Notes from a Strange War
On the 30th of October 2021 a 30-year-old woman died in a hospital in the Polish town of Pszczyna because doctors waited too long before terminating a pregnancy which was a threat to her life. While in theory abortion in a case like Izabela’s would have been legal, it is widely known that doctors in Poland are afraid to perform abortions, even in the very rare situations in which it is still permitted, because of a great risk of persecution. One of the aspirations of the ironically named “Law and Justice” party, and of its leader Jarosław Kaczyński, has been to take over the Polish legal system. This aspiration has been consistently implemented under the guise of “reform.” Consequently, justice in Poland has increasingly fallen into the hands of party ideologues. The situation is counterbalanced, to a certain extent, by independent judges, but those courageous individuals risk persecution from one of the greatest monsters of the Polish political scene, that is, our current Attorney General.
A few weeks before Izabela’s death another woman, 29-year-old Judith from Kongo, 2.5 months into her pregnancy, was thrown over a razor fence at the Polish-Belorussian border by Polish border guards. She was treated, in her own words, “like a bag of garbage.” A few days after the incident she lost her pregnancy. Her unborn child’s life was not of value for the Polish state. The procedure, which Judith had undergone multiple times (before finally making her way to France, where she could talk about her experience with journalists), is euphemistically known as “push-back.” Since the beginning of the current crisis at the Polish-Belorussian border which, evidently, has been orchestrated by Lukashenko in an attempt to destabilize the EU, Polish border guards have been pushing refugees back to Belarus, where they are caught by Belorussian guards and pushed back to Poland.
This nightmarish ping-pong game has been going on for weeks now. Poland has declared a State of Emergency in the area next to the border. The area is already referred to by the locals as “the Zone.” In violation of international standards, neither the free media nor aid organizations are permitted to enter the Zone. No one knows how many people are trapped inside and how many have died — the official count is at least 13, but the NGOs working in the area close to the Zone say the victims are probably much more numerous.
Back in October I spent a week at the very edge of the Zone. I went there for what was supposed to be a writer’s residency, sponsored by an organization called “Tropinka — A Community for Dialogue.” The residency is located in the heart of the Białowieża Forest. I love that forest — it’s Europe’s oldest, some parts of it have grown, without being disturbed, since the end of the last ice-age (that is to say, for 12 or 13 thousand years). It is an invaluable gene bank, a reservoir of biodiversity. I have written about those woods, mysterious and sometimes difficult to access without proper equipment because of swamps and the character of vegetation. My family, which is mixed (Polish, Belorussian, and Ukrainian) comes from a bit farther south. The book, on which I was planning to work in the residency, was to be set in the Białowieża woods. But the concept for my story fell apart in confrontation with the dramatic reality. From the moment I first arrived in my beautiful remote residence, passing through a magnificent alley of hornbeam trees, I had in mind the opening sentence of Leopold Buczkowski’s novel Black Torrent: "The journey and the night were interminable.” (trans. David Welsh)
Buczkowski’s book, a somewhat forgotten masterpiece, is an oneiric story of a few members of one of the Polish underground military formations during World War II, wandering at night in the woods of Wołyń. I am not the only person who is now reminded of the images of World War II. This association forces itself on the imagination so strongly also because this region was especially traumatized by the war and has never fully recovered. If you read Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands — well, these are the bloodlands. While the associations with WW2 are, hopefully, far-fetched, the fact that they come to mind shows just how disturbing this present situation is.
“It’s like a film” — these words come from Agata Bryk, an intensive therapy nurse, a member of a team of medics — they call themselves “Medics on the border” — who go into the woods to help people in need of medical assistance because of exhaustion, hunger and cold. “Medics'' are a group of friends (doctors, paramedics and nurses) who organized themselves within a week and very quickly raised enough money to buy the equipment, drugs, etc. Everything that was necessary was sponsored just by regular people. The medics were hoping they would get the permit to go into the Zone — they didn’t. They can only go around it and help exhausted migrants who have managed to get out.
The Medics are experienced doctors and nurses so they are not shocked by people in distress. But going to see a patient in these woods — wild, beautiful, and dangerous — is a different story. Sometimes it takes hours to actually get to the person in need. And to have to leave the patient in the woods is surreal. It is also surreal that it’s happening in Europe, in the European Union.
When I was thinking of Buczkowski, walking through my hornbeam alley, the sky had the washed-out color that I associate with this moment of the year — late fall. I like this washed-out color and I like this time of the year, going deeper and deeper into cold and darkness. But not this year.
Many people are willing to help. A number of NGOs and many individual activists are bringing food and clothing into the woods. I have met many local people who are also engaged in helping the migrants even though they risk conflict with the Border Guards, with the police, or with their neighbors. The weight of this humanitarian crisis is entirely on the shoulders of individual people — the Polish state actively hinders the task of help organizations as it prefers to focus on portraying the migrants as a dangerous force our country needs to resist at all costs, as if they were some sort of an organized group and not a collection of individuals with very different stories, many of them tragic. “The collective body of the other,” as the writer Magdalena Tulli put it in a recent essay, becomes a screen on which we can project our fantasies and fears.
Many Poles do fall victim to the state propaganda. The Polish government is using its mass-media, completely taken over by the party ideologues, to disseminate racist stereotypes, to scare people into believing that we are being “attacked.” Just a few days ago an attempt to force the fence by a group of unarmed men and women, which was prevented by Polish soldiers, was presented to the public as a “battle.” The people at the border are talked about as if they were a military formation.
The state propaganda divides people, turning us into hostile tribes. It’s a kind of deep damage that won’t heal for decades.
“In war, truth is the first casualty” — this quote is variously attributed and lately I found it may be an African proverb. In some senses, I think what we witness on the Polish-Belorussian border is a war — a strange, new kind of war with new forms of violence. There are casualties. People have died. And, yes, the truth has been severely wounded. But this war is not happening at the location where we see its consequences. It is not happening in the “Zone.” How could a European seriously claim to be at war with a few hundred exhausted, hungry, desperate people? The war is somewhere else and it needs to be addressed internationally.
The Polish government has used its propaganda machine before against other kinds of enemy, including women rights activists and our LGBT+ citizens, leading to the creation by local governments of the so-called LGBT+ free zones in some parts of the country (paradoxically, the attitude of Poles towards sexual minorities has changed in the opposite direction, with over 50% of respondents expressing support for the legalization of same-sex marriage, according to recent polls). Now Law and Justice is cynically using the humanitarian crisis at the border to boost their image as the protectors of Poland. The imaginary war produces fake heroes and real victims. The “Zone” needs to remain closed so that the images of our “enemy” do not spread widely.
The state-controlled mass media are used in a most cynical way to coerce people to be afraid and to hate one another. My government is using vast amounts of tax-payers money, including my money, to keep their hate factory running.
And it is running. Every day the situation at the border is getting more tense. Temperatures are falling. At the moment, the future looks grim; the night, and the road, interminable.
Julia Fiedorczuk is a writer, poet, translator, researcher and a practitioner of ecocriticism. Her work foregrounds the relationship between human beings and their planetary environment. She is affiliated at the Institute of English Studies at Warsaw University, and co-founded the School of Ecopoetics at Warsaw’s Institute of Reportage. She has published essays, novels and short story collections, as well as six volumes of poetry. The latest of those, Psalmy, was awarded the Wisława Szymborska Prize, Poland’s most prestigious prize for poetry. Fiedorczuk’s most recent novel, Pod Słońcem (Under the Sun) is set in Podlasie, close to the Polish-Belorussian border. Her writings have been translated into over 20 languages.