[ENG] EASTERN EUROPE. Noble Impulse of Logistics. Grassroots Aid for Refugees from Ukraine in Poland
Marcin Skrzypek
In the first month of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Poland took in two million refugees from Ukraine. After two months, this number exceeded three million. What lessons can we learn from these experiences, unprecedented in postwar European history?
Migration challenges
The humanitarian aid for Ukrainian refugees deserves attention in the context of current migrations to Europe from Africa and the Middle East, as well as prospective climate migrations. In Europe, there have been debates for many years about who should take refugees in and in exchange for what benefits. It turns out that respecting human rights is not that easy if many people need help at once.
What happens then is that resources begin to run out or you grow afraid you will have to share them with others. The consequence is a competition between the groups that need these resources. And so, a natural reaction of the majority is to deprecate the needs of the minority, even if the minority is objectively small and in a much more difficult situation than the majority, as in the case of immigrants or refugees.
In extreme cases, minority groups are deprived of their rights. This is what is happening on the Polish-Belarusian border, where foreigners pushed to the Polish side of the border are treated as Lukashenka’s “hybrid weapon”, not as people in a desperate situation. There is a real danger that if we fail to prepare today for the worst-case mass migration scenario, in the future we will end up isolating refugees in “temporary” camps in inhumane conditions or even shooting at them like at zombies in a computer game.
Moral challenges
The moment we have to share something with others reveals the true face of morality and ethical norms proclaimed in a given country, region or city. For it’s necessary to prove with our actions that these norms exist, and indeed shape our lives in these specific circumstances. And they require dedication, doing some extra work or giving up some things in order to do something good for others.
The fluctuations of those behaviours and the character of the problems vary depending on the scale, dynamics and stage of the destabilisation process that is affecting people’s lives. Preparing for a crisis at an unspecified time in the future requires certain actions, but something else is demanded from us by the rapid influx of refugees over a short time, and other actions still are required for the stabilization of a longer-term stay of foreigners in our society. Ultimately, it’s highly possible that we may have to prepare even for the transformation of our country from mono-ethnic to multicultural.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it came as a surprise that a humanitarian crisis could be avoided simply through spontaneous, self-organizing volunteer work of residents, grassroots actions that was made possible due to the cooperation of many actors from all sectors. The example of Lublin and the Lublin Social Committee to Aid Ukraine, operating since February 24, 2022, shows just how this came about.
Lublin experiences
The scale of Lublin aid for refugees from Ukraine and the Committee’s contribution is evidenced by the data below. By April 2022, 1,200,000 Ukrainian citizens arrived at Lublin, of which 138,000 had spent there at least one night. At the end of March they accounted for 17% of the population of the city (68,000 people). The Committee itself found accommodation for 1,668 people (531 families) for three months, and answered 14,670 calls to the municipal helpline. In addition, it ran 14 emergency shelters with around 1,500 beds, which during this time provided more than 102,500 overnight stays as well as served 150,000 meals and issued 39,500 food packets. 80 truckloads and 68 other transports of humanitarian aid were dispatched. With the Committee’s support, 1,196 Ukrainian citizens found employment, including 64 teachers in 41 Lublin schools.
The Committee was a network of cooperation of many NGOs, the Lublin City Office, the Lubelskie Province Governor’s Office, the Marshal’s Office, cultural institutions, universities, businesses and ordinary people. It was created on the initiative of the Homo Faber Association, while its venue and first regular employees were provided by the Centre for Culture in Lublin and the City Office. The data shows that the Committee’s activities were only a fraction of all initiatives for refugees in quantitative terms, but quantitative measurements are not a reliable benchmark here. Social aid for refugees formed a system of connected vessels, in which different factors were paramount, such as the speed of reaction.
The speed of reaction
The members of the Homo Faber Association have been engaged in aid to foreigners for many years. In 2021, they became part of Grupa Granica (The Border Group), which concentrated on direct, on-site aid to people abandoned on the Polish-Belarusian border. Thanks to their experience, when the war broke out they already had a network of contacts with the authorities and other entities, and were able to clearly picture the situation of the Ukrainian refugees.
This was why, when they learnt about the Russian attack on their way to Berlin at dawn on February 24, they immediately turned back and, while still on the train, began to organise the meetings and the volunteers. They knew that a multitude of frightened, hungry and tired people would soon appear at the border and would need to be helped to survive the next couple of hours and find options for future.
A few days before, at the initiative of the Homo Faber Association, a meeting was held between the city mayor, the voivode (a rough equivalent of governor), and the Civic Dialogue Commission on on how to organise city’s integration support system for immigrants. This let NGOs know what the authorities were planning, and helped both sides to establish a hotline between them. But for this swift mobilisation, on the very first day of arrivals there would have been many more problems, and they would have been much more challenging.
The need to help
It is likely that the situation on the Belarus border had prepared the entire society for this effort. Many people had long been frustrated at being able to only passively observe the inhumane treatment of immigrants by Polish and Belarusian [border] forces without being able to intervene. The arrival of the refugees from Ukraine was a sort of “liberation” from this powerlessness. Finally, there was a way to react to the violence and injustice taking place in the world.
People personally drove to the Ukrainian border to transport refugees to other cities. For this reason, there were no huddles of helpless refugees, but they were spread around Poland and further across the European Union, where they could encounter similarly dispersed aid from many people of goodwill in other countries. One of the Lublin centres involved in such help had its headquarters in a private house at 5 Liliowa Street. Thanks to three people who met on Facebook, it became a logistics centre sending refugees to the West in vehicles
that returned to us full of donated items.
The Polish Economic Institute reported that in the first months of the war 77% of Polish society was involved in helping refugees, and spent as much as 10 billion zlotys of private money in doing so. A few weeks after the war began, politicians began to repeat that “this noble impulse of the heart is no longer enough” and that the government now had to step in. This claim was motivated by their extreme ignorance of the professionalism of the help provided for refugees by the civil society. It was rather “a noble impulse of logistics” than of the heart. Quite simply, citizens turned out to be more efficient in their self-organization than the public sector they finance, and which indeed could use some sort of an “impulse of the heart”.
Logistics of cooperation
Homo Faber Association’s previous contacts with the authorities meant that the officials were comfortable handing over the initiative of organising humanitarian aid. These previous contacts also allowed for the wide community of volunteers to be instantly connected with the resources of the City Office and the Centre for Culture such as the premises, the decision-making and the work of committed employees. Already in the afternoon of February 24, a meeting at the Centre for Culture was held with several dozen volunteers, who were assigned tasks. Thanks to an online home-sharing database that began functioning the following Sunday, the constantly arriving refugees ended up in private flats.
Within a few days, the Committee organised over twenty working groups, which included forty coordinators and 250 volunteers, and which covered all the life needs of refugees. That is to say that in terms of providing social services, they all but replaced the local government. What turned out to be crucial was setting up a single hotline and centre of collecting and publishing up-to-date information to be used by any entities or residents providing assistance to refugees on their own.
Such small steps, the local “connectors” and procedures of both a top-down and a bottom-up nature, together created a system that connected the resources of premises, time, work and money dispersed in the community. This was happening all over Poland. What might have resembled an “impulse of the heart” to an ignorant politician could be seen by a computer analyst as a network server software, and a sociologist might describe it as social capital in full swing.. It was probably the first time in our lives that we had encountered such an advanced application of the ability to cooperate and join forces for a common purpose.
One person had a car, the other knew where to go. Somebody sensitive and empathetic provided psychological support to the refugees, while a more “task-oriented” person provided them with food and learnt how to get hold of appropriate documents. Nothing was wasted, no competence or resource. The owner of the house at 5 Liliowa Street, a speaker of Ukrainian, worked with strangers for several hours a day thanks to a neighbour who took care of her children.
Task organisation
In the Committee we are discussing here, most of the Ukrainian and Russian-speaking volunteers worked 24 hours a day at lodging and accommodation points, coach and railway stations, as well as transporting people and goods. The remaining teams dealt with: the shipment of medical aid, assistance for families hosting refugees, finding jobs for refugees, directing the hungry to restaurants offering free meals; psychological support for children, adults and volunteers; legal aid; translations; coordination of donations; publishing guides, leaflets and posters; contact with external entities; coordination of free premises and infrastructure; Polish and Ukrainian language courses; childcare; book collecting; scholarships for those in need of continuing their education (e.g. piano playing) and so forth.
Meanwhile, it was necessary to react to any new circumstances, such as the fact that refugees kept refusing to move inland and wanted to stay close to the border. Another necessity was to create a system of trust between volunteers and refugees, who were initially afraid to get into unknown cars at the border and later could fall victim to dishonest carriers, against which they had to be be warned. It was necessary to create relevant leaflets and a system of attestation for carriers based on recording and relaying information about who is carrying whom and to where, so that in case of any problems the history of transit could be traced. That was partly done by the relevant administrative entities and to some extent by citizens themselves, who spontaneously formed chains of trustworthy contacts equivalent to the famous blockchains known from the cryptocurrency market.
By August 2022, over five million Ukrainians had crossed the border into Poland, and three million had crossed in the opposite direction. At the beginning of May, approximately three million Ukrainians lived in Poland, around half of them refugees, and till the beginning of 2023 that order of magnitude could be considered stable. Today we know that the war might not end soon, and the Ukrainian minority is going to stay with us for longer than we anticipated at the beginning. Are we able to move to the stage of sharing what we have with refugees? Certainly, there are some circumstances that are not helpful, such as the economic crisis and the scheming of Russian trolls trying to incite Poles against Ukrainians and against other Poles who help refugees. Thus, our personal ethics are being put to the test and we have to show “imagination of charity”, as St. John Paul II’s put it, i.e. to be merciful and smart.
The issue of interpersonal closeness
Helping Ukrainians was possible thanks to the cultural and linguistic proximity of our nations. Unfortunately, our experience of helping Ukrainians had virtually no impact on the approach of the border service and politicians to foreigners of colour on the Polish-Belarusian border. However, this cultural closeness was developed through three decades of various actions. But for them, many historical facts would have separated us from the Ukrainians, for instance the Battle of Lviv between Poles and Ukrainians, the murder of about 50,000 civilians by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Volhynia, or the simple matter of competition in the job market.
Actions that have brought us and Ukrainians closer were conducted by NGOs, cultural institutions, and informal groups involved in cultural and social animation. It should be clearly stated that this area is still underappreciated in Poland. A carefully considered cultural policy was deliberately deployed in the development of the country after 1989, with the Little Homelands movement as an example. Another revival accompanied the 2010 campaign for the title of European Capital of Culture 2016 for a Polish city. But then this strategic way of thinking diverged in two directions leading nowhere in terms of social capital: creative industries and national conservatism.
The role of social links in helping Ukrainians suggests that it is worth returning to cultural and social animation as a tool of their creation. Cultural and social events form a neutral space of shared positive experiences that build social capital. And this is necessary for us to join forces and cooperate in unexpected and difficult circumstances as well as on a daily basis. Every interpersonal animosity, whether political or ideological, distances us from that goal.
Three decades of cross-cultural actions
It is difficult to say what was the most important for preparing the Lublin community to help refugees. We do not even know whether and how Lublin stands out from other cities in this regard. It could be an interesting subject of the study. It is nonetheless true that we reacted to the surge of arrivals a little sooner and better than many other cities, and that there have been no xenophobic incidents in Lublin over the last several years, unlike elsewhere.
Many examples can be given of cultural and social activities that may have contributed to this. It’s worth mentioning at least the longest, the most renowned or the most spectacular of them. Chronologically speaking, the earliest activity addressed to a wide audience is that of the folklore group – the Saint Nicholas Orchestra. Since its foundation in 1988, it has performed folk music of the Lemkos, Boykos and Hutsuls in Ukrainian dialects, in this way popularising our cultural commonwealth. Since 1991 the Orchestra has organised the yearly “Mikołajki Folkowe” festival, which was the first festival of cross-cultural music and the cornerstone of the development of folk music movement in Poland.
The next oldest is the Grodzka Gate–NN Theater Center, which debuted in Lublin’s cultural landscape with the “Meeting of Cultures” programme in the 1990s. Its very name expresses the idea of intercultural social animation. In the early years of the programme, showcases of Ukrainian artists were possible thanks to the close contacts of the NN Theater with the Lviv and Kyiv artistic communities. Later, the focus of the Centre’s activity shifted to the heritage and remembrance of Lublin Jews, who had their district just behind the Grodzka Gate. This memory comes to mind in association with helping refugees in February 2022. But this does not need to be explained to the nation with a quarter of all Righteous Among the Nations. If one’s identity is cross-cultural, it is easier to make sacrifices for people of other nationalities in need.
One-day crossing point
For many years, an intriguing, symbolic and spectacular action was the temporary crossing point between Korczmin and Staivka during the “Good Neighbour Days” organized by the Greek Catholic priest Stefan Batruch and the Foundation of Spiritual Culture of the Borderland. After the Second World War, Korczmin was separated by the border from the miracle spring associated with the revelation of the Virgin Mary. The tradition of the local church fair became an opportunity for organising the annual one-day crossing point, symbolically traversing a strip of ploughed land between Poland and Ukraine.
In 2008 and 2014, the Lublin artist Jarosław Koziara made land art for these occasions depicting the contours of huge fish crossing the border strip as a symbol of “freedom of passage”. This image of the Polish-Ukrainian good neighbourliness undoubtedly remained in the memory and imagination of the communities of Lublin and the Lublin region. The list of these kinds of activities is very long. We should not underestimate their integrative role in enhancing our ability to help people of a different nationality or culture. Even commercial companies recognise the role of integration events for better teamwork among their staff.
In a sort of response to Koziara’s land art, new cohorts of Ukrainian students appeared in Lublin, and many people from Ukraine also began to work in the City Office and in other institutions of culture. When the war broke out, there were around 1.5 million Ukrainian economic immigrants in Poland. The post-February 24 arrival of people from that nation in Lublin and in the country constituted a quantitative change, not a qualitative one.
Flexibility and empathy
After the outbreak of the war, the nature of humanitarian aid was changing hour by hour, and then week by week. It was necessary to react quickly to new signals, to identify and correct mistakes while respecting the goodwill of all partners. This can be compared to skiing: a skier does not have a precise plan for balancing or turning. A skier simply has to know how to ski, or be able to react quickly to variable circumstances.
Gradually, full-on support turned into less extensive assistance or into providing information about the possibility of receiving help from other sources. After four months, new problems emerged, such as the exploitation of the refugees in the workplace or the lack of stability in arrangements such as schooling for Ukrainian youths. The aid shifted to being provided by administrative and bureaucratic structures, whose actions were not always empathetic and well-organised.
Of course, such problems affect also Poles but we have jobs, we know the language, we are at home and feel safe whereas for a single Ukrainian mother with children in a foreign country even minor bureaucratic issues can be a major problem. For this reason, refugees, who are mainly women with children, should be treated somewhat “better” than the Polish majority. Still, a number of Poles fail to understand the situation of the refugees and unnecessarily consider those privileges to be a form of inequality or even discrimination.
Conclusions
In order to help refugees in urgent need, we should first and foremost ensure that strangers are not strangers to us. It is also good to have NGOs in the city that are competent in providing direct, on-site humanitarian aid and to have at our disposal the social capital that enables rapid cross-sectoral cooperation. This means getting used to the foreignness of others and building day-to-day cooperation between many people and entities in advance of any potential crisis.
These types of initiatives will never occur in mass numbers. Help is always pyramid-shaped: people who are the most supportive and active are situated at the very top, and those at the bottom, who are the least active, can, for instance, only share their homes. The point is to connect them into one system, and for others not to interfere with it. Cultural and social animators are particularly effective in such activities because they have the organisational skills, and they work for the common good, which spurs solidarity and cooperation. It is hard to deny that their impulse of heart was noble and sincere, and that their actions were logistically efficient.
Translation: Wiktoria Nowak, Beata Zielonka, Michalina Żydek, Marcin Skrzypek
Contact to the author: marcin@tnn.lublin.pl
Translation realised as part of student internship (90 hours, October – February 2022-23) in the second year of Applied Linguistics (Faculty of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, UMCS) at the “Grodzka Gate – NN Theater Center” under the direction of Marcin Skrzypek.
Kultura Enter 2023/24
nr 108-109