This past September I visited Poland with a team from 12Stone Church. We traveled as filmmakers to document the stories of Ukrainian refugees who have relocated to Poland, and to meet some of the people who are serving them. I am grateful that the Church would entrust their video team with such an open ended assignment and that they thought of me as a good person to tag along and help. There are several million Ukrainian refugees living in Poland alone, many of whom escaped from active war zones with only what clothes and items they could carry in a suitcase. They now face a life altering decision: wait for the end of a war with no clear path to resolution, or attempt to adapt to Polish life. Aid to Ukraine in Poland is a matter of some political controversy, but anecdotally, we found the Polish to be very supportive of their neighbors during our travels.
Our efforts would have never begun were it not for Tina Bruner, a missionary and outreach coordinator. She could be a film producer in a different life. An immensely practical woman with an unceasing mind for problem solving. Without people like Tina, I am learning, it is impossible to coordinate the goodwill of people back home into meaningful charity. One town may need blankets, another cots, another medicine. In a month their needs may be completely different, yet all too often they might be flooded with gifts and donations of too much of the wrong thing, too late. Without a person on the ground, establishing human connections and discerning the deep needs of the vulnerable, all the resources in the world will go to waste.
I felt more than a little silly explaining to Tina, who has given more or less her entire adult life to the service of strangers, my interests as a filmmaker. Those things which I ponder daily appeared suddenly as small trifles to me, in shadow of war. Yet there is joy in meeting new people, and in seeing the world through new eyes.
We were are also aided immeasurably by Tina’s friend Magda, and our driver, Pawel. Both of whom were translators for us, fast friends, and guides for us in Polish culture.
I shall not try to recreate the experience of sitting with new friends, both Polish and Ukrainian, who nonetheless showed us the deepest hospitality and trust. I will have to leave that to the documentary, which at its best can only offer a window seat to their experiences. As a filmmaker in these circumstances, you are haunted by the profound reality of the stories you hear, and by the little moments of humanity that you miss along the way. Equally haunting are the grateful eyes that trust you with their memories. One leaves with gratitude. We might have traveled thousands of miles to meet these people, yet they, mere hundreds of miles from the Ukrainian border, are farther from home than us.
In Krakow, we met Nikita, a boy, 19 years old, but I felt his junior in life experience. He told us about his family crammed into the subway in Kharkiv, hiding from the shelling, so tightly packed with strangers that – he searched for the words to translate a Ukrainian idiom, “There was not room for an apple to fall – does that make sense?”
We met Artur, who told us that he would be a corpse in a ditch by now if he did not flee with his family to Poland, for in his region, the need for men to be drafted is so great that they are sent to the front lines without training.
In Wroclaw we met Nadia and Victoria, young mothers who must raise their children in the absence of their fathers for the indeterminate future.
Nadia’s four boys shook our hands one at a time and introduced themselves in perfect English. Their father did not neglect to teach them manners and the properties of a good handshake before the war separated him from them.
Victoria’s daughter – the shy one – hid behind mother as the foreigners walked about with their cameras.
I was grateful on this trip to not be the man in charge, but merely a member of the team, another pair of eyes to observe, hands to serve, to set up tripods, lights and microphone stands, while Daniel and James the filmmakers on staff for 12Stone Church had to bear the real weight of carrying these stories across time and space.
Any time I was not holding a camera I was walking about in a stupor of mouth-agape awe at the beauty that surrounded me.
Not that Krakow or Wroclaw is without its requisite graffiti and grit – Europe is after all, not a theme park for Americans on holiday, but a living and breathing place – an ancient continent, home to thousands of years of death and song, the cradle to dreams which live on still across the entire world. Krakow is alive. Even those places which tourists frequent the most do not fully succumb to the trite self-parody of place. Rather, it is the place itself.
The travel websites will tell you that if you visit Poland, you should not refer to the country as belonging to “Eastern Europe, but rather, Central Europe.” This is trivially true upon inspection of a map, but it also reveals a desire of the Polish to be seen in the light their own identity, as separate from The East, and from the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union.
For my part, I felt I could discern this centrality everywhere. Not the centrality that implies dominance, but a place of competing influence. The Polish language itself sounds Slavic to American ears, yet it is written with the Latin script. It is a predominately Catholic nation, albeit increasingly secular in form, not Protestant, not Orthodox. Indeed, Protestants are rare enough to be regularly mistaken for Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is a varied and beautiful landscape, with mountains in the south, and bucolic flat-lands through its center, the chosen battleground for centuries of adversaries. Now a democratic nation, it is a country hoping for peace, that nonetheless prepares for war.
It is a unique situation that leaves Poland the opportunity to pick and chose what parts of the West and the values it wants to adopt. Yet we should expect that such an operation unfolds not by conscious act of the will, but more in the formation of dream, and in the dimly perceptible desire of a people.
Near the end of our journey we were driving from the train station to our dinner after a day of interviews, and I was on one of my monologues, as often happens, about transitory places.
For me the gas station is a signifier of modern life as a state of perpetual transition. An ugly, smelly way-station that nonetheless meets your needs on the journey to some place more significant.
“What?” Pawel, our driver chimed in, scandalized – how could I have such an opinion? From Pawel, I can only now recollect certain phrases, “it is clean - everything is here. You can find what you need...”
We told Pawel about Buc-ee’s.
“There are hundreds of pumps… There is a massive store, inside you can find every snack you can imagine… There is a bronze statue of a beaver outside and you take your picture with him when you go.”
In further conversation it occurred to me that for a former Eastern Bloc country, a clean, well-stocked gas station is not a thing at all to take for granted.
In Poland, for someone only a little older than I, the squalor and corruption of the late Soviet Union is not an abstract idea, but a memory. Under-stocked shelves and food lines may be real to them as Macy’s and Kohl’s and K-Mart and the little green transformer box by the street are to me.
But the embrace of The West implies more than embrace of economic and social freedoms. It is an embrace on an operational level of materialism. By this I do not merely mean the worship of wealth. I mean the belief that, at the metaphysical rock bottom of all things, there is really nothing down there but more rocks. Both America and Poland are ostensibly quite religious countries when compared to the rest of Europe. But do we act that way? Do we buy that way?
We went one night in Wroclaw to a section of town outside the touristy area to an island connected by a walking bridge where there were bars and restaurants, a place evidently frequented by young people.
There was a forlorn air to the place. It needed about twice as much lighting per square foot as it had -- and lighting of a different kind -- not that modern, hospital white LED glow that is slowly invading public spaces. A stasis loomed over everyone there, faces illuminated by phones and the embers of dying cigarettes. The phones make this stasis all the sudden familiar. Yet there is one difference, these young people are in public, and sitting together. Physically their bodies closer, men and women, five to a bench and leaning on each other, yet not communicating, but scrolling in silence.
Back on the square things were brighter again. Daniel observed that we saw so much of life unfolding here, just looking out the window of our hotel room. Life of every kind, the good and the bad mixed together. You equally see a couple wrapped in embrace, or a child crying, and a scolding parent, or the back end of a big argument unfolding right in the alley behind the square. Such things are of course, utterly normal and human, you might see them in any city in the world in any century. Only I can’t remember the last time I saw such a thing. We rarely see such a range of passions and emotions, good or bad, in public life in America. Now one only sees people in transition. And transition is not a place for passion but passivity. It is not a place for identity but obscurity.
As such, back in the square on Wroclaw, we instinctively rolled our eyes at the guitar in hand, street performers who sang covers of American songs, but we were not prepared for these serenades to result in the spontaneous eruption of dancing amongst strangers. Yet why shouldn’t it? Music in America is stolen from the people by superstars and their cults of perfection. Such spontaneous music-making we are cut off from, for it is only here for the stars and the most talented to enjoy. The rest of us do not participate but watch, and envy. Can it occur to us to take it back? What if imperfect voices and imperfect playing matter not? What matters is that it is happening here and now. At this very moment you are met by merriment that calls you forward.
We were welcome to film everywhere we went. Somehow in America, without noticing that it was strange at all, we have gotten used to encountering mysteriously angry officials, or nosy neighbors, petty HOAs, and bothered roommates. By necessity, the documentarian especially prizes stealth. We have phrases like “Guerilla Filmmakers,” and “stealing shots.” And we encounter everywhere, people for whom saying no to our turning cameras on shall be the highlight of their day. In Poland with this reflexive sense of discretion, asking not for permission but for forgiveness, we turned our cameras on. Europe of course has its litany of problems and bureaucracies as well, we must hold no illusions about that. But at least in my brief stay in Poland I did not encounter that reflexive defensive posture which has so quietly become normal that I had never realized it was strange until I traveled somewhere else.
In one instance, peeking in from the streets of Krakow we grabbed a shot of a woman playing old folk tunes on the piano. We were about to leave when we were surprised to be welcomed in, asked to sit down, and given free beers. This woman, as it happened, was also from Kharkiv, also a refugee, a great musician now playing in a little pub to make ends meet.
Guilt. Why was our first impulse to slink away? Why did I not move to make a friend immediately? To say “thank you, that was beautiful, where are you from?” My disposition is to expect conflict, or negativity from strangers. “Who are you? Why are you filming? Who gave you permission? Where will this play?” I wonder if I can overcome this weakness in myself. Is it a me problem, or an American problem? I can blame my culture, my country, the mores of my generation. Perhaps the best is to simply look at myself and say that I can do better. Sometimes one must say yes to the dance or become a bystander in life instead of a participant in it.
I felt I stepped into history. Or into Pawel Pawlikowski’s film, Cold War. Only now, Krakow has become Paris. In that film, two musicians escape from Communist Poland into the freedom of the West, and the timelessly sensual haven of Paris, yet in physical freedom, they find only spiritual emptiness. Paris indeed, is an idea as much as a place. For Artur, Krakow is Paris. Metaphors aside, Krakow is a city of immense beauty. Where Artur knew only bland Soviet central planning and concrete, now he walks the stone streets of a medieval kingdom. He tells his children they need not fear the commercial jets that fly overhead. These kinds of planes do not have bombs. His oldest child was born in 2014, a month before Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine began. They have known nothing but war their entire lives.
It is a different Paris for Ludmila, a woman we interviewed whose eyes shine with the light of Christ. She left the day after our interview to return on a visit to Kharkiv. She would never have left, even in the worst of the bombing were it not for her daughter’s sake. Born in Siberia, moved to Kharkiv, and now to Krakow. Her Russian family will not speak to her – they did not believe her when she told them how they bombed Kharkiv. Where home is for Luda, is a question that she cannot answer.
From Pawel, and from Nikita, Artur, Nadia, Victoria and Luda, and the others I have not mentioned, I want to remember their gratitude even in the face of tragedy. Gratitude may not be a native state of mind for the modern American, always deconstructing, never assembling, and that is why it is so necessary at our present moment. But thinking our friends and brethren in Poland and across Central Europe, for whom a well-stocked gas station has not yet lost its splendor, those immortal words come to mind, “man does not live on bread alone.”
My apologies for the significant time that has lapsed since my last writing here. I have been extremely busy the last few month with this, and other projects that have occupied my entire mental capacity. It is probably a reality of my chosen profession and my station within it that such busy periods are interspersed with slower months that provide time for reflection.