On neighbouring borders, Polish families helping refugees face very different fates

At Marina Sestasvili-Piotrowska’s kitchen table, Polish mingles with Ukrainian and people meet each other’s gaze with the shy smile of new acquaintance.

Dazed-looking pensioners pad around in their pyjamas, while volunteers busy themselves for another day at the border.

In just three weeks, Chutor Gorajec, a rambling guest house in a tiny hamlet near Poland’s border with Ukraine, has been transformed into a refugee shelter. Everyone is getting their bearings.

“I feel like we’re at war,” says Marina. “My family is safe but mentally we’re at war.”

Since the Russian invasion triggered a historic exodus, Marina and her husband Marcin have been at the centre of relief efforts at the Budomierz border.

They opened a warehouse nearby to store the help that poured in from around the country and have led a team who have stitched together a network of tents into a makeshift field hospital on the Ukraine side of the border, where refugees have sometimes waited for days in freezing temperatures to cross.

While Poland has been lauded for receiving nearly 1.7 million refugees, Marina and many others say this is down to ordinary citizens.

“The help is coming from people, not governments,” she says. “The best you could say is that the government is not interrupting us.”

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Marina, whose English is the legacy of 14 years working in Ireland at a contact lens factory as the couple saved up to convert an old school into the guesthouse, had never worked with refugees before.

While Marina appears almost fragile from exhaustion she has been buoyed by an outpouring of community support.

The experience has forced the mother of three to think differently about those Polish families who help refugees under bitterly different circumstances at the northeastern border with Belarus.

While the flight of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into Poland has moved hearts, opened homes and evoked solidarity, the comparative trickle of refugees from conflicts in places like Syria, Yemen and Iraq at the Belarus border was treated as an act of war and Warsaw declared the border area to be a forbidden zone.

“It’s only now that I fully understand this horrible situation they are living in,” says Marina. “It must be devastating for them to see all of this help for Ukrainian refugees.”

Marina and Dorota live just seven hours’ drive from each other in the same country.

They are of similar age, both working mothers of teenage children and clearly possessed of deep empathy. Their homes, while different in style, have the same air of welcome. But the consequences of their compassion are starkly different.

Dorota - not her real name - could face time in prison for the same act of sheltering refugees that has made Marina a local hero.

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At least 20 people have died often agonising deaths in the vast and beautiful birch and pine forest where Dorota and her family live.

Poland’s government reacted to the appearance of several thousand asylum seekers at the Belarus border by legalising pushbacks, in violation of EU law, declaring the forbidden zone and flooding the area with police, soldiers and militiamen.

Refugees have found themselves in a deadly vice with Polish security forces hunting them on one side and Belarussian forces forcing them forwards.

The most recent death was 23 February when Ahmed Al-Shawafi, 26, from Yemen, died of hypothermia.

“It was worse to do nothing,” says Dorota. “To realise that here near to our house people could die. That in the 21st Century with such technology that we are so primitive.”

It was September last year when life began to change.

“In our peaceful, small place they brought soldiers with long guns and police and checkpoints.”

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Dorota works for an international company. Like millions of other Polish women she marched to defend abortion rights against an onslaught from the ruling Law and Justice party, part of a worrying conservative lurch in recent years that has also seen courts packed with party loyalists and a crisis emerge with EU authorities over the independence of the judiciary.

When she shared an innocuous post about the refugees on Facebook she got a call that changed her life.

A woman she had not seen since her student years came to see them and asked if she could host six African men.

Dorota describes the conversation that followed at home as a “hard discussion” and it lasted all day.

On the one side they did not know anything about these men and her husband felt responsible for the safety of his wife and children. On the other was Dorota’s moral clarity.

If we are going to help, she argued, we cannot select who we help. She refused to believe that freezing, hunted refugees presented a danger. Her arguments carried the day.

Nobody in the family regrets the decision.

On the first night her daughter asked Dorota to sleep in her room. That was before she spent time with Max, a young man from Senegal, who was jovial and relaxed even after an appalling month-long ordeal in the forest. Max would tell her with a smile, “life is simple, eat, drink and have a smoke”.

On the second night she told her mum she was fine to sleep alone.

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In the last six months the family has sheltered nearly two dozen refugees. There are women and girls crossing, and in some cases dying, in the forbidden zone but Dorota has so far received only males.

“These are men and boys who have been beaten, attacked by dogs, who have had men in uniform threaten to cut their fingers off,” says Dorota. “And the words you hear from them most often? No problem.”

Dorota and her husband have no illusions about the role of Belarus in the young men’s misery.

They know that the country’s long-time dictator and Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko has stoked the situation and opened routes to Belarus’ capital, Minsk, with lies about what awaits the desperate.

“Of course they’re being used by Lukashenko, by Putin,” says Dorota. “They’re used as toys by politicians. Our government wants us to be scared of refugees and the other side wants to show that Europe is cruel.”

Polish media friendly to the ruling party, which dominates the airwaves, have pumped out nationalist and xenophobic propaganda, warning Poles that dark-skinned people are coming to destroy Christianity and rape their children.

Dorota has watched this flood of hate with repulsion. They rarely switch on state-run media and when they do the couple joke darkly to each other that they want to see what is happening in “perfect Poland”.

Since the war in Ukraine, the same government now presents itself as a champion of refugees. The sudden pivot has left Dorota and her husband breathless.

In Marina’s household in Gorajec there is a similar distaste for propaganda. As her double-barrelled name suggests her family has roots in Georgia.

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She has both Jewish and Tatar ancestry and her parents, who are Russian speakers, live in Estonia. She says that while her parents live in Estonia “in their minds they live in Russia and Putin is their president”.

When she spoke to them by phone they said: “Yeah the war is awful but it’s the fault of Nato, Ukraine, the West and the US, Putin had to do it.”

On the phone she demurred, she could not bring herself to argue with them.

“I can’t listen to this crap that Putin was provoked.”

Her mind keeps returning to a Ukrainian man in his 80s, a farmer who had never travelled more than 20 kilometres from home in his life.

He drove all the way to Gorajec from central Ukraine to deliver their daughter in law and grandchildren to safety, then turned around and drove straight back into the war to go and tend to his animals.

Her admiration for this man does not compel Marina to ignore the other things that her family and team of volunteers have seen.

Drivers carrying aid from their warehouse reported seeing queues to exit Ukraine segregated with brown and black people forced to wait much longer.

She says that her neighbours’ compassion does not extend to non-Western refugees: “Ukrainians OK but dark skinned people, no way.”

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One of the unsubstantiated rumours that persists, Marina says, is that dark skinned people crossing from Ukraine are actually the same ones who were in Belarus. She is bemused at the suggestion that this makes them enemy agents.

Hossam was in Belarus. He is Syrian and arrived there from Latakia where he grew up and which is now notorious for its nearby Russian airbase, used to fly the same bombing sorties and murderous bombardments of Syrian cities that now outrage world opinion in Ukraine.

His journey into Poland took endurance that few people can imagine.

The 39 year old spent a month and a half in the forbidden zone, being violently pushed back 14 times in a single week by Polish forces.

The pushbacks go far beyond the rhetoric in Polish media of holding the line and shielding Europe.

Refugees found in the zone are often dumped on the Belarussian side of the border barefooted in temperatures which drop to minus 12 overnight in spring.

Dorota is haunted by the case of one young woman whom she encountered on the roadside encrusted with ice and suffering frostbite. It was dark and she never got to see her face.

She would later learn that this woman, who could not stand up, was taken from a Polish hospital by soldiers and left barefoot in the forest. They even took her phone, her only lifeline.

Dorota says that since this incident she no longer tries to talk to the police and soldiers at the checkpoints, to understand or engage with them.

“What kind of person does that?” she asks.

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As for Hossam he is now in Germany and hoping to gain asylum and pick up work as a barber.

Dorota’s family sent him a package with professional trimmers as a gift. He sends them regular updates on a messaging group called “we are family” that they keep with all their former guests.

“It warms my heart,” says Dorota’s daughter. “I see that they’re OK in Germany, in France, in Spain. And every one of them tells us that as soon as they have their papers they will come to visit us or we will visit them. We can plan our trip around the world.”

Meanwhile, mother and daughter sit at the kitchen table practising the few phrases they know in the Senegalese language, Wolof.

When they have guests she tells them to keep away from some windows where they  might be spotted by the colour of their skin.

She hates doing this and feels that hiding innocent people from the police has disturbing echoes of Poland in the holocaust era.

From the kitchen window you can see a trail in the distance where police patrols pass every day, sometimes with an armoured car, to defend against “violent migrants”.

Dorota knows that one day they might roll up to her door but she refuses to be cowed.

“We are ordinary people, not spies,” she says. “I am not doing anything wrong.”

Reporting for this piece was supported by Lighthouse Reports, a European investigative newsroom

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