Activists helping people in the forested gray zone say the dehumanization of migrants is increasing as the Polish election approaches
Poland’s defense, interior and foreign ministers lined up in front of a high metal wall with barbed wire. In front of assembled television cameras, the three men warned of a terrible conspiracy against Poland that was being orchestrated in the Kremlin.
Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau suspected that the weapons in this “special operation” were not tanks or bombs, but rather people from the Middle East and Africa. Only the decision of the patriotic Polish government to build the wall behind it thwarted this Russian plan to sow discord and chaos in Poland, he said.
“Otherwise we would have become Lampedusa, but a Lampedusa full of migrants who had received military training. “Ninety percent of them, then as now, were recruited by the Russian secret services,” Rau falsely claimed.
After their work was done, the three ministers made their way back to Warsaw. Their speeches were part of the daily flood of migration horror stories on pro-government television. Temperatures are rising every week as Poland enters the final phase of a hard-fought election campaign.
A section of Poland’s border wall with Belarus, reinforced with barbed wire at the top and bottom. Photo: Kasia Strek
On the same evening in late August, 20-year-old Sadia Mohamed Mohamud’s health deteriorated on the other side of the border wall. At this point, Sadia, along with several other Somalis also trying to enter the EU, had been stuck for almost a month in the thin strip of land between the two border fences, the Polish and the Belarusian. Sadia told the others that she had left her conflict-torn homeland hoping to earn money in Europe to provide a decent life for her two young children, who remained in Mogadishu.
Another man in the group said on the phone from Belarus that some of them once made it into Polish territory through a hole in the border fence. Almost immediately, border guards showed up. One of the guards slapped Sadia on the shoulders and shouted at her in English, “Why did you come here?”
The Polish guards opened a gate in the wall and pushed Sadia and the others back to the other side. The group retreated through no man’s land only to reach another fence. There, Belarusian border guards threatened them with dogs and batons and ordered them to return to Poland. Sadia later made it to Poland a second time, but was again quickly arrested and pushed back by Polish border guards.
The group was denied entry into the EU and also refused to return to Belarus. She found herself in the gray area in between, with minimal food and shelter and no clean water. Everyone was weak, but Sadia was in the worst condition. A video taken by a member of the group in the forest shows her wrapped in a sleeping bag, barely conscious.
On September 10, the group again begged Belarusian guards to let them out, telling them that Sadia was dying. Finally the guards gave in. Another Somali woman took Sadia, wrapped in a white blanket, by car to a house outside Minsk that they had been told was safe. An ambulance was called. Sadia was now unable to speak, could barely open her eyes and was gurgling blood.
When the paramedics arrived, she was dead.
The background
The crisis at the border began in the fall of 2021. A year earlier, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko used brutal force to crush mass protests against his rule, leading to a breakdown in relations with the EU and the imposition of sanctions against his regime.
In return, Lukashenko threatened to flood Europe with “drugs and migrants.” He soon fulfilled his promise. Flights shot up from Middle Eastern cities to Minsk, bringing vulnerable people who had been sold the idea of an easy route to Europe.
Instead, they found themselves in one of Europe’s last virgin forests, which became a hellish no-man’s land between a dictator intent on using them as political pawns and a government determined to keep them out.
Polish Armed Forces soldiers patrol the Belarus-Polish border in Kuznica, Poland, Nov. 11, 2021. Photo: Getty Images
In response to the initial crisis, the Polish government announced the construction of a 5.5 meter high and 186 kilometer long border barrier. It was completed last summer. Poland’s government repeatedly refers to the catastrophic situation in the Mediterranean and claims that the wall has solved its own migration problem. In fact, humanitarian organizations say the structure has only increased suffering while doing little to stop people migrating.
On October 15, Poles will vote in a high-profile parliamentary election. The ruling Law and Justice party, whose leader once accused migrants of bringing “parasites and protozoa” to Europe, has ratcheted up its anti-migrant rhetoric in hopes of bolstering support among its core base and winning another term .
In the days following Sadia’s death, the evening news on Polish government-controlled television again featured reports of invading migrant hordes laying siege to Europe.
In between there was an advertisement for the “Law and Justice” campaign Footage of burning cars and violence in Western Europe with Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki taking selfies next to smiling Poles. Thanks to law and justice, said Morawiecki, there are “no districts full of illegal immigrants… no horror districts” in Poland.
The activists
The emergency call came just before dusk, just hours after the three ministers recorded their speeches at the border. At a base in a secret location in the forest, a group of humanitarian workers stuffed hot soup, tea, clothing and medical supplies into backpacks.
Dominika Ożyńska, a Polish humanitarian worker, and Liz, a German doctor at home taking a break from her hospital job, set off by car in the fading light toward the GPS location pin they had received.
They parked at the closest point to the base and continued on foot through the darkening forest, climbing over fallen trunks and overhanging branches until they reached the spot. They did not use lights so as not to attract the attention of border guards, police or soldiers. Eventually they found the eight Syrian men they had called for help exhausted and disoriented.
Dominika Ozynska, a Polish humanitarian worker, in a storage room in a village near Białowieża that stores basic supplies for people calling for help from the forest. Photo: Kasia Strek
One of the men apologized for the group’s appearance in Europe, as if to forestall judgment. “We want to work, we will work,” he said. Dominika assured them that they had nothing to apologize for as she handed out cups of tea.
The men had been stranded in the forest for weeks, and this was the fifth time they had crossed into Poland after four pushbacks to Belarus. This time, however, the group had managed to evade the heat sensors and soldiers stationed at the border and advance deeper into Poland. Finally, they were able to send a PIN to an SOS number to ask Polish activists for help.
These forest missions are called “interventions” by activists and began two years ago as an ad hoc response to the emerging crisis. Today, intervention procedures are more formalized, but there are still no large international NGOs in the border area. Instead, the burden falls on small Polish human rights organizations, big-hearted locals and volunteers. Many of them are now exhausted and burned out.
Every procedure is different: some people need food or new shoes; others are on the verge of death. Since the wall was built, serious injuries requiring hospitalization have become more common: broken pelvises and legs or severe concussions.
In addition, psychological trauma and panic attacks often occur. People were warned before departure that the journey would be difficult. But little can prepare them for what it’s really like to be stuck in a forest for weeks, drinking from swamps and sleeping on cold, mossy ground among bugs and ticks. It can send the toughest person into a spiral.
Most people who are still able to walk do not want official medical help because they know that the border guards will come with the ambulance and may force them back into Belarus or throw them into one of Poland’s closed internment camps. So the activists are doing what they can to patch them up on the spot and send them on their way.
On this particular evening, Liz, who did not want her last name published, set out to assess the Syrian group’s medical needs. She found a fairly standard collection of complaints. One man had extreme pain in his ribs, probably a fracture due to a beating by border officials. Another had a deep cut on his leg, cut open when he fell from the border fence onto the barbed wire that Polish border guards had recently installed at both the bottom and top of the wall. A third had an egg-sized abscess on his knee from a small cut that had become infected while spending weeks in the woods.
At a hospital, Liz would have ordered scans, stitches and surgery. In the darkness of the forest, all she could offer was bandages, painkillers and antibiotics.
In Poland, it is legal to give food and medical assistance to those in need, but it is against the law to offer transportation to people who authorities say have crossed the border illegally. After a few hours, Liz and Dominika wished the eight Syrian men good luck on their journey and left them alone in the eerie forest night. The helpers never know whether the people they helped will make it out of the forest alive.
“It’s all a bit abstract when you read an article at home. And then you come here and this crisis takes on a face,” Liz said in an interview at the base two days later. “I feel a lot of anger and rage about the whole situation. Towards Poland, towards Europe.”
The dictator
The Lukashenko regime is further exacerbating the crisis by allowing people to enter Belarus and then providing them with equipment to help them enter Poland.
“The Belarusian soldiers give people special tools for cutting the barbed wire and things with which they can dig a hole under the fence,” said Katarzyna Zdanowicz, spokeswoman for the regional border guard service, in an interview in her office on a fortified compound in the Ukraine city of Bialystok.
As of mid-August this year, the electronic sensors on the wall had logged more than 20,000 crossing attempts so far in 2023, up from 16,000 total attempts in 2022, Zdanowicz said.
Katarzyna Zdanowicz, spokeswoman for the regional border guard service on the Polish side of the border, says more than 20,000 people have attempted to cross the border so far this year, compared to 16,000 attempts last year. Photo: Kasia Strek
Lukashenko’s role in supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine has further heightened tensions. After Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed mutiny, troops from his Wagner group moved to Belarus in the summer. Lukashenko “joked” about Wagner fighters’ plans to invade Poland. At the end of July, three Belarusian military helicopters flew over the border town of Białowieża.
In response, Poland ordered an additional 10,000 soldiers to be sent to the border region. So far, the Wagner troops have not come close to the border, but the additional soldiers are making it even more difficult for people who make it over the wall to advance further into Poland undetected. There are police checkpoints on most roads near the border where officers stop cars and scan the skin color of passengers.
This has led to more pushbacks and significantly more statements of violence from Polish border guards. Zdanowicz said border guards would not turn away a person who had applied for asylum in Poland and also denied that there had been a case of unprovoked violence by border guards. Activists say both claims are untrue.
Members of a Kurdish family from Dohuk, Iraq are seen in a forest near the Polish-Belarusian border while waiting for border guard patrol near Narewka, Poland, on November 9, 2021. Photo: Wojtek Radwański/AFP/Getty Images
Those forced back into Belarus or stranded between the two walls have almost no one to turn to for help. Belarusian border guards often use dogs on people trying to return to Belarus after failed border crossings; Many people return to Minsk with leg injuries from dog bites.
The choice
Since Russia invaded Ukraine last February, Poland has taken in millions of Ukrainian refugees. Authorities and the public came together in a response filled with compassion and generosity to provide protection and support to fleeing Ukrainians.
For the much smaller number of people who come from further away and have a different skin color, the message remains very different.
“From the beginning, the whole thing was presented as a security threat rather than a human story,” said Ala Qandil of Grupa Granica, the largest umbrella group of activists and humanitarian workers on the border. “We just want the people crossing the border to be seen as human beings.”
Volunteers and activists from Grupa Granica are organizing supplies, including water bottles, to be distributed to people in the forest. Photo: Kasia Strek
Instead, dehumanization is increasing. On the same day as the parliamentary election, Poles will be asked to take part in a referendum. One question will be whether they want to remove the border wall. Another asks: “Do you support admitting thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa?”
In recent days, news about the state-controlled TVP has been broadcast live from Lampedusa, where correspondents explain the difference between Europe’s general migration policy and Poland’s tough stance at the border. The headline of a migration story on the television news one evening consisted of just one word: “Invasion.” Government ministers have condemned filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, who recently made a feature film documenting the cruel treatment of people trying to cross the border, comparing her to a Nazi propagandist.
It’s a low-profile attempt by the Law and Justice party to mobilize its base for an election that’s likely to be so close that it could focus on a tiny number of voters. The largest opposition coalition, led by former European Council President Donald Tusk, does not want to appear complacent on the issue of migration and has decided to set foot on the government’s territory.
“Never in history have Poland’s borders been so open to legal and illegal immigrants,” Tusk said, accusing the ruling party of talking tough while secretly letting migrants in.
Kamil Syller, an activist who lives in a small village near the border, said he was particularly disheartened that Tusk was engaging in the right’s rhetoric. “We were disappointed and frightened by their language change. The politicians see this crisis as a political goldmine and everyone is trying to take advantage of it,” he said in an interview at his home, a modern farmhouse set in idyllic fields.
In border communities like that of Syller, many people showed their solidarity with those passing through. In 2021, Syller and his wife launched the Green Light Movement, in which a network of sympathetic locals installed green lights outside their homes to indicate places where people fleeing could seek help.
Some locals were afraid at first, Syller said, but after talking to people seeking help, they realized they were not evil intruders, just vulnerable people who needed support.
Kamil Syller lives near the border with Belarus and started the “Green Light” movement to help people passing through his village after entering Poland. Photo: Kasia Strek
“Many of my neighbors used to be aggressive, but over time they understood the sadistic nature of the border guards and began to want to help. Now when they find people who need help, some of them call me instead of calling the border guards,” he said.
But after two years of crisis, many in the border region are tired of the increasing military presence and frustrated by the decline in the number of tourists visiting the forest. Syller fears that attitudes could soon change, especially given the daily anti-migrant election propaganda.
“We see disgusting, dehumanizing propaganda every night, it is pure propaganda from the darkest moments of the 20th century,” said Franek Sterczewski, an opposition lawmaker who has supported activists at the border. “Unfortunately, fear propaganda often works.”
The missing
On a muggy afternoon in late August, Mariusz Kurnyta, a wiry 36-year-old with fortnightly stubble, went looking for a body.
Mariusz, nicknamed “Man of the Forest,” crowdfunds his work on the border. In recent months he has patched up injuries, administered intravenous fluids in forest clearings, rescued dying people from swamps and helped hundreds of others with water, soup and a change of clothes.
“For two years my life has been the forest. I have no other life,” he said, puffing on a cigarette as he prepared to leave his base. He fell out with some other activists at the border. He is a chain smoker. He looks permanently exhausted.
Mariusz last saw Ibrahim Eltony, a 37-year-old Egyptian, a year ago when Ibrahim called for help after crossing from Belarus. Mariusz gave him food, water and a distinctive blue coat to protect him from the rain. Ibrahim was never seen again.
It is believed that Mariusz Kurnyta gave the blue coat to Ibrahim Eltony, who called for help after crossing from Belarus. Photo: Kasia Strek
In June of this year, a backpack that apparently belonged to Ibrahim was found during a search in swampy areas not far from the border. Its contents: some soaked documents, a power bank, a mud-caked thermos and an electric razor. Two months later, the same blue coat was found in a spot not far from where the backpack had been. Mariusz decided to return to the spot a third time to see if the body was nearby.
Mariusz and two other activists walked past hikers and cyclists and enjoyed late summer on the forest paths. On an adjacent track, an army van crept along, its passengers wearing balaclavas, apparently looking for people who had crossed the border.
Mariusz left the path and made his way through a dense forest until he came to a swampy clearing. The ground was uneven, every step meant twisting an ankle. Mariusz made his way through chest-high grass to the section of the stagnant swamp where the anorak had been found. Except for the buzzing of insects, there was perfect silence.
Mariusz Kurnyta is looking for the body of Ibrahim Eltony, who arrived from Belarus and has not been seen since last year. Photo: Kasia Strek
He and the others put on waterproof overalls, picked up chunky sticks and began wading slowly through the bog, touching the ground as they went.
After a few hours of methodical probing, they gave up. Ibrahim Eltony, missing since last summer, would not be found that day.
Ibrahim is one of more than 200 people still missing at the border since the crisis began. At least 49 deaths have been documented. The actual numbers are almost certainly significantly higher, especially since there is so little information about what is happening on the Belarusian side of the border.
Many of these deaths were preventable. People often died within a hundred meters of a village, a police patrol or a street where help could have been provided. On the Belarusian side, people died within days after being pushed back by Polish border guards.
This month alone there have been credible reports that four people died on the Belarusian side after being pushed back from Poland. People are thirsty and exhausted when Polish territory is visible just a few meters away. Activists are not allowed to come closer than 15 meters to the border wall, which means they are not allowed to knock over food.
Malgorzata Rycharska, an activist in Poland who takes calls from people stuck in the gray zone between border fences, said it can be unbearably difficult to explain to people that they cannot reach help despite seeing the EU with their own eyes can see . She described her work as “hopelessness management.” Often she has no choice but to try to connect them with other stranded groups.
“It’s always the same. They call and say, ‘We’re here, we have no water, no food and our battery is going to run out soon.’ Can you help us?’ And then we have to explain to them that no one will come.”
Additional reporting by Katarzyna Piasecka
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