EU – on the edge

On October 21, 2021, a bloated corpse was found floating in the Świsłocz river in northeastern Poland near the Belarusian border. It belonged to Muza (Moses), a 19-year-old from Sudan. 

A group of four Sudanese men, including Muza, hoping to get to Germany, had been dumped by Belarusian security agents in thick forest near the border. While crossing the Świsłocz river, which coincides with the border at points, Muza lost his balance. The heavy backpack he was carrying dragged him under.

It was only thanks to the efforts of journalist Piotr Czaban and the humanitarian activist Karolina Mazurek that Muza’s body was found. Czaban learned on October 3 from a Facebook group that a group of ‘black migrants’ had been moving around in the border area. “I was on duty at the time. My source said there were three of them, from Sudan. They were exhausted and soaked. They reported that their companion had drowned in the river near Krynki. There was no exact location,” he says. The group moved on. Unfortunately, the Russian phone number they provided turned out to be wrong. Trying different combinations, Czaban got through to a Russian-speaker who told him to “fuck off!”

“On the same day, the Border Guard published a tweet with information about a migrant lying motionless on the Belarusian side, near the border fence. The Belarusian services immediately brought a TV crew there and made a propaganda film. It showed the body of a black boy in a T-shirt and briefs. I watched the video thinking it might be the same person these three were talking about,” says Czaban. Two weeks later and Karolina wrote to Czaban: “Listen, a boy from the detention center in Przemyśl will contact you. He knows something about the body in Świsłocz…He was an Iraqi. He wrote that there was a boy from Sudan with him at the center who was passing through Świsłocz at the beginning of October. There were four of them and one of them drowned. He wants to pass on the location and asks us to go get the body,” Karolina wrote.

Czaban made contact with the boy’s family, who were looking for him through their own channels. They spoke French and Arabic, and communication via Google Translate was not easy, he says. 

The day after receiving the information from Przemyśl, Czaban reported the matter to the police. “I have more trust in them than in the Guards, they do not play down such reports,” he said. A patrol from the Powiat Headquarters in Sokółka went to the border on the same day. Czaban showed them an area near the village of Ozierany Małe, where the body was most likely to be found. The search went on all day. Two fire brigades participated and a policeman with a tracking dog. “There had been a stench by the river for a long time,” recalls Czaban. “It’s a vast area, wet, reeds. The dog could have misled the trail, there are wild animals out there.”

Despite the failure of the search, Czaban did not give up. He called the spokeswoman of the Border Guard in Białystok and asked her to tell the post in Krynki, which is responsible for the area, to keep a close eye out. On October 25, he received information that the Border Guards had found a body. “It was 9pm, I called the police station in Sokółka and said that if necessary, I had the missing boy’s passport, contact with his family, and his photos. The duty officer was not too effusive, but from the conversation I deduced that there was indeed a report. Then I announced on social media that the body had been found,” Czaban says.

Muza’s identity was confirmed by his family via zoom and his funeral took place at the Muslim cemetery in Bohoniki on December 5.

…

WHY ME?

Whenever I go back to Aleja Solidarności in Warsaw, all is forgiven. The daily diet of harsh blank faces, brusque exchanges, the rudeness all melt away. People reappear as heroic. The scrawled “Niggers go home” (in hand-written English) banner hung on the door of my Sunday league football hall suddenly downgraded and filed under “aberration” rather than “systemic racism,” my African teammates taking selfies against the banner an amusing anecdote. The faces of the old ladies waiting for the tram beside Hala Mirowska no longer xenophobic, their shopping bags now potential weapons against hostile intruders. I am on the side of the valiant. An illusion of course. But these are people who survived the end of the world, I tell myself. This was the Ghetto. I once lived here above the sklep spożywcze at Solidarności 82C. Femina cinema where we watched Polanski’s The Pianist over the road, the same road Szpilman walks down towards the film’s end. The man sitting next to me in his 70s struggling to muffle tears while his whole body shuddered. I walk up Jana Pawla II past the strip shows and kebab shops, to the prison, Pawiak, where the Gestapo tortured and killed. The plaques on the walls. Here 100 people murdered, here 75, lined up and shot in the street. Usually at random. The Wola massacre is just down the road. Incomprehensible horror. The Museum of Polish Jewish History and the story of the Ghetto Fighters. Marek Adelman’s book, The Ghetto fights, one of the first books given to me about Poland. We lived two years in an artist’s studio on the top floor of the 1950s Italianate workers’ residence on the corner of Solidarności and Jana Pawla II. Our cat appeared one night through the roof window, and never left. The protestant church the Nazis left standing amid the rubble of the ghetto. A shockingly vivid reminder of the symbolism and precision of the Nazi project. These people, in various degrees of brutality, were condemned to die. 

I remembered the start of what seemed to be a healing process in the 1990s after the publication of Jan Gross’s Neighbors. The book opened a door to a public discussion about the past, and set off a chain reaction of denial, counter-research, discussion and more denial and finger-pointing. But some years later it seemed that Poland had largely shed its historical complexes. But then came 2010, Smolensk, followed by 2014 and the return of war to eastern Europe. A decade later and we were deep in the midst of still unfolding crises: war in Ukraine, migrants crossing into Poland from Belarus, an arms race, militarization and attacks on democracy and accepted versions of the truth.

Polish history from 1795 to 1918 – the partitions – clearly left a collective psychology marked by notions of purity and contamination. As did the post-war communist era. Communism created Socialist bodies, pure and untainted, ideologicized fictions. Communism as a politics of fiction, increasingly reliant on ethno-nationalism, appeared self-contained, but was actually very leaky. What was a ‘True Pole’? The period 1939 to 1989 was one also of absences, lost territories, destroyed cities, new rulers, phantom limbs and multiple borderline personalities. Kresy – Borderlands – that had been fluid, after 1945 saw Lviv and Vilnius cut off across a border, while Wroclaw, Poznan and Gdansk were newly (re-)Polonized. This all combined to create a space unkind to any solid collective sense of self, other than in opposition to something else. And the neighbors – Jews, Germans, Russians – that had been integral to the pre-1795 Polish Commonwealth were gone.

Preliminary observations in 2024, three months after the attempt to purge PiS government placemen started, suggested that Poland was still a society grappling with trauma^[11] and responses to it: a neurotic and conflicted soul, part exaggerating a heroic and grandiose past, both imagined and real, and ignoring the darker corners of its own history, part adopting a ‘Western’ liberal ‘therapeutic’ historical opening. This conflict was aggravated by a legacy of generational trauma, communist and post-communist propaganda and poor education. To remember – and be reminded – what it meant to be Polish was also to understand that modern Polishness was created in conflict with foreigners. But another Polishness also fascinated me: Polishness as a diaspora experience, an insider-outsider perspective that offers a very different aesthetic – Malinowski, Curie-Sklodowska, Polanski, Pawlowski, Conrad. As if one’s collective abject could be exported – or rather exiled, but not destroyed. Another Poland, one scientific, creative brilliance from Gombrowicz to Milosz and Brzezinski. An alternative Poland, an imaged other, both hardline patriarchy a la Polonia association in the US to great contributors to Western civilization.

That is where the idea emerged for this book, exploiting the heuristic space – as a foreigner and reporter – to examine the sources of this discomfort, its contradictions and the various attempts to deepen or heal the traumas that underlie it. Telling the migrants’ stories seemed a good way of exploring some of these intertwined issues.

Notes from a border July 3, 2024

It was July 2, 2024 on an early morning train to Bialystok from Warsaw, to meet a Border Guards spokesperson, Katarzyna Zdanowicz, and then on to the border to see if I could meet a volunteer, Pawel Kasprzak, and maybe glimpse a few of the incoming strangers in the forest. It had the feel of a safari, maybe get a glimpse of a lion, a giraffe, a lesser spotted Ethiopian? How close could you get to these wild beasts? Or reality show. Being caught meant a beating, harassment, being thrown back over the border, even death. Who would get to these people first, the helpers, the uniforms, the smugglers? I was told on arrival that nationalist gangs now also roamed the forests looking to ‘clean up.’ For many crossing the border the smugglers were the helpers. To be met by the right gang meant to have succeeded, avoiding the cops and the militias. As much as you might want a drink of water after thirsty days and nights in the forest, how much more did you want not to be pushed back to Belarus? For some, gaining asylum meant a long stay in Poland, in an unknown detention center. 

I met Zdanowicz at the Border Guards’ HQ in Bialystok, a short taxi ride from the station. Bialystok had the feel of a remote border town, on the edge. “We see no women and children, just aggressive and armed young men,” she says. It tells me what she sees, what is seen, perhaps rather than what is. Maybe it’s the way the game is played. These are attackers, not victims.

The Polish language at that moment felt like the first line of defense in this war zone. Heavily defended, fortified, mined with impossibly complex grammatical rules. We are impenetrable. 

I returned to my book, the one you are reading now. But it had lurched from certainty to doubt, a thicket of competing theories, all pulling in slightly different directions, dragging the voices I wanted to hear back to the ground, strangulating them. But did I really want a detheorized, balanced overview of the securitization of a heavily militarized border area, weighing up the pros and cons of more security, higher fences, more drones? Poland as a weapon, or a shield for NATO and the EU? Was Sikorski right? Wasn’t this a classical case study in Russian psychological operations – and responses from an increasingly nationalistic and nervous Europe. Macron’s snap election strategy had failed in the first round and we awaited a new Europe. Tomorrow was election day in the UK, with Farage everywhere on screens and in print. Poland’s new government, a post-illiberal Civic Platform (PO)-led coalition hemmed in by its own rhetoric and Poland’s perennial need to defend itself. An existential threat. Older people, after all, still remembered the war, the postwar and the Russian exit. History had never ended here. If the Kremlin was playing a psychological game on Poland, using traditional Polish stereotypes, undermining its sense of self, if not also its basic security, national existence – NATO protection as 1938 never again – it was also working on me.

…

HYPOTHESES 

A series of historically concrete processes and inductively hypothesized connections between them are laid out below. These are designed as theoretically guided empirical propositions designed to indicate possible causal links explaining how migrants’ treatment at the Polish-Belarusian border in 2021-24 became entangled in multi-layered and overlapping geopolitical, national, local and political-discursive dynamics:

• After Poland joined NATO in 1999, but in particular after the formation of the Institute of National Memory (IPN) in 2005 by the incoming nationalist group headed by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, it sought to construct a national ‘memory politics’ whose aim was to equalize the role of Hitler and Stalin, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, in the same genocidal basket in WWII. Despite sporadic attempts by the Civic Platform (PO)-led government between 2007 and 2015 to develop a more nuanced historiography towards Russia, the basic discursive battle lines had been drawn.
• When Russia started its hybrid form of warfare in 2014, Poland became a crucial element of its plan to weaken the EU. By stoking historical resentments, supporting nationalist parties in EU states, both via strategically managed fake news and financially, and then in 2022 in actual military warfare in Ukraine, Putin sought to undermine EU and NATO unity and weaken support for Ukraine.
• Russia’s interests and those of PiS coincided in 2014/15, when a Kremlin-backed scandal helped bring down the pro-EU government.
• The next 8 years saw the Kremlin seek to exploit Poles’ historical grievances and collective blind spots in what appeared to be a strategy based on analysis of what one may term ‘Polish complexes.’ Its goal was polarization, embedding and aggravating what became known as ‘culture wars.’ 
• Poland feuded with the EU from the inception of the PiS government in late 2015.
• Poland then sought to influence EU and US discourse in this direction. Until 2014 and Russia’s first attack on Ukraine, the West was keen to stay on good terms with Russia, Germany in particular.
• Central to the strategy was to play on ambivalence among Polish society about (re)joining the West. By joining the EU and NATO Poland started a shift from symbolic East to symbolic West, symbolic victim to symbolic perpetrator, from object to subject and even perhaps from symbolic ‘feminine’ to symbolic ‘masculine’ archetypes, in terms of its own self-image, its projected self-image and how it was actually seen. This shift was normative and performative, in which participation in combat was a key indicator of commitment to ‘the West,’ a remasculinization of Polishness and an initiation exercise. 
• The PiS-led government placed German reparations at the center of its position vis-à-vis Berlin and played on anti-German sentiment in Poland.
• But by joining/rejoining ‘the West,’ Poland was also exposed to allegations of complicity in Western colonialism/neo-colonialism.
• Simultaneously, Poland’s attempts to come to terms with its own quasi-colonial past, both regionally and internally viz large pre-war ethnic minorities – or its de facto complicity in someone else’s – were interconnected with its newly Westernized projections of self-identity.
• This widened the pre-existing split between domestic liberal versus conservative approaches to coming to terms with the past and at the same time rejoining a post- and neo-colonial Europe. Conservative reactions in Poland to liberal attempts in the late 1990s to open up painful historical issues, saw a counterreaction to acknowledging and “apologizing,” as they saw it.
• This led to a kind of double-edged self-colonization: on one side the nationalist urge to purify, simplify and ethnicize the nation meant marginalizing traits in Polish society not grounded in Catholic-infused, ethnic-based Polishness. On the other hand, liberals sought to show how ‘European’ Polishness was – and always had been: individualistic, consumeristic, militaristic, but also – and crucially – ‘civic’ and democratic Simplified, Poland’s nationalist narrative constructed itself as a bulwark against, but also as a benevolent power in, ‘The East,’ while the liberal one sought to show how Western it was.
• The migrant situation on the Belarus border provided ideological space to performatively join the West, while sidelining and avoiding the complications associated with actually joining the West, Poland’s own myths about its role in the East and its ambivalence over domestic foreignness, exemplified most profoundly in its relationships with Polish Jews and more recently with Muslims.
• After the 2008 global financial crisis, it was the authoritarian right, not the left, that reaped the electoral benefits in Europe. If earlier waves of neoliberalization had been carried out by centrist parties, the center-right committing itself to progressive politics in exchange for center-left support for economic neoliberalization, after 2016, a new alliance emerged of center and far right.^[16] This neo-illiberalism, a synergy of neoliberalism and identitarian nationalism, can be seen as part of a process of ‘mainstreaming,’^[17] where parties seeing how the anti-Islam arguments of far-right groups found receptive audiences beyond their electoral constituencies, chose to appropriate them, not just borrowing their language, but adopt their framing of the issue. The template appeared to be one in which nationalist groups – and increasingly centrists with an eye on creeping nationalism – focused on migrants as a cause of Western problems that had been in fact created in part by Western imperial jollies in Iraq, Libya and Syria, and in a wider context by demographic changes, climate change and globalization – and also by the widening gap between the rich Global North and Global South. 
• Migrants thus became a useful weapon in the hands of conservative politicians in Poland, whose discourse welded together Muslim migrants at its border and a malign Russian strategy, thus lumping both into a single Orientalized pot. 
• Securitization discourses became mainstream and were adopted by the new, liberal, government under Donald Tusk in 2023/4. The process of bolstering the border with Belarus fed in turn into a process of fusing security and militarization policies and practices, with repercussions for Polish democracy and in turn also European peace.

…

POLISH RESPONSES:

SECURITIZATION AS RATIONAL CHOICE?

“Ohne Sicherhei  ist alles nichts” (Without security, there is nothing)

German chancellor Olaf Scholz June 6, 2024.

“We are not talking any more about exercises or lessons in threat theory.”

Donald Tusk, June 11, 2024, Białystok

The concept of ‘Departheid’^[102] perhaps best highlights how the West’s – and thus also Poland’s – migration system was created for the protection of the Global North from ‘uncivilized’ intruders. Its goal is achieved by the deployment of legal, psychological and physical violence in three spaces: first, at the point of entry, states fortify and protect borders to preemptively deny entrance to those who, it is suspected, will become illegalized migrants; second, inside their sovereign territory, states segregate and confine illegalized migrants to specially designated ‘waiting zones’—neighborhoods, camps, hotspots, prisons and detention facilities—from where surveillance and controlled removals could be more easily managed; third, at the point of exit, states oblige illegalized migrants to ‘voluntarily leave’ or be forcefully deported.^[103]

“Migrants considered as not belonging to the political community are simultaneously both the referents of security and the instrumentalized objects of a securitization which aims at the reproduction of sovereign power. The question ‘Whose security?’ means not only ‘Who is to be secure?’ but also ‘What does security mean?’ – answering it is the primary manifestation of power or sovereignty reproducing itself through securitisation of all ‘Others.’ ^[104]

Security in this conception is not an objective fact but is constructed through intersubjective social and discursive interaction between actors who propound definitions of what constitutes a threat and the corresponding audiences, who endorse or reject these definitions. There are no security issues per se, only issues that “securitizing actors” construct through the use of speech acts ^[105] – or  “securitization moves” – attempts to securitize an issue or an actor that will only be successfully securitized if they gain political and social momentum and, above all if the relevant audience accepts such a speech act. Securitization thus rhetorically actualizes anxiety and uncertainty concerning a security issue, it is the art of securitizing, guaranteeing, and securing, i.e., mobilizing a set of financial and human means for the security of an actor.

Balzacq argues^[106] that securitization is “a strategic (pragmatic) practice that happens within – and as part of – a set of circumstances,” including the context, the psychological-cultural predisposition of public opinion and the power that the speaking agent and the listening agent reproduce in the interaction. Securitization through practice studies police and military forces, border guards and humanitarian workers, amongst other security professionals and how they come to constitute the central actors of securitization.

Andersson demonstrates writing in 2014^[107] that Europe had already seen successive ‘border crises’ for over a decade by then, including the first large arrivals of sub-Saharan Africans into Italy in the early 2000s. “Each crisis has spawned more investment in border security, which has in turn worsened the problem by displacing routes, triggering more risky entry methods, and feeding the smuggling networks facilitating entry via those riskier methods and routes. We face a vicious cycle at the borders where the failure of controls feeds a demand for ever more controls: a cycle where many powerful groups stand to gain, while border crossers face ever graver risks to their safety.”

The pandemic also played a role in militarization of everyday life.^[108] In metaphorical terms, COVID-19 ‘became war, and the military became everything’^[109] with the health crisis being narrated in military terms, and the armed forces permeating the social realm. This militarized structure overlapped with the populist discursive practice associated with migration, gender and LGBT issues.^[110]  During the pandemic, the Polish government significantly raised its future defense and security budgets, referring to both prior modernization commitments and the post-pandemic recession, as well as simplifying army recruitment procedures.

Why definitions of terrorism matter: As Krasmann notes, in the framework of the Westphalian order of the modern state, the figure of the enemy relates to the defense of the state.^[111] The enemy appears from outside, whereas the culprit appears within, threatening society, and has to be confronted using criminal law. But the political criminal can be both part of society and a figure that in threatening the constitution transgresses the border.“The terrorist at one time crystallizes as a political threat, justifying exceptional measures, at the same time he crystallizes as a criminal being negated precisely that political significance, so that the usual catalogue of the criminal law can be imposed,” Krasmann writes.

As Skowronska notes,^[112] by drawing a division between citizens and non-citizens “migration policies speak to implicit definitions of what makes a good citizen. The selection of the ‘worthy’ migrants that those street-level bureaucracies operate is deeply rooted in interpretations of the nation’s boundaries […] by defining the conditions of foreigners’ stay (and potential inclusion) in a country, the state also implicitly prescribes certain behaviors and characteristics as intrinsic to its nationals […].” She found that the key feature of the anti-immigrant discourse was the centrality of an ethno-cultural definition of the nation, that treated citizenship and nationhood as synonymous. She calls this ‘Polish grammar’ a generative matrix that produces and imposes the boundaries of political belonging—underwritten by ethno-hetero-reproductive nationalism.

If Iraq was a war that externalized criminal policy, ^[113] so perhaps the militarization of domestic policy simply rounded the circle. Irregular migration, for example, became linked discursively by nationalists to issues such as transnational crime, transnational terrorism and border control. ^[114] Reece Jones and Azmeary Ferdoush refer to border militarization by other means, technological and surveillance devices, while another form of border militarization is the use of military equipment for border surveillance. 

Juliet Stumpf’s notion of “crimmigration”^[115]—the intersection of immigration and criminal law—includes barring access to immigration benefits, undermining procedural safeguards for fair and accurate outcomes, and embedding racialization into immigration enforcement. Bosworth and Guild show^[116] how expanding mechanisms of border control increasingly depend on the criminalization of non-citizens, where restrictions play important roles in discourses of citizenship and nationalism.

Huysmans stresses the central role of technologies as a securitizing tools.^[117] He argues the use of technology goes beyond its role as an instrument to implement given policies, but also plays a key role in presenting the existing choices to decision-makers.

…

THE POLITICS OF PARANOIA

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

George Orwell, Animal Farm.

“A PiS push-back is no different from a smiling European push-back: violence, harm and death are exactly the same.”

Adrian Zandberg, Left party (Lewica).

The two wings of Poland’s post-communist nationalist movement, Civic Platform (PO) and Law and Justice (PiS) – children of the period when the Solidarity movement emerged in the 1980s and broke apart in the 1990s – formed two parts of this Janus-like party hegemony. One appeared to veer towards the European civic mainstream, the other staying closer to an ethno-oriented home, although the two versions, one apparently liberal, the other conservative, shared much in common.

Polish coloniality: While in the Atlantic world race is often how class relations are mediated, in the Polish story, it was class that was be expressed in racial terms. In other words, that to understand how Poles “became white,” one must first acknowledge the way in which some of them were once “black.” Poland-Lithuania’s nobility believed it constituted a different racial group from Jews and peasants, the corpus of their racial theories being Sarmatism,^[169] an ideology based on the premise that the gentry, unlike the serfs, were direct heirs to Japheth via the Iranian tribe of Sarmatians. Anthropologist Lonia Jakubowska argues that race did not refer to skin color, but “connotes a distinct demeanor, one that exudes confidence, competence, and authority…This sense of entitlement comes not from genetic endowment but from the socially inherited differences in wealth, prestige and power.” In other words, in Poland race has not become naturalized, as Dunn suggested, but culturalized.

Nesting Orientalisms & Eurowhiteness: Milica Bakić-Hayden developed the concept of Nesting Orientalisms, explaining “a tendency of each region to view the cultures and religions to its South and East as more conservative and primitive.” It explains how a group which creates the Orientalized other can also be the subject of Orientalization by another group, and so on.^[184] Explaining the world through the construction of a spatial model explains reality by showing the mutual positioning of different characters or ethnic groups by inscribing them in axes of higher-lower, internal-external, center-periphery.

CONSTRUCTING MUSLIMS AS THE NEW THREAT

These historical archetypes in Poland tells us something about how the anti-Muslim discourses of post-2015 acquired such visceral and immediate expression. Böröcz and Sarkar suggest that denigration of the Muslim ‘Other’ can be read as an attempt to portray Poland as “West-compatible.”^[237] As if dormant for many years, they were re-evoked and rolled into action, a form of self- (or internal-)colonization.^[238] Muslims wandered back into a space, physically and metaphorically once occupied by Jews.^[239]

…

Looking for solutions: “There is a small part of Poland that is on the other side of the second fence separating Poland and Belarus. It is no more than 2 meters wide, but it matters. When people make it to this space, they don’t have to climb the fences to get Polish help.” Maria Kziazek, a psychologist who helped people in need on the border.

“The girls know that to be safer, they have to stand right next to the barrier. Behind it there is still a piece of Polish land. They stand in a row, holding onto the barrier on the Polish-Belarusian border. On a meter-two wide strip of Polish land these young African women huddle. Several dozen in total. How many exactly is unknown. Recently, a dozen or so of them went missing: masked guys came and tore away thosethat didn’t have enough strength to hold on. For weeks, NGO workers have been trying to monitor the girls’ safety. Even though we look at them constantly, we know so little about them.” Karolina Mazurek.

“Rather than obsessing over what are relatively low numbers of migrants and refugees arriving, Poland should focus its efforts on monitoring and deterring any potential direct military aggression by Belarus or Russia. Instead of treating asylum seekers as pawns in supposed “hybrid warfare” tactics, Poland – together with other European states – needs to invest appropriate resources into properly receiving and processing migrants through legal migration pathways,” Perkowski adds. “In addition, sufficient infrastructure, staffing and capacity to humanely accommodate asylum seekers arriving via Belarus need to be built up while their claims are fairly adjudicated through due process. Like other leaders across Europe, Polish authorities must move beyond solely framing migration through a one-dimensional securitized lens as an existential threat. A more nuanced, comprehensive approach is required to uphold both security and democratic values.

“Moreover, by reframing our discourse around migration away from being a securitized emergency, we would remove a powerful pressuring device from authoritarian adversaries like Belarus and Russia. Their current strategy appears aimed at spiraling the EU into chaos by allowing or incentivizing asylum seekers to move across their territories to reach Europe. However, this gambit only works if EU states view the migrants themselves as an intolerable threat. If instead, migration is understood through a more nuanced lens – with most asylum seekers being victims of persecution or desperation rather than infiltrating agents – the power of this maneuver by Minsk and Moscow would fade. We would make ourselves less susceptible to being coerced or pressured by such regimes,” she adds.

Pawel Kasprzak says the fence could have been built 500m into Polish territory, thereby enabling Polish authorities to take control of the situation, rather than “be blackmailed by Putin.”

Instead, we see cases like that of Rekaut Rachid, an Iraqi Kurd living in the UK. His 22-year old nephew disappeared inNovember 2021 after being thrown into the Polish forests by Belarusian military. Rachid went to Poland a week later and filed a missing persons claim with Polish police, helped by Polish volunteers. But he heard nothing for 11 months. He gave up hope. But, he says, a Polish activist posted a video online in which his nephew, Mohamed Sabah, was clearly visible. So Rekaut came back to Poland a year after his first visit and discovered the Polish police had closed the case. The police then lied to him about his nephew’s whereabouts, sending him to hospitals that had no records of his nephew’s stay. His nephew was one of 17 Iraqi Kurds who broke through the fence on the Polish-Belarusian border when about 2,000 people stormed it earlier this year. Of the 17 he was the only one missing.

INTERVIEWS

Adam Michnik: From anti-communist Marxist to post-Marxist capitalist: Born into a family of communists, Adam’s father Ozjasz Szechter was First Secretary of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, while his step-brother, Stefan Michnik, was a military judge in the 1950s.

Michnik spent three years in prison the first time, and on release in 1971 worked for two years as a welder at the Róża Luxemburg’s (Rosa Luxemburg) Industrial Plant. When martial law was declared in December 1981, he refused to sign a “loyalty oath” and voluntarily leave the country and was jailed again for an “attempt to overthrow socialism.”

Michnik played a crucial role during the Polish Round Table Talks, as a result of which the communists agreed to hold semi-free elections in 1989, which were won by Solidarity.

“The key was about striving for an open society and not a closed one, it was about a symbolic breakthrough. It was about a new way of talking and thinking,” Michnik says. 

In 1988, Michnik became an adviser of Lech Wałęsa’s Coordination Committee and took part in preliminary negotiations for the Round Table Talks. After the talks, Wałęsa asked him to organize a national daily, an ‘organ’ of the Solidarity Citizens’ Committee, before the June 1989 elections.

“We share an identity as Poles, whether of a Christian or Jewish or any other ancestry. It is this idea of the civic rather than the ethnic Poland that we are fighting for. This language creates an artificial division between the Józef Piłsudski and Roman Dmowski schools of Polishness. It’s all just a game played by cynical politicians. In 1968 it was also a search for enemies within, ‘the Other.’ Then it was Zionists. In the UK no-one talks of Miliband as being Jewish, he is English, right?” Michnik says.

“Kaczynski is a deeply frustrated and angry man who understands these Polish complexes very well. That is why Smolensk plays such a major role in his mythological universe. It ties him via his deceased brother to a national tragedy. It is thus intrinsic to himself as a person and he identifies himself with Poland. I don’t understand why Smolensk still holds so much magical power. It was an accident, there is no proof of Russian involvement. It is one of many visions Jarek has. But if one has visions one should go to a psychiatrist,” Michnik says.

“As for the left, what is it today? The left started when [Oliver] Cromwell chopped off the king’s head and ended with the Russian Revolution. Was Stalin of the left? Of course not,” Michnik says.

“The left’s ideas are hard to understand today. Do they want more state, but a state to protect individual rights? Do we want less market but also more freedom? [Ex-leader of the Labour Party] Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, for example, was a political cretin, a disaster. But in some ways he was a victim of the post-war success of the welfare state, the social democratic state that was built after the war by the Labour Party mainly. You can’t fight for what you already have. Otherwise it’s just a defensive position and may ultimately end up just reactionary,” Michnik says.

Mateusz Marzoch: Talking with the far-right

Before my interview with Mateusz Marzoch, a spokesperson for the All-Polish Youth (Młodzież Wszechpolska) – a component of Confederation – I asked people whose judgements in these matters I respect and whose opinions could be of value.

“There’s a difference between explaining and describing an abhorrent worldview and giving it a platform. Talking about and with these people always involves playing with fire, but we’ll never understand the physics of combustion without burning something,” Brian Porter-Szűcs, professor of history at the University of Michigan, said.

“I used to believe that one should not give odious people a chance to disseminate their views. I believe now that people should know what they represent and that we are wrong to try and protect readers/listeners from vile ideas,” said Anita Prazmowska, professor of history at the London School of Economics.

Confederation is made up of two main political forces. One is the National Movement (RN), formed in 2012 and merging far-right fragments such as the National Radical Camp and the All-Polish Youth. The other is KORWIN, led by the politician Janusz Korwin-Mikke, offering a mix of extreme neoliberalism and social conservatism.

The All-Polish Youth was created in 1922 as part of the National Democracy movement, and was modelled after the inter-war fascist movement Falanga. Roman Dmowski was its honorary chairman.

They declare themselves opposed to “doctrines promoting liberalism, tolerance, and relativism” and claim that the “Catholic ethic” should be irrevocable both in public and private spheres of life. The November 11 Independence Day marches in Warsaw have been dominated by the group for several years.

The interview

The aim was not on one hand to ridicule or belittle, or on the other hand to create a monster. What use would that do? It’s already been done and, anyway, it doesn’t work, the far-right seems to feed off both.

Marzoch comes from a small village 80 kilometers north-east of Warsaw, near Pultusk, which, he says, was very ethnically and religiously mixed before the war.

“There were many Germans, Ukrainians and Jews in my area. My grandfather tells me about the old days, about what the Jews there did for a living, nothing really more than that,” he says drily.

But in the next breath he says “the Jews were rich, the Poles poor.”

But weren’t these “rich Jews” also Poles, I ask? “Yes, but not the ones who collaborated with the communists,” he says. 

“We know that many Jews collaborated with the Russians and then after the war collaborated with the communists in Poland. My neighbour recalls how a Jew was saved after being hidden by local Poles [non-Jewish ones]. When he came out of hiding at the end of the war, he told my neighbour – my neighbour recalls – that even if there is one Jew left in Poland, that will still be enough to rule Poland.”

“The Polish nationalist groups helped Jews during the war when they discovered what the Germans were doing to the Jews. It was wrong what the Germans did,” he adds, as if there was any doubt.

“There is no evidence that Poles killed Jews at Jedwabne [the town in northeastern Poland where almost all of the Jewish inhabitants were killed by their gentile neighbours in 1941, as documented by US historian Jan Gross in his book Neighbours]. Many in our community [he doesn’t specific what his ‘community’ means] want to get the archaeologists in and see what really happened. But those that say Poles did it, don’t want to do that.”

Without being asked, Israel suddenly enters the conversation. “If you want the perfect example of a nationalist state, look at Israel,” he says. “There is nothing wrong in that, unless, that is, you keep expanding your borders and killing Palestinians.” I don’t press him on why he cares about Palestinians. He is less sympathetic to Syrians displaced by war coming into Europe, after all.

Asked if he thought Poland was better off without “the Jews”, Marzoch talks of the “great diversity of Poland after 1918, of Jews, Germans and Ukrainians. But they [“the Jews”] started to cause problems and not all Poles [the non-Jewish ones] were happy.”

“But Jews are not a problem today, not a threat. Some people say our premier is a Jew, but I don’t believe that,” he throws in.

“However, Jews like [Hungarian philanthropist] George Soros spread the LGBT+ ideology via money into NGOs,” he goes on. Asked if it is their Jewishness that determines their actions, Marzoch seems a little baffled, as if the question has never crossed his mind or did and was so absurd as to be immediately uncrossed.

“But we have Jews who are Polish nationalists, we have Muslims also in the association,” he adds quickly.

Asked if religious Jews who are also conservative in their views on LGBT+ and abortion issues can be included as Polish nationalists, Marzoch again appears a little confused.

“Nationalism can cut across religions. But we are a Catholic-Nationalist-Christian group. Polish nationalism has always been a bit different from others in Europe,” he goes on.

I get the feeling there are two narratives running in his head as he speaks, and at this point they collide in a jumble of confusion. “We don’t see ourselves as above anyone,” he adds, with a hint of defensiveness.

We move on to LGBT+ people, or “LGBT+ ideology”, as he calls it. Asked if there was room in his association for gay people, Marzoch laughs.

“I don’t know of anyone in the association who is gay, Catholic and nationalist.” It does and doesn’t answer the question.

Could there be gay people who are also anti-immigration and abortion? He agrees there could be.

“We just don’t want them [‘the gays’] to show off in the street,” he says. “We are not stopping anyone doing what they want in their own bedrooms.” So, it’s about the external aspects of identity then, I ask.

“We in my village were not brought up to hate anyone … well, maybe the Russians,” he laughs. It feels like the closest we are going to get to a joke.

Tymoteusz Zych (Ordo Iuris): ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ nationalisms

The influence of Ordo Iuris, a radical – sometimes described as fundamentalist – organization in Poland, should alarm all of Europe, say rights campaigners. Ordo Iuris leaders, meanwhile, claim they are a civic educational team of lawyers upholding the law.

Friendly and open, Tymoteusz Zych doesn’t appear to be the sinister presence he and others at Poland’s Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture, often portrayed as a fundamentalist, ultra-conservative and ultra-secretive organization, are often painted.

The Polish representative on the Brussels-based European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), a consultative body of the European Union, Zych says first and foremost that Ordo Iuris is not a religious organisation.

“Therefore it’s hard to describe us as ‘fundamentalists’, since this notion refers generally to religious groups,” he says.

Ordo Iuris has links with the Catholic Church, Baptists, and the Russian Orthodox Church in Poland, Zych says.

“Poland is a predominantly Catholic country, but we have also offered legal aid to Muslims and have Jews as members. All who share our values are welcome,” he adds.

“Jews have contributed massively to our Polish history and traditions. We abhor fascism and anti-Semitism. There are good and bad nationalisms, one can see positive aspects in Polish nationalist tradition, though.”

It is said much of the policy agenda of the Law and Justice (PiS)-led government which has ruled Poland since 2015 has been based on its prescriptions aimed to push the limits of a moral agenda in the traditionally Catholic country.

Ordo Iuris uses litigation as well as education to promote its traditional stance on gender and sexuality.

But the language it uses seems reasonable, tethered from some of the more incendiary language used by PiS politicians. “We are about upholding the constitution, for freedom of speech, the rule of law and human rights,” Zych says.

Ordo Iuris is not connected with PiS, but “there are many like-minded individuals,” Zych adds. 

Ordo Iuris was established in 2013, allegedly inspired by a transnational Catholic fundamentalist movement that started in Brazil, known as Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), a claim that Zych refutes.

Neil Datta, secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF) says TFP’s tactic is alliance building and capacity building of far-right extremist political parties. He explains that in Poland, TFP is very close to certain far-right groups and is extending its networks even further afield.

“It has a lot of different brands that it can offer: an anti-abortion one; a TFP one; a cultural one. It also has a very broad agenda covering socially conservative, anti-sexual reproductive health and rights and anti-LGBT agenda. It also has an anti-social welfare, pro-privatisation and anti-environmental economic agenda,” Datta says.

“Ordo Iuris is not ‘inspired’ by the TFP movement, neither it is part of it,” says Zych. “I don’t know of any such statement made by an Ordo Iuris member, nor any reference to TFP documents on our website. It is inspired by universally binding human rights covenants, as I told you.”

Allies reportedly include the US “Christian legal army,” which has advocated against abortion and same-sex unions.

“To be honest – I have never heard of a Christian legal army,” Zych says.

Ordo Iuris was established by the Father Piotr Skarga Foundation, which provided it with initial funding of 50,000 Polish złotys (about 10,000 euros). Its finances reportedly include three million złoty in donations from anonymous sources.

“The funding of Ordo Iuris is no more opaque than that of Greenpeace or Amnesty International,” Zych says. “To make claims like that is simply not serious – the GDPR [personal data protection agency] does not allow any NGO to publish names of private donors without special written permission. Nevertheless, if you come to our Warsaw office, you can find hundreds of names of the individual donors that helped us renovate it,” he adds.

Zych says Ordo Iuris is an NGO, without public funding. “About 90% of our funding comes from private individuals,” he says. “We don’t like the word lobbying, we prefer to think of ourselves as about advocacy, research/information campaigns and a litigation organization.”

Whatever one calls it, the organization has been successful on its own terms, promoting, for example, a total ban on abortion in Poland.

Its proposal was submitted to parliament as a “popular initiative” after it collected 450,000 signatures. The Catholic Church supported it, along with PiS. In October last year a ruling by Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal found that a 1993 law allowing abortion in cases of severe and irreversible foetal abnormalities was unconstitutional.

The institute’s bioethics center has submitted a proposal to grant foetuses independent rights to medical treatment. It is taking the European Parliament to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) over a resolution the parliament adopted on abortion in Poland.

It has also lobbied against anti-discrimination education in schools. As a result, the education ministry scrapped obligations on schools, introduced in 2015, to conduct anti-discrimination education. Ordo luris claimed this as “the first success” of its “Protect the Children” campaign.

It also reportedly encouraged pharmacists to cite “conscientious objection” rights in order to refuse the sale of contraceptives, a claim that Zych rejects.

“Simply not true – we never encouraged anyone to refuse to sell contraceptives. We just published informative materials on conscientious objection, referring in a very general manner to abortion and abortifacients.”

“We are against the neo-Marxist ideology, not against LGBTQ people. In fact we have supporters who are gay but also believe in upholding family values,” says Zych.

Ordo Iuris, Zych says, has never challenged any binding international covenant, as is widely reported. “To the contrary, as I explained, the organisation stands for human rights, as expressed in the binding covenants. All we challenged was just a single non-binding political resolution on abortion adopted last year by MEPs.”

“The EU was not set up to interfere in member states’ family law,” he says, adding that subsidiarity – the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level – is the key.

“What’s happening in Poland right now shouldn’t be seen as merely typical behaviour by the Polish state. This is not just ‘Poland being Poland’,” says Neil Datta. “These actions are illegal, inhumane and could infiltrate the rest of Europe – and this is just the beginning.”

Zych will have none of it.

“Datta is a radical activist – he is entitled to advocate for his views, but he will never be entitled to slander his political opponents and depict them as monsters,” Zych says.

Datta meanwhile is undeterred. “The provisions of the judgement go beyond the philosophical question of ‘right to choose’ versus ‘right to life’,” he wrote.

“By banning abortion for foetal anomaly, the Constitutional Tribunal is interfering in medical decisions that should be left to a woman and her loved ones, in consultation with her medical provider.

“What we are seeing in Poland is just the beginning. The beginning of the erosion of fundamental rights through pseudo-legal processes; first targeting women, then sexual minorities. Soon everybody will be concerned.”

“These quotations from Neil Datta do not refer to Ordo Iuris, but something distinct – he speaks about events, people and organisations that I have never heard of,” Zych says.

Mikolaj Kunicki: Polish nationalism is an odd one

An interview with Mikolaj Kunicki, the ex-director of the Programme on Modern Poland (POMP) at St Antony’s College, Oxford is illustrative of this ambiguous Polishness. Kunicki’s 2012 book Between the Brown and the Red: Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland—The Politics of Bolesław Piasecki is a crucial work in this regard. Piasecki was a Polish nationalist politician who started his journey as a fascist before the war and ended it as a procommunist activist. 

“There is an ambivalence in church-state relations in Communist Poland, relations that oscillated between mutual confrontation, accommodation, and dialogue rather than stagnating in a state of constant struggle. Contrary to many assumptions, under Communism the bond between religion and nation in Poland grew stronger,” Kunicki says. The book looks at Piasecki’s earliest involvement with the far-right, first with Roman Dmowski’s Camp of Great Poland, and later in the mid-1930s with a group called the National Radical Camp. Piasecki’s National Radical Movement (Ruch Narodowo-Radykalny) split from the National Radical Camp in 1934 under Piasecki’s leadership. This group is perhaps the best known of the interwar Polish far-right organizations, typically referred to as Falanga. 

“Westerners find it hard to understand Piacescki,” Kunicki says. “He was a quasi-fascist, but devoutly anti-Nazi, perhaps closer to the Franco fascism, clerical leanings in Romania and other Eastern European countries, Polish fascism had a strong religious component,” Kunicki says. After WWII, he was arrested by the Soviet NKVD, and in a conversion began to cooperate with the Communist government in Poland. 

“The Polish right still echo his views, but often without knowing it,” he says. “The widely held belief identified him as a political chameleon – the arch-villain of Polish politics and a turncoat who used Machiavellian tactics to get to the top. Later, for anti-communist dissidents in the 1970s, Piasecki was a fascist turned Soviet agent, a perverse phenomenon,” Kunicki says. “But the truth was that he was remarkably consistent in his beliefs throughout his life. His tactical pragmatism belied the solidity of his strategic and moral beliefs. In many ways, his journey is Poland’s journey, facing the need to retain some semblance of self-identity and continue to exist in the real world, a world dominated by Hitler and then Stalin. Piasecki was a broker between the brown and the red currents of totalitarianism, and the spiritual father of those Polish communists and non-communists alike who called for a system communist in its form and nationalist in its content,” Kunicki says. 

“Left and Right are elusive concepts in modern Poland and Eastern Europe, and Piasecki’s program is a perfect illustration of this point,” Kunicki argues. “His prewar ideology included ideological ingredients of the right, such as xenophobia, an exaltation of the ethnically homogenous community, religious fundamentalism, and a paramilitary movement led by a charismatic leader. On the other hand, he shared anti-capitalism with the extreme left– here overlapping with the rejection of the West – a glorification of a centralized state, a cultivation of collective identities, and historical determinism.”

Remigiusz Ryziński: Foucault in communist Poland 

Remigiusz Ryziński, the author of a book on French philosopher Michel Foucault’s stay in Warsaw in the late 1950s, believes the author of The History of Madness was profoundly influenced by his visit. The book was not published in Poland until 1987, three years after the Frenchman’s death of AIDS. 

Ryziński – a philosopher and cultural critic – tells the previously untold story of the plot to kick Foucault out of Poland in the late 1950s.

In 1958, Foucault arrived in Poland as the director of the French Cultural Centre and to work on his thesis—a work that was later published as The History of Madness. In it Foucault analyses how Western society deals with madness, arguing it to be a social construct distinct from mental illness. In the English-speaking world, the work became an influence on the anti-psychiatry movement in the 1960s.

“Foucault’s time in Poland seemed to be the stuff of legends,” Ryziński says.

“Poland had its own social revolution in the 1960s, and I think Foucault was in some important ways an instigator of this kind of Polish Stonewall moment,” he says.

“His invitation to Warsaw was a great opening, a gesture in the post-56 thaw period, opening to a world that had been lost, a diverse multilayered Poland. Or at least a glimpse at it,” Ryziński adds.

“The new reality had built a new Warsaw, erasing all aspects of the bourgeois past. But really it was just a stage set,” he goes on. 

“For him personally I think his time in Warsaw allowed him to experiment with his own identity, but also to smell, sense and see communism in reality. The public bravado of a free and equal society behind the curtain certainly enticed him to Poland. But his was in a sense a performative process. He knew he would be outed and exposed and he stood up and said: so what!”

“Jurek”

While he was in Poland he became involved with a number of members of the gay community. 

Foucault’s lover was named Jerzy Tadeusz S. “Jurek” was 25 when he met Foucault in the spring of 1959. “Jurek” eventually led the secret police to Foucault’s hotel room, causing his subsequent exit from Poland.

Foucault’s after partner, Daniel Defert, tells Ryziński of Michel telling him about the moment he met Jurek.

“Foucault entered the room, looked around, and went up to the table where the young man was sitting.

He noted the shelves were sagging under the works of Marx and Engels. He asked why.

“Because no one reads them,” replied the boy.

Foucault laughed and looked at the boy with curiosity.

A later anecdote from Jurek’s trip to Paris three years later is also revealing.

They passed near the French Communist Party building.

Jurek couldn’t believe it. He kept looking at the Party building, then at Foucault, then back at the building again.

“What is it?” asked Michel.

“Is that the Communist Party building?”

“Yes, of course. Why are you asking? Has something happened?”

“Does that mean the party isn’t banned here?”

“Of course not,” laughed Foucault. “It’s part of the government.”

Jurek burst into tears.

“They lied to me about everything! You see? Everything they told me was a lie!”

That was the moment Jurek told Michel the truth.

That he’d been hired by the secret police to spy on Foucault.

That he’d never been with a man before or worked for the intelligence services.

That their meeting in the library was not accidental.

That nothing had been accidental, because from then on he’d been informing, and this had allowed the secret police to stage the ambush at the Bristol Hotel.

Foucault then wrote a report on himself, which Jurek rewrote in Polish and delivered to the secret police office in Warsaw.

Jurek’s wife, Wisława, has since passed away. Jurek S., in turn, died on November 10, 2011. They had no children.

An archeology of Foucault

Ryziński says the first place he turned to when seeking traces of Foucault in Poland was the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN).

The University of Warsaw’s documentation has no information about Foucault’s time at the philosophy department from 1958 to 1959.

There was nothing at the Polish Academy of Sciences. A survey of files in the University of Warsaw’s philosophy department and the Institute of Romance Languages from later years also turned up nothing.

The Institut Français in Warsaw and Kraków knew nothing, except that Foucault had been in Poland.

Bondage

As Foucault might have suggested, only when a certain thing is described is it brought into existence. There were no homosexuals in Poland until someone started keeping files on them.

Foucault was interested in prisons, regimentation, violence, and repression – a Poland in the grip of communist madness was a great testing ground, clearly. 

“He certainly knew he was being followed, surveilled. It was part if the excitement. He saw the madness. His was a world of a lot of silences. Foucault’s dissertation addresses the archeology of silence.

“His flat was on Chmielna street, opposite the Atlantic cinema and just over the road from the newly built Palace of Culture. His idea of the panopticon was for sure developed with this in mind. We internalise the power structures, there are no guards, but we are always being watched, we as our own gaolers.

Without a doubt, The History of Madness was Foucault’s attempt to understand himself, his otherness, which was simultaneously his true identity, says Ryziński. “It was also the gateway to his research on sexuality. Madness, after all, was a category of social exclusion in the same way as homosexuality.” 

The History of Madness is is about the desire to gain knowledge of that which falls outside of knowledge, which itself is anti-knowledge, the conflict of reason and madness. 

Madness and homosexuality are similar to one another, Ryziński goes on. “As long as there is no knowledge about them—medical, statistical, political—they do not exist. Or rather: they are left in peace. When knowledge emerges, so too does a sense of danger. Knowledge always only touches on some concept of an object, not the entirety of the fact.”

It must not have been easy for Foucault to write his dissertation without access to publications and sources, outside the realm of the French language. Perhaps he drew inspiration from the madness surrounding him.

Stultifera navis (“ship of fools”) is the first chapter of Foucault’s book.

This was based on real events. Madmen were put on ships and sent out to sea.

The people still on land felt safe. They felt no guilt, they did not believe they had acted immorally.

A few hundred years later trains left the Umschlagplatz, carrying people to the gas chambers. Those who perpetrated this were convinced they were acting rightly. They thought they were defending their identity against the disease of otherness.

Lepers, the insane, the ill, unbelievers, Jews, Gypsies, refugees from Syria, homosexuals—all excluded from the spaces of “normal” people, of Michel Foucault himself, who was recording their story within a world of political alienation.

The insane political system he was experiencing firsthand was evidence of one of his main theses: that madness occurs only in a society of normal people. Madness was invented, like race, like society, and like sexuality.

He made inquiries about a hospital for those with mental disorders, and was recommended to visit Tworki, the famous psychiatric facility outside Warsaw.

On May 26, 1962, a three agents delivered a report to the intelligence services on the subject of persons “practicing homosexuality.” There was a list of sixty-eight men, as well as eight women.

An operation conducted in the 1980s and afterward code-named “Hyacinth” set up a national register of homosexuals. The goal was to define homosexuality as an illness, and then provide “case studies.” 

Asked, inevitably, if there are similarities between the gay community’s experience under the old system and now under PiS, Ryziński says we can easily see many similarities. 

“The language that they were speaking about gays is the same as we can experience today, in the media, in the politic discourse. It has caused a specific mood in the part of society, giving some people enough courage to express their fears, phobias, and hateful opinions,” Ryziński says.

Rewatching Lanzmann’s film Shoah

Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 nine-hour documentary film Shoah famously consists only of interviews. There is no archival footage, no musical background and no narration.

The interviews are often conducted in the locations the film’s interviewees – mainly the Polish or German witnesses, but not most of the Jewish survivors – are describing.

Lanzmann stressed what he called the “topographical” character of the film, with a lot of time spent silently panning empty fields, forests, or camp remains. This was, he said, meant to combine knowledge of past events with an experience of space. The film was supposed to become a “new form” that would tell a different story about the Holocaust. Lanzmann called it “a fiction of the real”, allowing the viewer to experience the film as an event in itself.

The key role in the film is thus played by conversation and descriptions of the Holocaust as remembered by the witnesses, perpetrators and bystanders. It does not aim to reveal new facts, but to bring up imagination, symbols, desires, images and interpretations, for all involved, including the viewer. The aim – he said – was to create an impression of an entanglement of two orders in one place – “here and now” and “there and then.”

The words of the witnesses are interpreted on the spot from Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew into French. In the subtitles, both French and English, some sentences are skipped and the plurality of voices is sometimes lost, the result being more of a summary than a translation.

The speakers sometimes engage in conversation on the side, comment on the situation of the interview in various ways.

Understanding the editing process is central to apprehending the role of translation in Shoah,” Remy Besson, from the Technès international partnership project at the University of Montreal, says.

“Indeed, in the film, we almost never hear the whole of the interviews that were shot. The director and his editor have chosen each word spoken by the witnesses with careful attention. It is important to know that the editor did not speak Polish. She worked from the transcripts of the verbal content of the interviews. It was therefore the meaning of the words spoken in French that guided the editing process. This process of sound editing led, among other things, to an accentuation of Polish anti-Semitism.

“For example, some expressions of solidarity with the Jews were cut out several times during the editing process. This can be demonstrated by systematically comparing the original content of the filmed interviews and the verbal content of the film after the editing, which I did for my PhD. This can be seen as part of the creative and political choices of the film team,” Besson says.

“I think the main idea is to let the viewer have time to understand and incorporate the narratives carried out by the witnesses,” Besson says.

“However, in the case of the interviews in Poland, the idea is also to stage the translator, Barbara Janicka. The idea is to represent her as a figure between the director and the Polish Bystanders. She is neither completely on one side nor completely on the other.

“The film is very much rooted in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time when Holocaust deniers were very much in the forefront, but also at a time when the specificity of the Holocaust was not clearly understood by all,” Besson says.

“Today, I think it is possible to re-employ the film archive to create more reflexive films. We must use this material to question not only the Holocaust, but also the collective memory of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is also possible to use this material to question the process of translation, as I did in the short film Tell Her (2021).

“Finally, it is important to explore this material in the context of all kinds of issues that are contemporary to us.”

‘A difficult man’

Professor Francine Kaufmann – the Hebrew interpreter in Israel for Shoah and Sobibor (2001) and for The Four Sisters (Les Quatre Sœurs) (2018) –  says that working with Lanzmann was “a challenge”.

“I received no preparation. I suspect that Lanzmann wanted to hear, in my voice, my astonishment, he wanted me to ‘experience’ the words. I presume also that the ‘delayed’ or ‘echo effect’ of asking a question twice and it being answered twice, gave a gap for reflection, a period of nothingness, of void. But Lanzmann was hard to work with,” Kaufmann says.

Asked if he was “dictatorial,” she answered: “Oh yes. He rarely explained what or why he was doing or asking things. I sent him, before publication, in around 1992, my first academic text on the role of the interpreter in Shoah, in order to know his own opinion, receive reactions, precisions, but he ignored it.

“I realised only later what a cult film I was a part of and began to learn. The role of the interpreter was part of the process of double layered testimony,” Kaufmann says.

Lanzmann’s film challenges this idea of equivalence in translation, what he called a socially useful fiction. There are no “mistakes of memory” and “untrue statements”, but a complex narrative, concealing numerous layers of knowledge and ignorance.

Reception in Poland

When the film first came out in 1985 Poland’s communist authorities showed just two hours or so, the parts related to Poland. The official reception in Poland was largely negative.

After 1989, the democratic authorities initially balked at showing the film in full, but then permitted Canal+, a French-owned channel, to do so in 1997. Jan Gross’s revelations about gentile Polish complicity in murders of their neighbours, Polish Jews, at Jedwabne in the second year of the war were published in 2000 and Poland began a period of soul-searching that continues to this day.

One of Poland’s post-communist foreign ministers, Władysław Bartoszewski, an Auschwitz survivor, criticised Lanzmann for ignoring the thousands of Polish rescuers of Jews, focusing instead on poor rural Poles, selected – he argued – to conform with his preconceived notions.

Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, a Polish writer and dissident, questioned why Lanzmann had omitted talking with anybody in Poland with advanced knowledge of the Holocaust.

The Socio-Cultural Association of Jews in Poland called it a provocation and delivered a protest letter to the French embassy in Warsaw.

An unfinished film

“No, we have not finished with this film yet,” Dorota Głowacka, director of the King’s Contemporary Studies Programme at the University of Kings College in Halifax in Canada, says.

There are over 300 hours of fragments of outtakes that were not included in the final version of Lanzmann’s film, as Głowacka notes in her book The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and its Outtakes.

In it, Głowacka studies how Lanzmann treated the Polish language in the film, and what this reveals about the director’s biases.

“Changing attitudes towards Lanzmann reflect the debate in Poland about Polish-Jewish relations, like a litmus paper. It’s like two Polands in parallel, opening and and closing,” she says.

“There is not only a certain colonial attitude towards the Polish language, there also seems to be a rather Zionist attitude towards the Yiddish language, and Eastern European Jews. There are also very few women in Shoah and one might think Lanzmann chose women interpreters because he felt he could better intimidate them,” Głowacka says.

“What has remained constant through these different phases of the film’s reception is the view that the film only emphasises the conflict between Polish and Jewish memories of the fate of Polish Jews during the Holocaust.

“In my view one of his strategies was a linguistic one, aimed at the Polish language as the carrier of Polish national values and attitudes, which included a centuries-old legacy of anti-Semitism. It seems that, throughout the Polish translation sequences [the] Polish language itself — indelibly marked by the trauma of the extermination of Polish Jews — is put on trial before the camera.”

Głowacka argues that Lanzmann introduced to the film a “colonial gaze” which bore “contempt for the language of the native and replacing it with a more civilised tongue…”

Noting that Lanzmann shows great attention to detail elsewhere, including in his treatment of other languages, Głowacka points to the many misspellings of Polish proper names that are found in the English subtitles of the film.

The outtakes include a conversation a Jewish survivor named as Srebnik (his name is Srebrnik) has with workers at the site of mobile gas vehicles in Chelmno. Glowacka says Srebrnik is extremely assertive when talking in Polish, and that this was cut by Lanzmann as it didn’t fit his narrative of Polish complicity, Polish anti-Semitism and backwardness.

“In contrast to what I see as Lanzmann’s dismissal of Polish testimony — his view that Poles were ‘false witnesses’ — I give credence to Polish villagers’ desire to testify to what happened to the Jews, even though what they say is overlaid with anti-Semitic prejudice.”

Agnieszka Holland: The Green Border

Polish film director Agnieszka Holland says her film – The Green Border – depicting non-European migrants’ experiences on the Polish-Belarusian border is helping to treat Poles of historical trauma.

“When I had a meeting with an audience in Poland, not only were the people crying and giving standing ovations, but the conversations afterwards were a bit like collective psychotherapy,” she says. “I didn’t expect that the reaction of the audience could be so high, that people could be shaken and moved by the film and at the same time elevated,” she said.

With parliamentary elections on Oct. 15, the became part of a divisive and ugly election campaign.

While she has been backed by the Federation of European Screen Directors after harsh government reactions and received the Special Jury Prize for the film at the Venice Film Festival, Holland was forced to take 24-hour security protection when in Poland for the release of the film on Sept. 22.

“There could always be some dangerous person who takes the propaganda to heart. In fact, the only person who did come at me was a local politician in Bialystok,” she says.

Holland’s two-and-a-half-hour-long black and white film is divided into several sections, each looking at the crisis from a different angle. 

We see a Syrian family led by parents Amina and Bashir and an Afghani teacher Leila, who joins them at the border. The second section follows one of those guards, Jan, whose pregnant wife sees a viral video in which he beats refugees. In the third, we see Julia, a Polish woman who rescues Leila from a swamp behind her house.

President Andrzej Duda in a televised interview repeated the WWII slogan “only pigs sit in the cinema,” used to refer to Poles who frequented cinemas during the Nazi wartime occupation.

Poland’s government has even said it will broadcast a “special clip” in cinemas before screenings of the film to inform viewers of its “many untruths and distortions.”

“Those who make such films and who support them, those who receive them well, are essentially Putin’s army,” said PiS president Jaroslaw Kaczynski. “This is a lampoon, a disgusting, disgusting lampoon,” he added.

According to Kaczynski, Holland fits into the history of “her community … an environment that comes from the Polish communist party, from people who served Stalin, who was exactly the same genocide as Hitler,” he said. Holland is the grandchild of Holocaust victims.

“The same tone we experienced in 1968, when Poland’s remaining Jews were forced to leave the country, is there in what he says,” Holland says.

The nationalist Polish association of communism and secular Jews, both before, during and since the end of communism in 1989, is a familiar and often used rhetorical device that places Holland within a milieu – a “community” – that is effectively, by virtue of its ethnicity, claimed to be anti-Polish. 

“Polish services have been successfully defending the border against illegal immigrants sent by Lukashenko and Putin, storming it for two years. Now they also have to deal with the slanderous theses of the creators of the film,” Kaczynski added.

PiS says the film is a preparation for tearing down the fence on the Belarusian border and pushing Warsaw to agree to the EU’s relocation of refugees.

PiS has long attacked those whom it sees as a form of internal dissidence from the patriotic line. It has sued US-Polish historian Jan Gross and others over claims Poles were complicit or actively engaged in the murder of Jews in WWII. 

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki was equally furious. “They show our people as idiots and bastards, Poles as primitives. They are trying to destroy our good name as those who opened their hearts and doors to over two million Ukrainians,” he said.

Justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, said he would not withdraw remarks likening Holland to a Nazi propagandist. When Holland threatened to sue him, the minister said it was more important how he is judged by God than by a court. He added that he too had not actually watched the film.

“I think the film was needed. That the people didn’t want to be lost in the narrative that everything is fine,” Holland concluded.

Tucker Carlson: A useful idiot: On 8 February 2024, American journalist Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin was broadcast. In the interview, Putin mention Poland 36 times. It afforded a fascinating insight into how Putin used history as a weapon, how Poland was central to his main narrative, how Poland reacted to his claims and how Western media could be manipulated into following narratives that it either didn’t understand or understood but believed they worked in its interests, however defined. The Polish foreign ministry collected Putin’s statements from the interview and responded. ^[252]

Collaboration with Hitler

Putin said: “In 1939, after Poland cooperated with Hitler – it did collaborate with Hitler, you know – Hitler offered Poland peace and a treaty of friendship and alliance. [Poland] rejected Hitler’s demands. Since [Poland] did not give up the Danzig corridor, the Poles nevertheless forced him. They got carried away and forced Hitler to start WWII against them first. Why did the war start on September 1, 1939 precisely against Poland? Because it turned out to be uncooperative. Hitler had no choice but to implement his plans, starting specifically with Poland.” 

The Polish FM replied: “Putin’s claim that Hitler had ‘no choice’ but to invade Poland is not supported by historical evidence. After the death of Jozef Pilsudski in 1935, Polish foreign policy implemented by Jozef Beck was conducted based on a ‘policy of balance.’” The Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) defines it as maintcoaining ‘an equal distance’ from the USSR and from Germany, with the complete exclusion of being bound by an alliance either with the Third Reich against Moscow or with Moscow against the Third Reich.” 

“Polish foreign policy prior to WWII did not seek a military alliance with Adolf Hitler. In 1934, Poland and Germany signed a non-aggression pact, which guaranteed a peaceful settlement of disputes over, among other things, territory. This led to a temporary improvement in relations between the states, which, however, collapsed again in 1939 with the Third Reich’s territorial demands on the Republic of Poland. Germany’s plan was never to make a lasting peace with Poland […]They only intended to lull the vigilance of the Second Polish Republic and give themselves time to prepare for war. The pact was eventually broken by the German side in April 1939. In August of the same year, the Third Reich and the USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which provided, among other things, for the division of spheres of influence in Central and Eastern Europe between the two states.”

“According to The National WWII Museum, Hitler set the stage for the invasion by making it look as if the Poles had provoked the hostilities and the SS obliged by staging numerous false-flag operations and ‘Polish provocations’ against Germans.”

Czechoslovakia

Putin said: “The Poles collaborated with Hitler and engaged together in the partitioning of Czechoslovakia[…]By the way, the USSR […] asked Poland’s permission to transit its troops through the Polish territory to help Czechoslovakia. But the then Polish foreign minister said that if the Soviet planes flew over Poland, they would be downed. […] the war began, and Poland fell prey to the policies it had pursued against Czechoslovakia, as under the well-known Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, part of that territory, including western Ukraine, was to be given to Russia. Thus Russia, which was then named the USSR, regained its historical lands.”

The Polish FM wrote: “Historical facts do not support these words. In September 1938, representatives of the governments of Germany, Italy, Britain, and France concluded the Munich Agreement. It authorized Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia. The Republic of Poland was not a party to the treaty. The Polish government took advantage of the fact that the document had been signed to take its own action — to occupy Zaolzie, part of Cieszyn Silesia. However, one cannot speak of Polish-German cooperation here.”

“By uttering these words, the Russian President seeks to justify the armed aggression against Poland during WWII. This pushes the responsibility for Russian actions onto the lack of willingness and cooperation on the part of the Polish Republic, which was supposed to have cooperated with Adolf Hitler. This is not true.

“Russian aggression against Ukraine cannot be justified by history. Poland’s refusal to accept German territorial claims, or the admission of Soviet troops who wanted to go to the aid of Czechoslovakia, cannot explain the brutal occupation of its territory. In the same way, Ukraine’s failure to make concessions to Crimea and Donbas cannot explain the invasion of their territories by Russian troops. In the context of Czechoslovakia, it should be remembered that the USSR decided not to send troops there not only because Poland did not agree to it, but also because of the attitude of France and England. The USSR initially wanted to defend Czechoslovakia militarily together with other democratic states to stop Adolf Hitler. France and England, however, preferred to make concessions.”

Ukrainian identity

Putin said: “It was the Poles who instilled in the Ukrainians that they were a separate ethnic group from the Russians. For decades, the Poles were engaged in ‘Polonization’ of this part of the population: they introduced their language there, tried to entrench the idea that this population was not exactly Russian, that because they lived on the fringe (u kraya) they were ‘Ukrainians.’ Originally, the word ‘Ukrainian’ meant that a person was living on the outskirts of the state, near the fringe, or was engaged in border service. It didn’t mean any particular ethnic group.” 

“But due to the historical development, these territories [the territories of modern Ukraine] were part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – Poland, where Ukrainians were persecuted and treated quite brutally as well as were subject to cruel behavior. There were also attempts to destroy their identity. All this remained in the memory of the people.” 

The Polish FM replied: “It is true that the original meaning of the word ‘Ukraine’ was borderlands, which lay in the border areas. In the past, the territories of present-day Ukraine were most often referred to as ‘Rus.’ However, this does not mean that as a result of the actions of the Poles, Ukrainians began to see themselves as a separate ethnic group.”

“In the book by historian Professor Wladyslaw A. Serczyk History of Ukraine, we read that the process of formation of national distinctiveness and the Ukrainian language gained momentum in the period after the district disintegration of Kievan Rus. By contrast, the concept of Ukraine as a territory inhabited by people who differed in language and customs from their neighbors in the public consciousness began to appear as early as around the 14th and 15th centuries. Contrary to Putin’s claims, the Poles were not responsible for these processes.”

“In this context, it is also worth mentioning that in the First Polish Republic, the Poles recognized the national separateness of the inhabitants of today’s Ukraine. This can be evidenced by the Treaty of Hadiach of 1658, which planned to create the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with the Principality of Rus as its third constituent state. Polonisation of the Ukrainian population in the First Polish Republic did occur but was limited to the elite and was voluntary, in contrast to the mass and violent Russification of Ukrainians in the 19th century.”

“During the Second Polish Republic, however, Polish-Ukrainian relations were difficult, and the long-lasting border conflict between the two nations contributed to this. As Prof. Maciej Marszał wrote, part of the Polish political elite (including Josef Pilsudski) sought a Polish-Ukrainian agreement. However, due to the discord within the Polish elite on the one hand and the intransigence of Ukrainian nationalists on the other, we did not live in peace with each other. These facts, however, bear no relation to the years of forced Russification of Ukraine under Russian annexation, or the leading to the deaths of some 4 million Ukrainians as a result of the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 caused by the Soviet authorities.”

“Professor Mirosław Nagielski in his book Under a Common Sky: Ethnic Groups of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania mentions that, as a consequence of the Union of Lublin in 1569, the lands of Southern Ruthenia, among others, were incorporated into the Polish Crown. As the author writes: ‘The Ruthenians were therefore admitted to the Crown’s citizens as equals to equals.’ Admittedly, over time, Cossacks also sought nobility privileges, which was opposed by the rest of the Commonwealth’s elite. However, this does not mean that the very existence of the Ruthenians was not recognized or that the Ruthenian elites were subjected to forced and brutal Polonisation.”

Restoration of historical territories

Putin said: “As expected, the war with Poland began. It lasted 13 years, and then in 1654, a truce was concluded. And 32 years later, I think, a peace treaty with Poland, which they called the ‘eternal peace,’ was signed. And these lands, the whole left bank of the Dnieper, including Kiev, went to Russia, and the whole right bank of the Dnieper remained in Poland.”

The Polish FM replied: According to the Russian president, the war with Poland in the 17th century involved the ‘return of the lands to Russia’, but — again — no mention was made of the fact that the lands originally belonged to Kievan Rus,‘ which historically was not a Russian state. On the other hand, it gave rise to the modern Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian states. Modern Russia can trace its origins primarily to the Principality of Moscow, which for a long period of its existence until 1505 did not control Kyiv, but only part of the Ukrainian lands.”

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