While welcoming Ukrainian citizens, Poland is building a wall against migrants fleeing other wars. We went to the border with Belarus to meet those who are helping them.
While the world applauds Poland for opening its borders to civilians fleeing Ukraine, behind the spotlight the country is carrying out a genuine selection of migrants. If you are Ukrainian you can pass; if your skin is a little darker, if you come from a little further away, you have no right to be welcomed.
Poland has in fact recently approved illegal pushbacks: migrants coming from the Belarusian border are not only constantly pushed back across the frontier, but are also beaten, left to die of cold and hunger among the dense trees of the forest. Poland is the country that has created an exclusion zone to prevent activists from intervening in support of refugees, and to stop journalists from documenting what happens along the line separating Europe from Belarus. It is that part of the West that is building a border wall.
We would like to say that Poland has today chosen to behave differently, more humanely, but that would not be the truth. "We continue to receive requests for assistance from people fleeing armed conflicts taking place in other parts of the world, including Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan," reports the NGO Grupa Granica, which works at the border.
Unable to use legal routes to enter Poland, these people are risking their lives in the border forests.
"Unable to use legal routes to enter Poland, these people are risking their lives in the border forests. At the Belarusian border, unlike the Ukrainian one, the border guard does not accept applications for international protection and offers no shelter; it pushes people back into Belarus, a country that supports the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And while under the Geneva Convention every person fleeing persecution and violence should have the right to safe refuge, these two borders – that with Belarus and that with Ukraine – make it clear that the ability to exercise this right depends on the nationality of the person seeking protection."
Among the Polish population, however, there are also those who have chosen not to make distinctions. People who are devoting their lives to welcoming others. Who go against the government and law enforcement to help. We met some of these people, who are direct testimony to the true Polish attitude towards migrants.
When we ask Jakub to tell us about the last six months of his life, something in him takes over. His hands begin to shake. His shoulders close in. His gaze drifts. "It was intense," he says, almost compulsively. "I'm fine, but it was intense." Intense. The word keeps repeating itself, as if there were no others strong enough to describe what his eyes have seen. What his ears have heard. Jakub is 33 years old, Polish, and has lived around the world. When migrants arrived in his country he felt it was his duty to help them. Literally. "I knew I could be useful, more useful than I had ever been in my life."
He is an interpreter, he speaks Arabic, and he is part of the Grupa Granica movement, which has allowed him to help many people. To explain to them what to do, how to assert their rights. How to survive. As I write up my notes he checks every word. He speaks fluent Italian but struggles to trust us. And somehow I have no difficulty understanding why.
"Some days, as I was packing my rucksack to spend the whole night in the forest, I would ask myself whether I had gone mad. I was leaving my children home alone to go and help strangers. I had stopped sleeping. But then, when I got there, among the trees, and saw all those people, those children in the cold, desperate, I told myself: no. I was not the one who was out of control. The system is what is insane." The voice of Kasia, a 40-year-old single mother, drops as she says these words.
When you arrive at the border between Poland and Belarus you are swept up in a wave of suffering. On the streets you can hear the rumble of military vehicles. At every crossroads there are the blue lights of police cars, border guard checkpoints. Vans, cars, military vehicles. People walk with their heads down, pretending not to see. Not to hear. The air is frozen, almost as frozen as the minds of those who in recent months have given their heart and soul to migrants fleeing from Belarus. Here, indeed, many citizens have worked hard to help those who managed to cross the border and, when not intercepted by law enforcement, were hiding among the dense trees of a forest that seems to have no end. They brought them hot soup, water, jackets, shoes. Sometimes they offered them a sofa to rest on. A place where they could stop shaking.
We are not talking about activists. Or rather: not exactly. We are talking about people who were born at the border, grew up there, or simply chose to live there. We are talking about people who, faced with so much desperation, decided not to look the other way. Not to pretend nothing was happening. "We had no choice. This thing hit us like a tsunami, and we could do nothing but help. It was a war. There was a moment when I felt guilty hugging my own children. I felt guilty towards the children I saw in the forest, frightened, children I could not hug. So I stopped hugging mine too," a woman confessed to us as she struggled against the tears beginning to well up in her eyes.
We could do nothing but help. It was a war.
From August 2021 onwards, thousands of migrants poured towards the border between Belarus, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, thanks to the granting of tourist visas by the Minsk government. These are people from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, but also Senegal, Ghana and even Cuba. Men, women, children with no real destination other than to manage to enter the European Union. To build a future that they could not otherwise have.
"In three weeks I carried out more than ten interventions. Some lasting as long as four hours. After that I had to stop. I could no longer sleep or eat. I had to go to hospital for help: it was too much for me." The situation, in certain cases, proved unsustainable. "You could constantly hear police sirens going past, military vehicles on the roads. It felt like being at war. In fact, we were at war and we will be again. The crisis is not over. Now we are living through a lull because of the cold. When spring comes everything will start again, not least because India and Russia are reaching agreements that will bring people towards the European Union," they tell us, reminding us that they wish to remain anonymous.
When spring comes everything will start again.
Recounting what they witnessed and how they intervened can in fact bring them serious problems with law enforcement: some crossed the exclusion zone to provide assistance. They brought refugees out, gave them a place to rest.
Despite all the media attention, travelling along the border it is hard to spot any green lanterns — those lights that have become a symbol of willingness to help migrants. "For those of us who live here, they're a trap: lighting one means having a permanent checkpoint in front of your home." And that is exactly what happened to one of the women we met. She showed us hers, and then, on leaving the house — perhaps through absent-mindedness — she left it on. When she returned, the police were waiting for her. "What are you doing here? There's never been a checkpoint in this area," she said to the border guards. "We're following orders" was the only answer she could get.
Green lanterns have become a symbol of willingness to help migrants.
Every time we sit down in residents' living rooms and start talking, the fear of answering becomes palpable. Many hide their mobile phones in metal boxes, afraid of somehow being listened to, spied upon. They know they have acted illegally in recent months; they know what they were risking.
Yet despite this they never stopped: "If people are dying behind your house you have to help them: there's no choice. It's simple," Kasia Wappa tells us. "We're not heroes or anything like that. It's a matter of necessity. You see so much suffering, you see people hiding, fleeing, dying. And you do what you can. Sometimes my friends and I carried migrants home in our arms because of their condition. I asked myself what I would have done if they had died in my living room. This isn't a normal situation. There's something insane about what we've been through. Every time I left the house it felt like being in a film. Many of us have developed problems with food, with sleep. I cry all the time. Some try to hide their emotions to appear strong, but it's impossible. When you see certain things, it's impossible to stay still." As Kasia speaks, the feeling is of having been transported back seventy years, to when people were hiding Jews from the Nazis.
If people are dying behind your house you have to help them.
Imagine waking up one morning to find your village — a village of 2,760 inhabitants — completely militarised, for no real reason. No longer being able to wander freely through the forest that has always offered you moments of escape from daily life. When you walk among the trees, especially in winter, it feels like entering an enchanted valley. There is no sound. Light slips timidly through the branches. Snow caresses the ground. An almost fairy-tale image, were it not for the fact that right there — right where people used to spend their time — migrants are now dying of cold.
Białowieża is a tourist destination. Because of the exclusion zone created to "protect" the country from incoming migrants, however, residents today find themselves in serious difficulty. Visits have come to a complete standstill, hotels have their shutters down, and the few that remain open are full of law enforcement officers. Restaurant doors are closed. In the strefa, no one comes in and no one goes out. The streets are travelled almost exclusively by military vehicles. Soldiers and police walk the pavements. "How can you live like this? There are more military personnel than inhabitants."
There are more military personnel than inhabitants.
And we are not talking only about Białowieża, but also about all the villages lying along the 450 kilometres that border Belarus. There, nights have translated into hours of fear and tension. The dread of helping the people hiding among the bushes has become a constant feeling, above all because of the fear that it could amount to aiding and abetting illegal immigration. In the villages everyone knows each other, but no one talks about what their neighbour is doing. Silence reigns, even if the occasional piece of gossip does surface.
Someone admitted they had never had the courage to help anyone, having heard that if they did, people would come and burn their house down. On the contrary, it was the migrants themselves who helped them: before resuming their journey, they left water and food in the garden. Probably what some volunteer had given them and what they had not managed to consume in the rush to move on.
So while on one side people have mobilised to help those in difficulty, putting themselves and above all their mental health at risk, the Polish government has done no such thing. On the contrary, Warsaw is working to send the message that the country will do everything to "protect" its borders and its citizens from this "dangerous invasion." Yet in the space of six months, around 15,000 migrants arrived. Many things can be said, but invasion is certainly not one of them. The only real crisis Poland is facing is the one that lays bare the lack of humanity shown by its institutions.
And it does so even today, presenting itself as a country that welcomes Ukrainian refugees while abandoning everyone else. The symbol of a Europe that chooses to close its doors to those it does not deem worthy enough of help. What will become of the refugees abandoned along the Belarusian border? And of those who, in trying to help them, are today traumatised? How will they justify the selection they are putting into practice? Greater humanity would be needed to resolve the situation — the same humanity shown towards Ukrainian refugees. Because the price that citizens and migrants are paying is destined to keep rising. Just like the wall that will divide them.