The Sad Ballad of Wojciech Bakun
Fear and Loathing in Przemyśl
In the winter of 2015-16 I was in Greece, on the island of Lesbos, outside a village called Moria, at the receiving end of the young century’s bleakest migration. Refugees arrived by boat. As the seven-mile crossing from Turkey was technically illegal, smugglers ran the game, and they often seemed indifferent to whether their charges reached land or not. When they weren’t indifferent, they could be brutal. Rape and theft were common. Refugees were often crammed into rickety vessels, even stacked into them like cordwood. Sometimes boats stalled out and were left to pitch for days on the rough seas. Panics would occur; many boats sank, scores drowned. Refugees who made it ashore arrived dazed or frazzled and usually wet. Hypothermia was common — even in Europe’s south the winter is frigid, especially on an island, especially at night. On land, medical volunteers and plain novices performed triage, saved who they could, then put everyone on buses that took them to Moria to be processed for the journey onward into Europe.
Refugees came from everywhere to Moria and few knew exactly where they were headed. And where they were headed, few wanted them. Europe wanted crackdowns; the Greeks mostly obliged. Only very specific populations — Afghanis and Syrians — were waved through. But there were so many others: Iraqis, Iranians, Pakistanis, even Congolese — even (but rarely) Latin Americans who supposed Greece might be the best way into Europe and then to Canada. Refugees settled into the camp, some for months at a time, unable to go anywhere else. There wasn’t much we could do for them there. When they weren’t burned for heat — that happened — tents were just about the only shelter available. Showers didn’t exist. Even basics such as socks were in very short supply, so these were rationed. Coats, too — but sometimes these were also (and improbably) burned for heat by shivering migrants. Scores of refugees crouched out front of the clothing tent at all hours, shaking from the combination of exposure and stress. On days when it rained — somehow it only rained, never snowed — migrants in some parts of the camp were forced to squat in inch-deep water in places they were supposed to sleep. For the many thousands who came through we had but the one interpreter, a British woman who spoke Farsi and Arabic. Just weeks before I arrived, refugees rioted and burned half the camp to the ground.
Przemyśl is not that. In fact, if you were not at the heart of things — at the train station, maybe, or at the cavernous relief center, built into a cleared and converted Tesco store — you might not even know that ancient, picture-book Polish city, just miles from the Ukraine border, was ground zero for Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II. At least that’s how it looked when I arrived, in April, almost two months into the Russian invasion.
I was stationed at the Tesco as a volunteer. A kind of antic, low-grade chaos usually pervaded the center, particularly in the morning hours as refugees flooded in and also flooded out. But overall, the center was clean, relatively organized and well-supplied (with some important exceptions). There was a kindergarten. There was a dispensary that provided free medicines. World Central Kitchen provided free meals from not one but two stations, inside and outside. During the day, refugees poked through the racks and bins and shelves of donated clothing, organized by size and sex, or grabbed free personal items — anything from tampons to toothpaste — from the canteen. If you were a refugee, and this wasn’t your first rodeo, you would hardly believe your luck.
The traffic was mostly transient. Beyond serving as a relief center, the Tesco was also, and maybe primarily, a transit hub, a place for refugees to work out the next steps in lives that had been upended completely. Stations divided among the various destination countries and staffed by technical personnel provided immigration assistance and help with visas. A refugee could get just about anywhere in Europe (and Canada) from there. And if they were moving through Europe, by rail or by bus, the travel was free. When they didn’t opt to remain in Poland, which was discouraged, most travelers chose Germany because of its large economy, its traditionally liberal attitudes toward refugees and its proximity to home. (Barely anyone tried for the US, at least not openly. Nevertheless, most of the Ukrainians I met claimed to know somebody who was sneaking in through Mexico. I remain skeptical.) Although the facility was outfitted with roughly 1,300 beds (of the army cot variety), refugee visits were often brief.
Nearly all the adult refugees were women — Ukraine doesn’t let fighting-age men leave — and the overwhelming majority of these arrived with children. Many also arrived with their lives lumped into garbage sacs or into small- and mid-size duffels, packed to the density of a neutron star and weighing just about as much. Rolling suitcases were by far the most common supply request, but stock was spotty. The kids barely seemed to know there was a war going on, or just preferred to ignore it. They kicked soccer balls, chased through the halls. Some adults were practically catatonic with shock or grief, particularly those arriving from devastated areas such as Bucha or Mariupol. But most were stoic. I was reminded of my time living in Kyiv, years ago, and the patterned resignation of Ukrainians faced with the serial indignities of the world left behind by the Soviets. “Stalin killed all the smart ones,” was how one older woman, an English teacher, described it to me then. There was nothing to be done but survive. Everything else was hubris. Fate makes the rules here.
At the Tesco I was in the overnight shift, managing a room of more than 500 beds (including the area set apart for the handicapped and debilitated). When I was lucky, at least two interpreters worked alongside me; events could quickly spiral without them. Buses arrived round the clock. Each bed needed to be specifically assigned and tagged with the eventual destination of the person sleeping in it. The first departures came at 3 am, with the next to follow at five and six. Every refugee and every volunteer was assigned a QR code when he or she first arrived on site, and everyone was scanned in and scanned out. No one was permitted in the building without one, and this was no idle concern. Abductions from the center had occurred, primarily in the early weeks of the crisis; also, two buses with refugees were said to have gone missing, in what were assumed to be human trafficking schemes. (In one instance, the abductees were finally located in France; the bus wasn’t.) Usually twice a week, after the overnight visitors departed, volunteers from the 82nd Airborne showed up, mostly to turn the beds and mop the floors. A small group of them could handle in about two hours what the larger segment of volunteers could maybe do in six. But it was hard the miss the irony: The sons and fathers, brothers and husbands, of the refugees who pass through Tesco were manning the trenches in Kharkiv and Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia, while an elite division of the world’s foremost fighting force cleaned the bins in Poland.
Maybe patterned resignation is contagious.
If relief operations were solely about relieving, this might be a good place to summarize: The need was great, we had good tools, the refugees endured. But relief operations are also, always and inevitably, a test of abstractions, of typically evanescent public phenomena like patience, resolution, purpose. And so they are a test of societies and, ultimately, politics. Specifically, how does a political system adapt to extraordinary pressures, from outside and inside, when the outcomes could reshape that system permanently?
Przemyśl mayor Wojciech Bakun began the crisis as a celebrated figure, lauded as much for what he was unwilling to do as for what he was. “I’m not going to explain history to a three-year-old who just crossed the border,” the New York Times quoted him as saying, in a statement that came across as both practical and humane. “This Polish mayor has become a hero for Ukrainians in crisis. But what of his past?” read the headline of a piece from NPR in March. (In the article, Bakun’s “past” turns out to be just the usual, but unspecified, ethnic-grievance stoking. More on that below.) The Guardian presented him as a voice of reckoning in the battle with Europe’s reactionaries and opportunists.
Yet by the time I arrived, Bakun had transformed into a more ambivalent presence. He seemed unsure of what his next steps should be, but fully confident that “next steps” were needed. So he had seized upon impenitent meddling, the low art of the bureaucrat, as the most natural expression of his talents. “He’s a right f—king c—t, that one,” a supply and logistics volunteer whispered to me as I watched Bakun arrive for an event at the Tesco on Orthodox Easter. It was hard to process. Bakun looks like a cross between a driver’s-ed instructor and the stock boy at a mom-and-pop hardware store. He seemed unthreatening.
But he had a certain chump certitude, the kind that prevails before the treehouse comes loose and kills someone on the ground. A visit from Bakun usually meant something stupid was about to happen; his decisions were uniformly mystifying, and they all seemed designed to disrupt, insofar as they forced everyone to pivot to new expectations and practices. Volunteers groused that they were prevented from distributing or even unboxing mountains of donated supplies that languished for weeks near the loading docks. Rules at the facility would change suddenly, then change back, then change again as supervisors sought to keep up with his shifting whims. At some point, Bakun seemed to decide that the Tesco had basically run its course and began diverting refugees back to the train station, where they were not provided food or supplies and slept on floors by the hundreds, all while beds at the Tesco lay unused.
“Wojciech Bakun is not mentally prepared for this role. He makes decisions quickly and emotionally. Only he cannot back out. And people have to clean up after it,” one local insider, active in relief operations from the outset, told me.
“And refugees suffer.”
If the universal assumption was (and still is) that Bakun is trying to shutter the relief center, he denies it. “It is not true we will plan to close Tesco. We always try [to] do best we can in this situation, and we always reorganize something, but we have no plan to close this Center!” he told me in one recent text exchange. Pressed to describe how relief work would be expected to function at the Tesco, however, Bakun became reticent.
“I will discuss about functioning Tesco with Red Cross, UNHCR, Medair and Unicef. We will decide about [the] way [t]hat we should go,” he said, naming four NGOs that have ostensibly partnered with the city amid the crisis.
Those are big names, with big budgets. So their customary absence from on-the-ground relief work at the Tesco was conspicuous.
(Minutes from a recent high-level meeting at the Tesco give a different picture than the one Bakun describes. According to the minutes, which I obtained, the mayor argued that the government is now entering “Phase 2” of operations, and in this phase there is no longer any need for refugee relief centers. Over the strenuous objections of supervisors, he disputed that the Tesco was seeing many refugees anyway. On this last point, he may have something — but only because, according to my sources, he began stationing police outside the Tesco to prevent most refugees from entering.)
And yet. Nothing in Przemyśl happens in a vacuum. In fact, it might be one of the most contextualized cities in Europe, the site of major battles in both world wars and nearly flush to a border that has variously divided the Russian Empire from the Austro-Hungarian, the German from the Soviet, the Roman Catholic from the Eastern Orthodox and, in the current moment, the East from the metaphorical West, a contest that pits the ancien régime of the Russosphere against “modern” Europe. “History” — Bakun’s word in the Times quote — is only the most delicate way to describe a centuries-long litany of rivalries, encroachments, strifes, displacements and eliminations, much of it pitting the Poles against their new friends from other side of the line.
Major Ukrainian cities such as Lviv and Ternopil were part of Poland as recently as 1945, when the Soviets expanded westward, pushing Poland’s boundary back to around the Curzon Line of 1919.
Some of that history ain’t exactly history, either. Between 1943-45, as many as 100,000 Poles by the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the Volhynia region, part of present-day Ukraine. Needless to say, this kind of history is only history when both sides agree to forget, and there would not seem to be much prospect of that, in spite of current events. (To the consternation of Poland, the Ukrainian government has resisted efforts to label the events in Volhynia a genocide, though Ukraine has acknowledged as many as 30,000 Poles killed.) The border that separates the two countries is as much metaphor for unresolvable division as it is a political boundary.
Given this past, the recent turn of events has left a lot of Poles bemused. “I don’t know what to say. For me, it is incredible,” said Yolanda, a young Polish woman, originally from Przemyśl, who shared a cab with me from the airport in Rzeszów. “For us, it was the Russians, then the Nazis, then the Ukrainians who were the worst,” she said. And yet now, on her overcoat, Yolanda wore a ribbon, formed into a flower, in the deep blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag.
The ironies keep coming. On top of the complicated history, it is probably no exaggeration to say that Poland may be Europe’s least ideal country in which to seek refuge. Andrzej Duda’s populist government in Warsaw has made no secret of its disdain for migrants in the main, and just last year passed stringent new laws designed to repel an influx of Kurdish and other non-Western refugees coming across the border from Belarus. (They also erected a barbed-wire “wall” to prevent further incursions.) Deputy prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Duda’s Law and Justice party (known as PiS), has characterized refugees as lawless invaders who, owing to their different cultures and customs, will “bring about the downfall of Latin civilization.”
The government nevertheless responded graciously to the inflow of Ukrainians starting in late February. Measures were soon passed to provide refugees with significant social benefits, as well as access to jobs and schools. The Polish public did its part, too. Estimates vary, but it is believed at least 3.5 million Ukrainians (of more than six million total) have crossed into Poland since then. Many stayed. And hundreds of thousands of ordinary Polish citizens opened their homes to settle them, in what is likely the largest civil response to a refugee crisis in European history.
“If you told me four weeks before the invasion started that this [hospitality] would happen, I would say, ‘No way,’” one Polish official I met in Przemyśl told me. “There is so much politics all the time.”
(The joke around Przemyśl was that the one “good thing” to come from Putin’s war is that it ended Covid. Which it did not, of course. But it may as well have, for all that had changed on the ground. That’s what a massive Russian invasion will do to a region: masks off, Ukrainians welcome.)
Still, Poland’s right-wing government hadn’t transformed overnight into Germany’s Social Democrats, and never saw its generosity as anything but temporary. (Refugee settlement is time-limited to 18 months.) In the last couple of months the government has experimented with tighter passport controls at the border — at the Tesco, we could see the refugee numbers dip and spike as new policies were adopted and then revised. And as the crisis has continued to drag on — it’s now moving into its fourth month — there are signs that politicians at all levels are trying to work out where to find discrete advantage in the ordeal.
You can’t put up two million Ukrainians — not with all the history — without the topic being front and center.
This is perhaps nowhere more true than in Przemyśl, in the person of its afflicted mayor. Less rabble-rouser than artless functionary, Bakun nevertheless owes at least some of his political success to the old enmities. The center-right political party he co-founded, Kikuz’15, has been accused of exploiting anti-Ukrainian sentiment in the past, and Bakun himself has been accused locally of playing the “Ukrainian card” in order to win favor with Polish nationalists. It was his dumb luck to wind up with a mass-scale migration of Ukrainians through his city, and to emerge as a crucial front-line figure in Europe’s response to the humanitarian crisis.
But the luck was not only his own. As it happens, Bakun’s party is the more moderate participant in a long-simmering rivalry with PiS, which is also from Przemyśl. And although Kikuz’15 is a member of the ruling coalition in Warsaw, Law and Justice officials were not best pleased when Bakun challenged their candidate for mayor and won. That was in 2018, and relations have only deteriorated from there. The one certainty in Przemyśl seems to be that PiS is waiting for Bakun to plotz so they can gain the upper hand.
Some assume the mayor’s strategy is to create problems and then shift blame, as if he is doing the best he can with poor support from Warsaw. Bakun’s goal, it is suggested, is to make sure Duda’s administration is seen to share responsibility for the handling of the refugees, so that local PiS representatives will not be able to outflank him to the right in some future election. One local political insider suggested to me that Bakun’s interference with relief efforts — as quizzical as it sounds — should probably be understood as an effort to play defense. “That’s why he makes decisions that seem idiotic to us,” the insider said. The plan is to “show the government that they, too, [are] unable to cope with the refugee problem.”
Three-dimensional chess, Slavic style: Look incompetent so maybe your enemies will look worse.
The outcomes don’t look auspicious — for the refugees, anyway. By the time I left the Tesco, in the second week of May, frustrated supply and logistics volunteers had cleared out the adjunct “magazine,” a supply area, so local authorities would stop messing with distribution. World Central Kitchen had been forced to scale back operations. Many other volunteers have quit the center for other assignments, elsewhere in Poland or even in other countries where they felt they could be more useful. Security has been reduced considerably, I am told.
There could be a more innocent explanation, of course. Perhaps Bakun wants fewer services available in his city, so refugees — particularly those headed back to Ukraine (not a huge number, but it is rising) — won’t be tempted to cluster there, awaiting outcomes from the war. If that is the plan, he hasn’t shared it publicly, and certainly didn’t share it with me. He left but the one distinct impression: Just as quickly as he mastered the challenge, Wojciech Bakun was determined to fail.