We’re trying to do that. We had here conversations about that, trying to have critical reflection, also to our attitude, our behavior, and stuff like that.
TFSR: Cool. Well, I’ve really appreciated the conversation. Thanks for the time and the energy of speaking in English with me. I’m excited to share this with folks.
X: Cool. Thank you for your work too. I said before, that it would be nice to get some even symbolic support, but we also know that we’re here in Poland, and there is much work that is done on your territory. So we will be also up to support some of the other people by even just sending postcards to each other and cheering up together.