Forests Where Past & Present Meet

Maria Jastrzębska

I’m back again in Warsaw. Lime trees (lipy) are blossoming everywhere. The scent of their fuzzy, star-shaped yellow and white flowers hangs in the warm air. They’re flowering early this year. It’s only the beginning of June and really they should flower in July (lipiec), the month named after them in Polish. Their scent is sweet, like honey – maybe a touch of lemon zest or a spice? A heady perfume, I feel it everywhere.

The parks look so luxuriant, green. There are still road works in the same places as my last visit and more seem to have moved across the city. As usual, I chat to the driver on the way from the airport. This time, we take an Uber and the driver complains how the rival taxis are all rigged – the men who control the flow of the queue make sure the best rides go to their mates. The online app is fairer, our driver believes, first come first served, no queue jumping. 

Visiting Poland, Warsaw especially, is not like travelling anywhere else for me. It’s where I was born. It’s where my parents lived, survived the war and the Warsaw Uprising, got married, had me and my brother, survived the worst of communism. I travel ‘back’ but I  never lived here after the age of four. After we left, I grew up in the UK. Poland is my homeland but not my homeland. I am always confronted by not knowing enough about it. I rely on family and friends for everything – for current political updates, book recommendations, tram and bus timetables, directions to cafés, museums, galleries, parks, which café does the best coffee and cakes, which exhibition is worth seeing, all the insider information. 

For this visit, my partner and I have decided not to stay long in Warsaw as we usually do  but to take a trip east into the countryside to see the primaeval forest. Our friend Ann, an American who has lived in Warsaw for years, has been there before and has offered to drive the 250 kilometres east to take us there. We’re hoping to catch a glimpse of the wild bison and other local wildlife, birds, perhaps elk. It will be a trip with a group of us friends, including my cousin Kasia. A holiday, not linked to my research. I want to enjoy being a tourist. But, as it happens, even that is not entirely straightforward.

First, I need to collect some documents. On my trip last winter, I went to the Institute of National Remembrance to apply for the release of surveillance documents from the communist era relating to my family. Since then, we’ve been engaged in a spirited correspondence and endless form filling, clearing one bureaucratic hurdle after another – more emails than I care to remember, in fact. Finally, two envelopes of photocopies were been sent to my cousin Kasia. I’m waiting on a third. She regularly lets me use her address for all this sort of correspondence and helps me when I have to wade through local bureaucracy. The thought of the documents being posted to the UK and possibly lost and then having to restart the application process was more than my nerves could withstand. 

Kasia is a cousin on my father’s side of the family. She is a literary translator from French to Polish. Her profound knowledge of Polish culture and language provides an anchor for me without which I feel I’m constantly drowning. She lives in a semi-rural area just outside Warsaw in a house which she arranged to have built for her, her husband and children. She and her family welcome me and my partner Deborah every time we come. She pulls out all the stops for us without fail. Her grandmother married a Jew, which my grandfather, her brother, didn’t approve of. This heritage sets Kasia apart. She is a fish out of water, an in-between person, particularly as the Catholic church has become so dominant since the fall of communism.

Deborah and I meet Kasia for coffee and she brings the documents to me. Some of the copies are illegible owing to the poor quality of the originals, either hand-written notes or reports typed on a manual typewriter. I had asked Kasia to open the envelopes when they first arrived so she has already skimmed through them. She seems underwhelmed by the contents that are so shocking to me. I hadn’t known just how closely my parents and grandparents were watched. I imagine that having grown up in Warsaw under communism, this is commonplace for her. Later, I tell my friend Hania about the documents. She nods and says: ‘Yes, all that time and labour wasted on endless surveillance, such a pointless exercise.’ 

Now, over lunch with our friend Jola, it’s almost too hot to sit outside and we angle our chairs to get some shade from the row of bushes around the tables. Jola and I met as children when we were both in the Polish scouts in West London. Jola was born in London six years after the end of World War II to two displaced persons, both veterans of the Warsaw Uprising, who would almost certainly never have met in Poland, coming, as they did, from separate communities with differing religions and languages. Her family, like mine, was part of London’s large Polish Catholic community and, as her mother was silent about her past, Jola didn’t learn of her Jewish heritage until she was a teenager. 

In her thirties she began working as an artist, basing her work explicitly on the Polish folk art of papercuts and later, as she learnt more, also incorporating elements of the Jewish papercutting tradition. We met again as feminists and have collaborated artistically. I have known Jola so long and she has been such a generous friend that now she is also family to me. When the communism of the old Eastern Block was toppled in country after country, it coincided with her falling in love with Hania in Warsaw. During this time of hope, she embarked on teaching English there, the most useful contribution she felt she could then make to the budding democracy. With Jola’s multiple roots, I think of her being an in-between person too and rely on a smiling welcome from her, Hania and friends whenever I visit.  

The forest we want to visit is a UNESCO World Heritage site at Białowieża renowned for its biodiversity, including the famous wild European bison, and is close to the border between Poland and Belarus. Tragically, this borderland has become the site of brutal pushbacks against refugees trying to enter Poland via Belarus, from Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraqi Kurdistan and Cameroon. Some people have lost their lives trapped in this no man’s land, where volunteers, journalists and NGOs are prevented from helping them by the border guards and, more recently, the military. 

Jola explains that the Polish authorities have erected a steel fence inside the Polish border. There have been countless injuries as people try to scale it. Now, the Polish government is extending the no-go buffer zone, aiming to strengthen the border. Since the Russian army invaded Ukraine in 2022, Russia is using the refugees and migrants, weaponizing them to destabilise European Union states by pushing large numbers of them illegally across EU borders. Increasing numbers of them have Russian visas. The Belarussian government supports the Russian government, so is widely seen as complicit in this tactic and as taking revenge for previous EU sanctions. 

Ever since the invasion of Ukraine, there is a fear that Poland could be next. There is talk of a ‘pre-war situation’. Missiles and fragments of drones have landed in neighbouring countries, including Poland and Moldova. Now there’s talk of a ‘hybrid war’ with borders threatened, unexplained arson attacks within Poland and cyber attacks. 

‘Is this paranoia?’ I ask my friend Jola. 

‘Well, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’ she replies.

We laugh at that old joke from Joseph Heller’s book Catch 22 and it lightens the atmosphere. But it’s a grim subject. Compared to other families, my parents spoke little about their experiences of the war but I remember they were always fearful there might be another one. Whenever there were international crises on the news, (the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam war), my mother would look at my father and ask him if there was going to be another war in Europe. Having been caught off guard once by the devastation of a World War, she could never trust that peace would last. Growing up, I thought they were both being over-dramatic. The Balkans war of the 1990s and the current invasion of Ukraine have proved them right.  

I get all the cutlery out of the metal bucket on the table and arrange the knives and forks into borders and the fence and the proposed buffer zone extension. It’s the only way I can visualise it. Between the rows of cutlery is the no man’s land of dense forest that refugees get trapped in, without food or water or shelter, often already brutally injured by the guards. Not only are people losing their lives, says Jola, but the animal population is suffering too with the increased militarization of the area, army trucks hurtling along roads unsuited to that speed, razor wire endangering humans and animals alike. At least two bison have been killed. One was with a mate. After the dead one was put on a truck for its body to be driven away, the partner kept it company by running alongside.

I gather up the knives and forks and lay the table for our lunch. After some delay, it finally arrives, brought to us by a distracted young waitress in baggy dungarees, hair shaved at the sides, a long fringe flopping over her face. She and the other waitresses are chatting and laughing together about something I can’t make out. Thanks to Jola, this isn’t a pierogi café for tourists. The season’s produce – fresh asparagus, yellow string beans, strawberries – which fills Warsaw’s markets in colourful heaps, features on the menu. We’re outside in bright sunshine. Sitting here, it seems unreal to be talking about the possibility of war. Our trip to the forest is still going ahead as the incursion of the buffer zone into the tourist area has been halted. But we don’t know what will happen in the future.

Once we arrive in the east of Poland, we find that the locals take a dim view of the politicians’ scaremongering as it threatens their livelihood. The holiday homes, souvenir shops and guides all rely on tourism. They’re worried about visitors cancelling their trips. People come from all over the world to experience the immense biodiversity of these lands, they tell us. They come to see bison, elk, white-winged black terns in the marshlands, egrets, cranes and many, many storks and to discover plants, such as the insect-eating sundew in the peat bog forests further west near Biebrza. It is a breath-taking part of Poland, teeming with birdsong and wildlife at this time of year, utterly enchanting. We’re up at three in the morning to search for bison grazing at the trees’ edge, since with more traffic on the roads later in the day they shy away, hiding in dense forestland. ‘I have seen four species of woodpecker in one tree alone,’ our forest guide tells us proudly. 

This is not the first time that blood has been spilled in these beautiful forests. Local people here were murdered by the Nazis and Red Army alike during the Second World War. Countless people were deported to the labour camps in Siberia by Soviet soldiers. Jews, communists and resistance fighters were publicly executed; hanged outside a local Orthodox Church by the Nazis. When some of them hid in the woods and could not be found, random locals were rounded up and shot instead, here among the very trees we are walking through. 

The main concern that local people we speak to express is over the young soldiers posted to the area with insufficient experience or training, rampaging through the forest, unable to protect themselves or others. Just before the EU elections, a story broke about some soldiers having been cuffed and taken off for firing their guns. Coverage was sympathetic to the soldiers – surely they were being punished merely for acting in self-defence. Now the election is over, the true story has come out: they were shooting randomly at other soldiers and border guards too. Apparently, these particular soldiers had caused problems before. People were scared to be on duty with them. It was the border guards who informed the prosecution service in order to put an end to the situation. There is more faith here in the border guards – local boys – than military brought in from other parts of the country. 

At times, refugees are sent back again to the Belarussian border. Many refugees are beaten, women are raped, people die from injuries and exposure. Recently, a young Polish soldier was killed too. The locals blame his superiors rather than any migrants who may have been coerced or bribed by Belarussian or Russian instigators to attack Polish forces. It’s also possible the attack was by someone who was not a migrant, bearded and trained to blend in with the refugees. We pass military trucks and encampments under trees. A border patrol guard stops us but he and our guide know each other and we are waved through. In the tiny local shop, we queue behind a young armed guard. 

When we visit the wetlands area, further from the border, we meet another guide from the national park there. She tells us about the elk, lynxes, wolves and directs our attention to animals and birds in the distance. To us, they are blurred dots. It is thanks to her and her long range fieldscopes that we see elks playing together and grazing in the long grass, as well as countless birds, cuckoos, egrets, cranes. She also shows us tracks in the earth and different kinds of spoor including, to much excitement, the scat of a wolf.  ‘We used to have a bear coming to these marshlands, but it wandered over into Belarus,’ she says. ‘It can’t come back anymore because of the steel fence.’ We visit a stork sanctuary full of stork nests, which we can see into from tall viewing platforms. The storks are feeding their young. It is completely magical. 

We also visit the synagogue in Tykocin, a town which had invited Jewish families to live in it during the 16th century in order to enhance its prosperity. Almost the entire Jewish population was taken in trucks by the Nazis to nearby forests and shot. The homes of any remaining Jews were raided and the residents also murdered. Local Christians were then forced to dig graves and bury them. We visit the local synagogue, a museum now, not a working temple, and take a few moments to sit on the old wooden benches in it.

We skinny dip in a quiet ox bow of the Narew. We take walks in lovely countryside. We eat local potato cakes. Then it’s time to drive back to Warsaw. 

Although I’m glad I have made Poland my own, or tried to, I also wish I could have at least sometimes gone back to Poland with my parents. Not that it would have been simple. They wouldn’t have wanted to visit many of the places which interest me most or to attend Euro Pride in Warsaw, as I did in 2010. But I can imagine them in the countryside more easily somehow. They would have been excited seeing the bison – who wouldn’t?! My nature loving mother would have delighted in all the plants, including the carnivorous sundew which would have made her laugh, and the storks, the elks. My engineer father would have exclaimed at the rangers’ telescopic equipment and examined it with interest. He would also have been as keen as me to take a dip in the river, though perhaps keeping his trunks on. 

Warsaw – and all of Poland –  has changed enormously since my parents – since I too, for the first years of my life – once lived here. In the last few decades, it has changed even more rapidly. So much is built up: office blocks, skyscrapers. Young people ride electric scooters with AirPods in their ears and twiddle fidget spinners. There are Irish pubs, trendy places to lunch in, kebab and burger bars; most of the old, subsidised milk bars are gone. There is fast food and multicultural cuisine: Vietnamese, Georgian, Thai. There are vegan and eco cafes. CBD shops. Some toilets are unisex. A banner on a church wall invites you to ‘Adoration of the Sacred Heart’ and, at the same time, there are LGBTQ+ Pride marches up and down the country. You can see the same high street shops which you find all over Europe. In the countryside, villages are more built up, land and river ‘improvements’ abound, stone houses replace old timber ones. There are larger farms instead of individual strips of peasant smallholdings, many more industrial estates, warehouses, mobile phone masts reaching into the sky. 

It is over 85 years since Russia and Germany invaded Poland, when my parents were young people falling in love. 80 years since the Second World War ended. A lifetime ago.  So much has changed. In Warsaw, I recognise place names which my mother mentions in her diary written during the uprising, such as Opoczyńska, a street in the Mokotów area where she and her parents were living for some of the time, or Warsaw West, the station they were marched to by the Nazis, coralling them towards the transit camp at Pruszków. My friend Jola lives close by to it. If they were still alive, would my parents recognise any of these places now? In the 1980’s, after nearly thirty years in the UK, they felt safe enough to return to Poland for a short visit. My mother said it was wonderful as they’d been welcomed with flowers by friends. But she never did it again. I imagine she felt too overwhelmed and, of course, it was no longer her Poland, the place of her memories. My father made one or two more trips, meeting other combatants for the anniversary of the Uprising, laying wreaths in Powązki cemetery to commemorate fallen insurgents.  I’m sure he visited his brother’s grave where his parents were also buried. I wish I could tell my parents about my recent trip to the primeval forest. It is such a long time ago that they were here in Poland. And yet, after all this time and with so many changes, there is still talk of war. 

I can’t stop thinking about the refugees caught in the forest land between the border of Poland and Belarus. I keep thinking how every single Polish person I know has parents, grandparents or other family members who were once displaced, not knowing if their loved ones were still alive or not, wandering hungry, thirsty, trying to escape capture or death.