![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/11/14/4.jpg\")
Demonstrators display a banner on October 29, 2020 during a protest against the Polish Constitutional Court’s ruling on abortion.
\nIn Poland, abortion has been almost completely prohibited since 2020. Nevertheless, a network of anarchists and other feminists strives to ensure that those who need abortions can access them, legally or not. Now that abortion has been prohibited throughout many of the United States, as well, people in North America stand to gain from the experience of those who have already been confronting this situation for years. To learn how Polish activists use direct action and mutual aid to keep abortion accessible, we interviewed participants in this network.
\n\nMaintaining widespread access to abortion—legal or not—is crucial to saving lives and preserving the autonomy of those targeted by patriarchal power structures. It is also an essential part of the struggle to legalize abortion. As we argued in June, after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade,
\n\n\n\n\nThe Roe v. Wade decision did not take place because a majority of the US population supported abortion access in 1973. Rather, in view of organizing efforts such as the Jane collective, which provided an estimated 11,000 illegal abortions, we can conclude that the ruling was a response to the intensity with which a particular segment of the population was fighting for abortion access, and to their success in calling the state’s monopoly on power into question by continuing to make abortion available despite the efforts of police and judges.
\n
We are once again in the era that the Jane collective confronted—this time, with abortion pills as an option. As people in Poland have demonstrated, it is possible to maintain widespread access to abortion regardless of the laws on the books.
\n\nIf you want to support abortion access in Poland, one option is to donate to Ciocia Basia. In the United States, you can obtain abortion pills here and information about how to use them here. The above photograph is by Radosław Sto.
\n\n Demonstrators display a banner on October 29, 2020 during a protest against the Polish Constitutional Court’s ruling on abortion.
\nIn Poland, widely posted stickers display a phone number that connects people seeking abortions to the helpline of a network of organizations collectively known as Abortion Without Borders (AWB). With Poland’s abortion laws being among the most repressive in Europe, this network demonstrates the power of international solidarity in defending reproductive freedom. The groups that comprise Abortion Without Borders include Abortion Dream Team (ADT) and Kobiety W Sieci1 in Poland, Ciocia Basia in Germany, Abortion Network Amsterdam and Women Help Women in the Netherlands, and Abortion Support Network in the United Kingdom.
\n\nAsia, an anarchist activist from Poland who relocated to Amsterdam to work with Women Help Women, recalls how these groups met in 2018 on the initiative of one person from the United Kingdom who saw them all doing similar work separately and suggested that they join forces. “The idea was to figure out ways to get later abortions, especially for people living in places where there was no easy access to abortion services, and [to] spread information,” says Asia.
\n\nThe Abortion Without Borders helpline is staffed by Kobiety W Sieci, who counsel callers on their options and connect them with other groups in the network according to their needs. If someone in Poland wants to travel abroad to terminate a pregnancy, counselors refer them to Ciocia Basia, a queer feminist grassroots collective in Berlin dedicated to building support structures for people coming to Berlin for abortion access. Those who prefer to opt for a pharmacological abortion at home can order the necessary pills from Women Help Women’s global telehealth service. Asia emphasizes that it is important for activists and counselors to use precise language around this because, while Polish law does not criminalize those who terminate their pregnancies, it has become increasingly dangerous to help someone obtain an abortion in Poland.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/11/14/11.jpg\")
\nAbortion law has a complicated history in this traditionally Roman Catholic country. With the fall of communism at the opening of the 1990s, the Church began to push for new legislation to restrict abortion access. Since 1932, the procedure had been legal in cases of rape and threat to maternal health, with a 1956 law expanding legal justifications for abortion to include “difficult living conditions.” The newly elected non-communist government passed legislation in 1993 that disqualified social and financial factors as a justification, leaving rape or incest, threat to maternal health, and fetal impairment as the only cases in which the procedure was legal. In April 2016, Polish anti-choice organizations proposed a bill to ban abortion in all cases except where the pregnant person’s life was in danger, which passed in the Sejm [one of the houses of Poland’s parliament] the following September. The other house of the Polish parliament voted to reject the law the next month, after tens of thousands of people raged against the proposed legislation in decentralized demonstrations collectively known as the “Czarny Protest” (“Black Protest”) in cities across Poland.
\n\nOn October 22, 2020, however, the Constitutional Tribunal effectively banned abortion almost entirely, ruling that terminating a pregnancy because of fetal defect was unconstitutional. This sparked mass demonstrations in which over 400,000 people took to the streets to protest the decision and the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS). According to an official tally from the Ministry of Health, 1074 out of the 1110 legal abortions performed in Poland the year before the ruling were obtained due to fetal impairment or life-threatening disease. The number of legal terminations, however, offers little indication of how many Polish people terminate a pregnancy in a given year. Tens of thousands do so every year by ordering abortion pills through the mail or travelling outside the country to undergo procedural abortions in clinics.
\n\nBecause of the obstacles to obtaining the procedure legally, people in Poland have largely defaulted to these options even in cases where they have a legally recognized right to have an abortion. For example, to terminate a pregnancy that is the result of a crime, a pregnant person needs a certified letter from a public prosecutor confirming that they were raped. Such bureaucratic obstacles can make it impossible to access abortion services before one is twelve weeks pregnant, after which abortion is prohibited under any circumstances.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/11/14/7.jpg\")
Anarchists demonstrating in Wrocław, Poland for abortion access in 2020.
\nThe collectives participating in the Abortion Without Borders network noticed an immediate increase of interest in the services they provide following the ruling of October 2020. “We could absolutely feel the impact of the decision,” says Asia. “This was really devastating on one hand, but on the other hand it also brought incredible amounts of solidarity and grassroots organizing, and organizing that went beyond grassroots… it really affected the whole society. Also, there were huge demonstrations and protests that were, I would say, counterproductive to what is the hope of people in power in Poland.”
\n\nAdrianna of Abortion Dream Team says the 2016 protests against the proposed abortion ban were what inspired her to focus on the issue. She comes from a small town in Poland where she says the word “abortion” didn’t exist in her family. “I didn’t know such a thing existed until my early twenties, and then I think I was really against abortion,” she says. “Then, step by step, becoming a feminist, I had to deal with this abortion issue. I realized it was about having control over your body. It really was a long journey from being a person who was against abortion to being a person who is totally 100% pro-abortion right now.”
\n\nToday, Adrianna is part of a group of twelve people who support ADT by answering questions on social media from people seeking abortions. “In Poland, because of this abortion stigma, it’s very important to just spread the news,” she says, “to let people know they will not be punished for taking abortion pills or going outside the country to get a procedural abortion.”
\n\nADT’s mission is to change the narrative on abortion, destigmatizing and dispelling myths about the procedure while spreading information about self-managed abortion, which involves terminating a pregnancy with the medicines Mifepristone and Misoprostol and does not require medical supervision. “The abortion pills give you power,” says Adrianna. “In 1993, when the abortion law was established, no one knew the pills would become so accessible and used every day.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/11/14/9.jpg\")
\nPeople can contact ADT via email, Facebook Messenger, or Instagram. First, volunteers inquire if the person has taken a test to be sure they are pregnant, then ask if they are sure they want to have an abortion. Once they have established that a person wants to order abortion pills, ADT volunteers instruct them on how to order from Women Help Women in the Netherlands and share the link to that organization’s order form. “People ask questions like if it hurts, how long does it last, how much it costs,” Adrianna says.
\n\nRather than purchasing these pills, the person ordering them makes a donation of 75 euros, though they can give more if they are able. “If you don’t have the money, as many people under 18 who write us don’t, we can ask the organization to waive the donation,” says Adrianna. “For people in Poland, it’s a steep amount of money. Many of the women already have kids and can’t afford to donate.” The pills, which take a maximum of 20 days to arrive, are packed in very discreet packaging, with only the recipient’s name and address, as they travel across the border. ADT provides instructions via email and social media regarding how to take them, and volunteers are available to advise and answer questions throughout the process. The person taking the pills can also call the Abortion Without Borders helpline to receive support from the Kobiety W Sieci team.
\n\nADT also stays in touch after the pharmacological abortion is over. “Usually, people want to go to the doctor to make sure everything is okay,” says Adrianna. “But the vagina is such a great organ that it will clear itself without even checking.” She says people often write to ADT afterward to thank them and express how happy they are. “I think the most important thing is, they don’t want to feel that they are alone. The stigma of abortion is such a big thing in Poland, they usually cannot tell even their partners or their friends. So I think the most important role we have is that we are giving them support. We are with you, you are not alone, and this is your decision. This is a good decision.”
\n\nActivists in the AWB network agree that the first thing that changed in the wake of the Poland’s near-total abortion ban was that an atmosphere of fear took hold among doctors, nurses, and patients. Since the ban took effect in January 2021, at least three women have died of sepsis in Polish hospitals as a result of doctors refusing to perform a life-saving abortion or caesarean section. Human-rights activists blame these deaths on the chilling effect that the abortion law has had on medical professionals, scaring them into refusing essential care to patients.
\n\n“This is the most terrifying thing that I have noticed,” says Adrianna, who recalls hearing from one person who was considering terminating their pregnancy out of fear that they might not receive necessary care at a hospital if something went wrong.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/11/14/5.jpg\")
Demonstrators display a sign reading “Abortion Without Borders” at the constitutional court in Warsaw, January 2022.
\nAsia of Women Help Women says the most heartbreaking effect of this atmosphere of fear is that many people taking abortion pills are concerned that they might not get adequate medical support in the event of complications, and that doctors might treat them as if they have committed a crime. “Someone who is taking abortion pills is not breaking the law, but doctors don’t know it, so they feel like they have to report someone. There’s a strong feeling of insecurity on all levels. A lot of people don’t seek medical treatment because of this fear.”
\n\nComing from Poland’s anarchist punk scene and queer feminist movement, Asia moved to Amsterdam to work with Women Help Women after she discovered that there were limitations on what kind of support activists located in Poland could provide to those seeking abortions, due to the legal restrictions. “For me, moving out was an opportunity to get closer to more practical help,” she says.
\n\nUnlike the more informal collectives within AWB, Women Help Women is a formal organization active in multiple locations around the world. “We are not a huge organization, and we focus on the countries where there is not access to safe abortion services,” says Asia. “For the countries where there are local abortion services, we strongly encourage people to use those services, so we can focus on those who don’t have any options.”
\n\nWomen Help Women operates with a horizontal organizational culture, which Asia says requires “constant conversation” about what it means to organize horizontally. “We try to change the narrative and promote a supportive, non-judgmental, normalizing-of-abortion approach,” she says. “I would say it’s mostly local groups that focus on this and we are doing our best to catch up with them and to implement their approach in how we communicate and what kind of message we want to bring to the outside world.”
\n\nThe collectives in the network share the goal of both de-criminalizing and de-medicalizing abortion. “I would like us to have more local groups who are willing to support each other,” says Asia, “and who question the fact that abortion is so much in the hands of doctors and that the most optimistic view is to have it legalized and in the clinics. This doesn’t have to be the way, especially with first-trimester abortions, with abortion pills that can be extremely cheap and accessible.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/11/14/3.jpg\")
“Unwanted pregnancy = simple abortion.”
\nOne of the objectives essential to Abortion Dream Team’s mission is to de-medicalize the procedure and put the power back into the hands of the people. “Abortion pills are something that you can do on your own,” says Adrianna. “You can decide when you want to have this abortion, how to do it, with whom you want to do it. You don’t have to go to the doctor. Even the World Health Organization guidelines say that you can do your abortion at home. Like every area of life, it’s sometimes taken by politicians or men in power.”
\n\n“For me, this is actually the feminist revolution,” says Asia. She explains that the idea of the procedure as something ethically controversial and prohibitively complicated is a construct that has nothing to do with reality. “It is a very simple procedure that 99% of people can have at home themselves and not really have a need to see a doctor afterwards. Complications happen in less than 1% [of pharmaceutical abortions]—so do we really, as a society, need to have so many structures around it? Do we really need to have so much legal conversation about something that is so easy? When you think about it, you realize that it’s not really about safety, because the safety of it is proven. It’s about control and keeping this atmosphere of dependency.” Asia and other activists at Women Help Women reflect on how the medicalization of abortion has shaped our reproductive lives. “It’s not only about stigma, it’s not only about the law, but how our pharmaceutical system is working and how the healthcare systems are designed. It all goes hand in hand, and it all limits our freedom.”
\n\nIn Germany, one of the countries where AWB helps people from Poland to access abortion services, the procedure is controlled by the state. While it is illegal to terminate a pregnancy in Germany, the law makes exceptions for medically necessary abortions and cases where the pregnancy is the result of rape. It also does not prosecute abortions in the first trimester, as long as people first submit to mandatory counseling with a state-licensed social worker (which laws require to be biased toward dissuading the person from having abortion), followed by a compulsory three-day waiting period. Abortions in Germany can be surgical or pharmacological, but must always be performed in a clinic—one cannot simply order the pills and take them at home.
\n\nCiocia Basia, the collective that supports people from Poland who choose to obtain abortions in Berlin, has always been small, informal, and self-organized, according to one member. It was initiated in 2015 by two people, one German and one Polish, who had the idea to bring people from Poland who were seeking abortions to the neighboring countries. The organizers started to make connections and formed their first partnership with a clinic that had affordable fees. After they began to receive phone calls from people in Poland seeking assistance, they decided to name the collective Ciocia Basia, which means “Auntie Basia” in Polish. Basia is a very common name in Poland, so it is inconspicuous for people to save the group’s number in their phones.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/11/14/1.jpg\")
“We do abortions—Ciocia Basia.”
\nPeople in Poland seeking an abortion sometimes find Ciocia Basia through an article or interview in the course of searching for resources, or else through pro-choice groups in Poland, which distribute propaganda in the streets and media. One collective member reports that they try to be visible, going to demonstrations in Poland and passing out stickers and fliers. Every week, two members take regular shifts answering the phone number and email account via which people contact them. Once a person reaches out, members help them to decide whether coming to Germany for the procedure is an option. Ordering pills for a pharmaceutical abortion costs less money, so if that seems like a better option for the person, Ciocia Basia refers them to the website for Women Help Women and stays involved in case they have questions.
\n\n“The first thing we establish is if they want to come to Germany,” explains one member of Ciocia Basia. If the answer is yes, they put the person in contact with a social worker to arrange a meeting for the mandatory counseling. Because of the COVID pandemic, this can currently be done online or over the phone, which works better for most people—otherwise, the three-day waiting period between the consultation and the procedure would mean they had to either come to Germany twice or stay four nights there. Ciocia Basia also puts people in contact with the clinic and helps them navigate making the appointment, finding the clinic, getting reimbursement from their insurance provider, and preparing for the procedure.
\n\nSometimes, though not often, the collective pays for and arranges the person’s travel. “It depends on what the person needs, which is what we try to find out.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/11/14/2.jpg\")
“My body, my choice.”
\nThe collective works with a network of people living in Berlin who host those coming to the city for an abortion. Collective members meet people at the train station and transport them to the place they will be staying, and from there to the clinic. According to one member, the activists don’t host people themselves because it is too emotionally draining to be doing this work and be with the people the whole time, which is why the network of hosts are people with whom they are in touch but who are not part of the collective. When someone needs a place to stay, members of the collective email this pool of volunteers to see who can host, explaining how many people will be coming and how many nights they need to stay, and hosts write back to answer whether they have room available. In some cases, Ciocia Basia pays for a hostel or simply directs people to hostels. The group also partners with volunteer translators to support those who don’t speak German.
\n\n“In Berlin, people love organizing parties to raise funds and often approach us saying they want to do that for us, so we don’t have to organize it by ourselves,” a member explains. “This work requires having money, having access to money. You need many people so you don’t get burned out. This is emotional work.”
\n\nOne activist who moved from Poland to work with Ciocia Basia and was in Berlin when the 2020 court decision imposed further restraints on abortion access recalls noticing a change immediately. Whereas previously, most of the emails and calls the collective received had been about unwanted pregnancies, after the ruling, about half of those requests for support regarded wanted pregnancies in which there was a possibility of fetal defect, and the pregnant person wanted to plan for an abortion in case test results showed an impairment. “In Poland, you don’t always have access to the information you need about your pregnancy. If there’s a possibility of abnormality, the doctors have strategies to delay you in getting the test results until it’s too late to terminate.”
\n\nWhile a person still cannot be prosecuted for having an abortion in Poland, anyone who supports someone in obtaining one can, and the authorities appear to be sending a message to those who would do so. In April 2022, Abortion Dream Team co-founder Justyna Wydrzyńska became the first activist in Europe to face criminal charges for aiding an abortion under Poland’s new abortion laws. Justyna, who has been supporting people seeking abortions for fifteen years, now faces the possibility of three years in prison for sending a packet of abortion pills she had kept for her personal use to a woman who said her abusive husband was preventing her from leaving Poland to get the procedure. The woman eventually had a miscarriage due to stress after her husband found the package of pills and reported it to the police. With Justyna’s trial having been postponed for the second time to January 2023, abortion-rights advocates at ADT and throughout Poland hope to see all the charges dropped, knowing that a conviction in this case would set a dangerous precedent.
\n\n“We are very afraid of what will happen because I think they want to prove that you cannot help with abortion,” says Adrianna.
\n\nIn June, Polish Health Minister Adam Niedzielski signed an ordinance allowing health information on patients to be saved in a central database by the federal government, including data on pregnancies. While the health ministry insists the data will only be available to medical professionals, women’s rights advocates have expressed concerns that the government will share this information with police and prosecutors, potentially making people afraid to seek care from the state medical system during their pregnancies. Asia says she isn’t sure whether the government actually has a plan for how to use this information or if instilling fear is the only objective. “I feel it’s a great tool of control and a great tool of building the atmosphere of fear, and it already works. People are confused, people are scared. They don’t know who and how to trust, and I absolutely understand this.”
\n\nDespite these new developments and their ominous effects, pro-abortion activists in Poland remain encouraged by many people’s response to the ban. “For me, what was really beautiful and mind-blowing was the solidarity organizing that happened after the court ruling,” says Asia, “and people who started to declare that they did have abortions, they are willing to support others, they know how to do it. I feel like we need more and more of this, because it has such a power of destigmatizing the procedure itself and changing that narrative around it.”
\n\nAdrianna says creating networks is critical to this struggle. “I think in groups, we have power. You are not fighting alone. Even for me as an activist, I feel safer and that I have more possibilities when I’m in this network.”
\n\nAsked what the next step should be towards making abortion accessible to all in Poland, a member of Ciocia Basia says, “The next step has to come soon; it is about the law change. However, the resources the movement has or needs will be still utilized—supporting people in late pregnancies, financial help, providing information, educating, etc.—we will not disappear from one day to another. And some of us will still have to face repression. In patriarchal, racist, and capitalistic society, you have to rest and recharge regularly, but you can’t quit the resistance structures.”
\n\n“I’m really impressed and grateful for the grassroots organizing that is happening around this topic, and I would love this to be spreading,” says Asia. “Everyone can do it. It’s so easy. All the information is there on the internet. Everyone can support someone with an unwanted pregnancy and how to terminate it. I really hope that people are going to take this opportunity to build more support networks for each other.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/11/14/6.jpg\")
“This means war”—graffiti that appeared in response to the prohibition of abortion in Poland.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/11/14/8.jpg\")
\nKobiety W Sieci translates to “Women on the Web.” ↩
\nNearly four million refugees have fled Ukraine since Russia invaded. But these are hardly the only refugees fleeing war-torn countries today. Starting in 2021, the government of Belarus has cynically used thousands of refugees displaced by wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ethiopia, and elsewhere as a weapon with which to exert pressure on the European Union. EU governments have responded callously, leaving these refugees trapped in limbo between two militarized borders and establishing a restricted zone to ensure that observers could not see them dying. Despite this, anarchists organized in the No Borders Team network have defied the restrictions to provide assistance to the refugees in the name of a world without borders. We spoke with anarchists mobilizing on the border between Poland and Belarus to learn more.
\n\nYou can donate to support the efforts of No Borders Team here.
\n\nFor background on mutual aid efforts in Poland during the COVID-19 pandemic, start with this article. To learn about how volunteers act in solidarity with migrants along the border between the United States and Mexico, read this. For perspective from migrants, read this interview with Syrian exiles.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/1.jpg\")
October 23, 2021: Items abandoned by refugees in Poland. They were either in a hurry to escape from the border guards or were unable to pack up camp because they were arrested and taken back to Belarus.
\nOver the past few weeks, the Polish government has commended itself for welcoming the millions of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and countless people in Poland have extended solidarity toward the mothers, children, and elderly entering their country day after day, with ordinary citizens offering transportation to those arriving at train stations and willingly opening their homes to strangers. Yet for months now, on the northeastern border of Poland, migrants of all ages from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and other war-torn countries have been freezing and starving, stranded in the border zone between Poland and Belarus. At a time when there are more forcibly displaced people worldwide than at any previous point in history, this catastrophe highlights the European Union’s bias against non-white migrants and portends a future in which governments will systematically weaponize displaced populations for political leverage.
\n\nAt the same time, in Poland and elsewhere around Europe, anarchist collectives are demonstrating how we might confront such a future, organizing in solidarity with migrants from the Middle East and Africa despite an atmosphere of fear, prejudice, and violence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/16.jpg\")
November 8, 2021: “We receive disturbing news from the border. Belarusian border guards have pushed 2000 people to the Polish side. There are many children. We hear reports that from time to time, shots are fired over the heads of refugees to make them move faster. The Polish army is setting up barriers under arms.”
\nIn mid-2021, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko lured people desperately fleeing armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other parts of Asia and Africa by promising them a safe migration route through Belarus to the European Union. Upon arriving in Minsk, they were detained by Belarusian soldiers and forced to cross the borders of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia outside the official checkpoints.
\n\nNow, for more than six months, thousands of women, men, and children have been treated as pawns in a power struggle between Lukashenko’s government and the European Union, repeatedly forced at gunpoint to enter the EU in unauthorized places and then immediately pushed back into Belarus by the border guards of those countries. They are denied access to shelter, food, medical treatment, and legal services. As of February, at least nineteen bodies of presumed migrants have been found in the forests and marshes along the Polish-Belarusian border.
\n\nSince the early days of this crisis, a network of Polish anarchist collectives known as No Borders Team (NBT) has joined local residents of the border zone to provide these migrants with food, water, blankets, medical care, and other necessities by means of grassroots mutual aid. For No Borders Team, these efforts are part of a long-held mission to eliminate the borders between nations and counteract their pernicious effects.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/12.jpg\")
“No One Is Illegal—Against Fortress Europe,” A banner hung on the Provincial Office in Poznań, Poland.
\n“We have witnessed a huge social outburst in Poland in the last few weeks,” says J— of NBT. “Thousands of people welcomed Ukrainian families under their roof. For some time, there were even too many people who wanted to help, as if with this great movement, the Poles wanted to wipe out their passivity towards migrants on the Belarusian border. These detained families are still thrown into the forest.”
\n\nLukashenko, who has been president of Belarus since 1994, is believed to have orchestrated the forced migration in order to exploit divisions in the EU over its migration policy and destabilize the region, as a form of retaliation for EU governments criticizing his authoritarian regime and imposing sanctions on Belarus. When he was declared to have won a sixth term as president in 2020, the EU and numerous other countries rejected the results due to the widespread belief that the election was rigged. The EU has also imposed economic sanctions in response to human rights abuses Lukashenko’s government has committed, including forcing a Ryanair passenger flight from Greece to Lithuania to land in Minsk in order to arrest an opposition activist in May 2021. The Belarusian economy is largely dependent on Russia, which is Lukashenko’s one remaining ally. When protests raged for weeks in 2020 in response to Lukashenko’s fraudulent re-election, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to send Russia’s military to crack down on the opposition. In July 2021, Lukashenko reacted to the sanctions the EU imposed after the Ryanair incident by threatening that his government would no longer stop undocumented migrants from attempting to reach Lithuania through Belarus.
\n\nA clear human trafficking operation emerged, as state-owned airlines and travel agencies promoted reduced prices for “tours” to Belarus in countries like Iraq, Turkey, and Ethiopia, advertising Belarus as a supposedly safe route to the EU; at the same time, Belarusian officials began to issue more visas, relaxing their rules. After being transported to the EU’s eastern border and placed in camps on military bases, migrants were given wire cutters and forced by Belarusian officers to cut through razor-wire fencing and cross the border outside official checkpoints. By October, Belarus had escalated to trafficking thousands of migrants to the EU border. Nonetheless, in November 2021, Lukashenko claimed that the Belarusian authorities had simply ceased preventing migrants from reaching the EU border, rather than inviting them.
\n\nWhile Western governments have accused Lukashenko of weaponizing these people in a “hybrid attack” against the EU, Putin has defended the Belarusian president’s actions, as he has often done in the past. Since February, Russia’s influence over Belarus has been demonstrated by the fact that Russian troops were allowed to use Belarus as a staging ground for the invasion of Ukraine.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/11.jpg\")
\nParticipants in No Borders Team suspect that Lukashenko’s strategic use of refugees to destabilize the EU has been connected with Putin’s machinations against Ukraine all along. “From the very beginning, our activity on the border with Belarus was related to the political situation in Ukraine,” says J—. “We were aware that one of the reasons for the actions taken by the Belarusian authorities could be the destabilization of the situation in the region, the purpose of which was to facilitate the Russian military operations in Ukraine. Nobody was sure that such an attack would take place, and the scale of the aggression certainly surprised most of us, but we saw the instrumental use of human tragedy on the border as part of the power game in Moscow.”
\n\nBut the tragedy arising from this power play is also the result of the strategy that the Polish government has adopted in response—a strategy that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the European Court of Human Rights, and several human rights organizations have forcefully condemned. In a tactic commonly known as “pushback,” Polish border guards, soldiers, and police round up people who have managed to cross the border and immediately force them to re-enter Belarus outside of official border crossings, without giving them the opportunity to apply for refugee status. Although the Polish government amended regulations to allow this and the parliament passed a law in October supposedly legalizing these expulsions, the practice clearly violates international and European law by denying people the right to apply for asylum.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/3.jpg\")
“Most likely a Kurdish family. Few children, women, men, an elderly person—they were all pushed back across the border the same night.”
\nIn November, the Polish Border Guard escalated its violence against the migrants by firing water cannons and teargas at people trying to cross the border. Many of the those who are caught after entering Poland are held in guarded detention centers, often for months at a time. In one center in Wędrzyn, detained migrants have staged two different hunger protests against the conditions there. NBT includes teams of people who have been able to provide essential items to people detained in these camps, and in some cases have connected people wanting to apply for asylum with legal assistance.
\n\nPolish President Andrzej Duda declared a state of emergency on September 2, 2021 in parts of the Podlaskie and Lubelskie regions bordering Belarus. The state of emergency establishes a three-kilometer zone along the border that no one is legally allowed to enter, including journalists, non-governmental organizations, and independent observers. Anyone who enters the restricted zone to provide humanitarian aid risks being arrested or fined. “Since the zone was established from the beginning of September, no medics were let in there,” says D—. “Even if someone was dying in the forest, the soldiers at the border let in no one.” While border guards have turned away medical NGOs like Doctors Without Borders, some medics have been able to enter the borderland undetected to treat migrants suffering from hypothermia and injuries resulting from the violent assaults of Polish and Belarusian officers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/13.jpg\")
“In the silence of the night, someone is dying in the forest.” Christmas eve, 2021.
\nF—, an organizer with NBT, says almost all of the activists participating have been trained in first aid. Typically, when they find people who have requested help in the forest, they address whatever medical needs they have first, then give them something warm to eat and drink. “Depending on the person you encounter,” she says, “sometimes you just help them change clothes and then you leave because they have some plans, but sometimes you spend a bit more time with them. You sit around, you share the blankets, you share the coldness. You drink some tea and hear their stories, and they show you the photos of their kids and their families on their phones.” F— has met many interesting people in the border zone, including some who were political activists organizing for marginalized groups in their countries of origin and now find themselves on the other side of that process in the EU.
\n\nD— says they have encountered several people who were in such bad condition they were afraid they might die. Though the NBT activists haven’t seen any deaths in their work yet, they have met people who have been severely beaten, including some children, and women who been repeatedly raped, in most cases by Belarusian soldiers, but also by Polish officers. “It’s amazing how they are able to survive there,” he says, noting that some migrants were totally unprepared for the terrain and weather in the area, being from the Middle East. Activists have provided them with tarps, maps, sleeping bags, new clothes, and sometimes showed them how to build a temporary shelter.
\n\nThe people who live within the “state of emergency” zone along the border were the first to respond to the humanitarian crisis on their doorstep. “A very big part of any aid that was provided to people that got stuck in the forest after the establishment of the no-go zone, was actually based on the locals,” says F—. In spite of living under constant threat from the officers who patrol the area in helicopters, many residents have risked arrest from the beginning by venturing into the forest to bring lifesaving relief to the migrants stranded there and continually try to provide aid to those being held in the detention centers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/7.jpg\")
On February 12, 2022, a demonstration took place in Krosno Odrzańskie in solidarity with people imprisoned in concentration centers. A few hundred people gathered in front of the gate of the local Border Guard unit in response to the protests breaking out in the so-called “centers for foreigners.” At that time, there was a hunger strike in the notorious center in Wędrzyn, among others.
\nD— talks about the connections that anarchist organizers have formed with the local residents in the process of doing this work together. “It was really impressive for us, because Poland is a super conservative country, to see the organization of the local people, who were not activists before.” Many of them, he says, have come to share NBT’s view of the government after seeing people die in the forest.
\n\nProhibiting the media from entering the border zone has allowed the border guards to operate “like cowboys,” according to F—. She says people providing aid there have had guns pointed in their faces, been dragged out of their cars, and had their phones taken by guards. “They can do anything,” says F—. “Nobody can see them, nobody can judge them, and nobody will ever know.”
\n\n“There are some undercover cops that are following us,” says J—. The group believes the police know the location of their base, where they meet and store the items they distribute. J— says they are taking a lot of safety measures, though. While he prefers not to go into the details of how the NBT volunteers carry out their activities, he says it helps that they are a large network and can share information easily with one another. The migrants stranded in the forest know how to contact them and share where they are located, which enables members of the network to respond to calls for aid. Those responding to these calls travel in groups and look out for each other.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/9.jpg\")
The forest.
\nPerhaps the most glaring difference between the Polish government’s responses to the two crises, F— points out, is that helping refugees from Ukraine is not criminalized. “To support people from Ukraine, you do not have to hide in the forest from Polish services. You do not have to cover the curtains at home after you sheltered a refugee, you do not have to worry that the police or territorial defense forces will throw you on the ground, that they will intimidate you because you go out to meet people on the move with soup and a warm jacket.”
\n\n“Although we are impressed by the scale of help provided by Poles, we cannot fail to notice that it is selective help,” says J—. “While Ukrainian mothers with children can count on support, men and people with different skin colors have a much harder time. Of course, this is not just a Polish problem, as many shipments from Western Europe refuse to take non-white people.”
\n\nNBT participants argue that the reason the crisis resulting from the invasion of Ukraine has eclipsed the one on the northeastern border is not only its scale, but also the psychological distance that many Poles feel from the migrants who have attempted to enter their country through Belarus—an attitude fostered by fearmongering from state and capital interests. “The Russian invasion of Ukraine is for the Polish society more visible, perceptible and less complicated than the bombing raids in destabilized Syria, Iraq, or Yemen,” says F—. “It is easier for them to recognize that they are war refugees who need help. This is how the propaganda of the Polish state worked.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/4.jpg\")
“Refugees welcome here.”
\nWhile continuing their work on the Polish-Belarusian border, NBT has demonstrated the same solidarity toward people driven from their homes in Ukraine. “From the beginning of the war, people associated with the No Borders Team were present on the border with Ukraine,” says D—, “first engaging in immediate aid, such as the border cuisine, organized by Food Not Bombs collectives from all over Poland, or assistance in the transport of people. Over time, we started more coordinated activities. Together with our Ukrainian comrades, we launched aid transports from Poland to Ukraine, and the direct transport of people escaping from the war to Poland.”
\n\n“The chaos and confusion surrounding this situation are slowly stabilizing, so opportunities for organized action are emerging,” says D—. “Friends from different sections travel to the border and help with splitting and sorting packages, cooking, transporting; we organize drops of things and money. We work with an anarchist group fighting in the vicinity of Kyiv; we support them with supplies. A base was also created where people from our environment can come. We are currently running a fundraiser for a delivery truck that will be able to operate in Ukraine.”
\n\nRegarding how the Polish state has functioned in response to the influx of Ukrainian refugees, J— says, “It would suffice to say that it does not function at all. However, it is not a particularly revealing sentence for us as anarchists. Practically all help given to victims of this war is organized from below. Millions of people devote their time, work and money to it. On the other hand, the government confines itself to press conferences at which these achievements are remembered. Since the beginning of the war, no coherent policy was created to help refugees.” While the Polish government constructs a 353-million-euro wall along its border with Belarus, despite fierce opposition from both human rights and environmental advocates, participants in NBT view this reactive approach as a symbol of the country’s complete lack of viable policy on migration.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/6.jpg\")
“No wall.”
\nAs F— explains, “The activists and residents of the borderland, who have been operating on the Polish-Belarusian border for over half a year, also use this time of social insurgency for Ukraine to emphasize that all refugees can come to Poland and should find their place to live here or a safe way in their future travels. Regardless of papers or nationality.”
\n\nWhile the Belarusian government has begun to transport detained migrants back to Minsk to be repatriated to the countries they fled, hundreds still remain in the border zone. NBT’s continuing work to aid the migrants still trapped there is only one part of their mission to change migration policy in the European Union and beyond. They argue that opening borders and working together is the only way we can prepare for what lies ahead, as more and more people are displaced from their homes by war, political upheaval, economic crises, and ecological disasters. The collective in Poland is part of a wider network; they work together with No Borders groups from Germany, France, Italy, Czech Republic, and the UK.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/10.jpg\")
A photograph of the demonstration in Krosno Odrzańskie on February 12, 2022, taken by Agata Kubis.
\n“We have a different situation than groups outside Poland,” says D—. “This is due to the fact that none of these groups enter the restricted zone and work in such difficult conditions: long trips to the forest and swamps, extremely low temperatures. Poles and Lithuanians are forced to engage in saving lives in the summer in a restricted zone, which is criminalized in these countries.” On March 23, four activists in Poland who were providing humanitarian aid to a family on the border of Belarus were arrested on suspicion of smuggling people over the border.
\n\nIn the face of this adversity, No Borders movement continues to promote the idea that border crises are not caused by migrants, but by the system of geopolitical division into nation-states. “First of all,” says J—, “we just need to do what the No Borders movement has been doing for years—support people on the move in every way. We need to create support networks, open safe houses, show the way, put up that daily real resistance to borders.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/15.jpg\")
Demonstrators in Poland opposing the construction of a border wall between Poland and Belarus.
\n“Paradoxically, the situation in Ukraine has revealed to us the natural closeness and ease with which mutual assistance is provided in the face of threats across state borders,” says D—. “The elimination of the mechanisms of the development of authoritarian structures is only one of the factors favoring the opening of borders.” Participants in NBT believe that some of the other important steps towards a borderless world include developing a plan for slow demilitarization, strengthening pro-ecological programs, the fair distribution and redistribution of resources, working to eradicate poverty and hunger, education in ethical attitudes, and building a network of self-organizing and self-managing local structures.
\n\n“There is a lot to do, but we only have our own borders to lose,” says D—.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/14.jpg\")
\nThe following account appeared on the Facebook page of the No Borders Team on February 23, 2022.
\n\nIn order to give a voice to those the world does not want to hear, we publish the story of a person who decided to take a huge risk and set off on his way to Europe:
\n\n“I’m from Syria, I’m 33 years old and I’m an engineer. I left Syria about nine years ago and traveled to Lebanon—among other reasons, for stomach problems that I had to treat. One day someone told me:
\n\n“If you want to go to Europe, there’s an easy way. Just give me the money and I’ll give you a ticket and visa to Belarus, then you can go anywhere. It’s a really simple way…”
\n\nI don’t want to go back to Syria because of the war and my religion. If I say what my faith is, they can kill me. There is a branch of Christianity in Syria that few people profess. In 2018, ISIS attacked my village and killed around 300 people: children, women, and men.
\n\n…And that’s how it happened that I gave this man $ 4000 to arrange a visa for me and a hotel reservation. We had a direct flight from Lebanon to Minsk. When our group of eight arrived, some man picked us up, put us in a hotel, and said that we needed to get a really good rest for two days. He also told us:
\n\n“If you want to go to Europe, you have to pay 3000 Euro in cash. A car will take you to the border, you will walk a kilometer or two, and on the other side (of the border), there will be a car waiting to take you wherever you want. Germany, Belgium… ”
\n\nPerhaps we are all stupid, because we believed him.
\n\nAfter two days, the car actually came and took us to the border. But it was not two kilometers to go, it was about 30. As we couldn’t go back, we decided to embark on this terrible journey. We walked for about three days. One person in the group had a phone with internet. One man, I don’t remember his name, gave us directions: “go here… go there …” When we got to the fence in Belarus, there was no way to go through. The man said we had to find a hole in it, but we couldn’t, so we walked under the fence. Then we walked for about 20 hours in the forest and came to a town. The man who was navigating kept saying: “You have to walk 5 kilometers here, 6 kilometers there, 5 kilometers again, 12 kilometers…” and so on and on.
\n\nWhen we got to the last point, it was another day. There, the Polish police caught us. They gave us water and said nothing except that we had to go back to Belarus. The guard took us to the border. Later, on the other side, we were caught by a Belarusian soldier. We said we want to go back to Minsk, Iraq, Syria, anywhere. The soldier laughed and said:
\n\n“You are not going back to Minsk. You’ll die sooner. You have two options: you can die here or try to go to Poland. “
\n\nAnd they took us, eight people, to another group of people, a group of about 200 people, in a camp, but with nothing to live on. They didn’t give us water or food. They said:
\n\n“You are not human. You are animals. “
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/5.jpg\")
Do not judge a person until you have walked a mile in her shoes. As wars, ecological disasters, and other crises displace people around the world, you may be a refugee yourself one day.
\nWe stayed there for five days. We asked for water every day. We didn’t get it. A soldier would come and say if we wanted water, he could give it to us for $100 a bottle [sic]. This water was not fit for a person to drink; it was green, from a puddle. But you can’t live without water… so I paid him every day. One day, the soldiers stole my friend’s powerbank and a pack of cigarettes, and the other person’s phone. They acted like the mafia.
\n\nI don’t know why they use us as propaganda. They collected us every night and went to the border with Poland. They (Belarusian “security”) hid among people, wearing normal civilian clothes. They took stones and threw them towards the Polish side, shouting “Yalla” at the same time to make others believe that the Arabs were throwing stones. These were provocations. When we couldn’t get over the Polish fence, they beat us and said:
\n\n“You have to go!”
\n\nAfter five days, we were picked up and taken to another place. A Belarusian soldier cut the fence so that we could go to Poland. We walked about five days without water or food. We slept in the snow, we were very tired. In the end, my colleagues and I decided to go out on the main road because we didn’t care what happened anymore, we were so exhausted…
\n\nAfter a while the woman in the car stopped. We just said to her:
\n\n“Please help us.”
\n\nShe took us, but after fifteen minutes, the police stopped the car at the checkpoint.
\n\nI fell to the ground and said:
\n\n“Please take me to the hospital.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/8.jpg\")
\nThey took me to a place where a Kurdish doctor worked, a very good man. He told us about the organizations that help, he gave us the papers to be signed.
\n\nWe cannot go back to Belarus. If they want to kill us in Poland, go ahead, we don’t care. But we don’t want to go back to Belarus.
\n\nFinally, people from your group came to the hospital and protected us. And thank God for that help. After two days in the hospital, the guards took us to the police station to submit documents and took me to an open place.
\n\nThis is my story. I’ve seen very, very bad things.
\n\nI saw a man dying next to me in the woods and there was nothing I could do…
\n\nIf I had to choose between life and Europe, I would choose life.
\n\nI’m lucky to have met people like you who know what humanity is.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/28/2.jpg\")
A solidarity protest in Michałów: “Mothers to the border.”
\nThrough interviews with the founders and participants, we explore how a mutual aid network in Poland has provided for tens of thousands of people during the COVID-19 pandemic and what others might learn from their experiment.
\n\nThis is the second installment in a series exploring mutual aid projects around the world in the era of COVID-19.
\n\nWhen Filip Zulewski got home from work on March 11, 2020, the idea he had seemed simple enough. He had just learned that the university in Warsaw at which he taught would be closed for the duration of Poland’s nationwide coronavirus lockdown; he was concerned about the heavy restrictions the government had suddenly placed on everyday life. He thought of how, when he needed emotional support, he reached out to friends and family. This had given him the idea to start a support group for people who might not have friends or family, or who were not originally from Warsaw and whose families were somewhere else, so people could help each other through what was certain to be an extraordinarily difficult time. The group Filip created on Facebook that day, which he named Visible Hand, began with about 50 of his friends and acquaintances. Three days later, it was being covered in the national media. Within ten days, Visible Hand had become a movement involving over 90,000 members, with smaller groups forming in cities and towns across Poland.
\n\nIn the first article in this series, we explored the ways in which established mutual aid networks have been uniquely prepared to respond to their communities’ needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Visible Hand is a mutual aid network that formed, almost by accident, in response to this crisis and has already made a profound impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, despite the vast majority of them not having known each other before. Even as it exemplifies the anarchist principles that inspired it, the activists who founded it believe it should not promote any political agenda, but focus solely on meeting people’s needs. Having fulfilled its purpose in the current crisis, can this type of initiative create radical change in Poland, where the far right has gained considerable ground in the government and throughout society?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/25/1.jpg\")
Activists from Widoczna Ręka—Polish for “Visible Hand”—in front of their local headquarters in Piotrkow Trybunalski.
\nOn July 12, Poland’s conservative incumbent president Andrzej Duda was re-elected by a margin of about half a million votes. The election, which drew the highest voter turnout since the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1989, was almost evenly divided between socially conservative, largely older voters in rural towns, and the young urbanites who voted for Duda’s liberal challenger, Rafał Trzaskowski. Backed by Poland’s ruling conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, Duda appealed to anti-gay sentiment in his campaign, calling LGBT rights an “ideology” that was “even more destructive” than communism, and promising to pass legislation to prevent gay couples from adopting children and to ban schools from teaching about LGBT issues. PiS won the majority in the 2015 parliamentary election; they espouse right-wing nationalist ideals and were accused by the European Commission of undermining Poland’s independent judiciary after imposing reforms in 2017 that lowered the retirement age of judges and decreed different retirement ages for male and female judges.
\n\nAs of publication, there have been almost 50,000 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 and over 1700 related deaths in Poland, with the first confirmed case announced on March 4. Poland’s Ministry of Health has been criticized for providing misinformation to the public, downplaying the threat, and for failing to adequately prepare for the crisis. Doctors claimed on social media that the government’s reported numbers of confirmed cases of infection were most likely distorted by the shortage of available test kits. Poland’s public healthcare system, which had been underfunded for years, was unprepared for the pandemic. Hospitals faced a severe shortage of personal protective equipment and medical supplies such as respirators, as well as an insufficient number of staff per patient and lack of training in procedures for such a crisis. Healthcare workers, however, were threatened with repercussions for letting the public know about the conditions in which they were forced to work. On March 20, after a midwife posted a report on social media detailing the situation at the Lesser Poland hospital where she worked, the Ministry of Health issued a written statement ordering medical personnel not to make public statements about the epidemic without permission. She was fired the next day.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/25/9.jpg\")
Making masks for a local hospital in Slupsk in an effort coordinated by the local Visible Hand group.
\nPolish authorities instituted strict lockdown measures beginning on March 10 with a ban on mass events; all schools were closed on March 12. On March 20, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki declared a state of “epidemic threat,” even though the number of people infected per capita was lower in Poland than in the other 22 EU countries; on March 31, Morawiecki announced a regulation prohibiting minors under 18 from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a legal guardian. Poland started to roll back restrictions on April 20 and continued to do so by reopening its primary schools on May 25. Due to a spike in the infection count, however, the government has tightened restrictions again in August, promising spot checks by police at shops and private events and more heavy fines for people not wearing face masks.
\n\nIn the first month, Filip recalls, police would constantly check IDs on the streets and impose fines on individuals for violations such as going out without PPE or to do “unessential” tasks such as taking out their garbage or washing their cars. The looming threat of punishment created a pervasive air of anxiety for Poles, as did the new challenges that came with the quarantine, such as how to get their shopping done. Another concern for people with young children was education—a widespread lack of resources and time to work from home while having their kids schooled online at the same time. “People started to organize their lives around education,” says Filip.
\n\nCurrently employed as a university lecturer in engineering, Filip built extensive experience in anarchist organizing long before accidentally sparking this movement. In 2012, he and his friends created an initiative called Spina Collective, for training in “sustainable activism”—conducting workshops in practices to help political organizers avoid burnout, including training in somatics. He also helped to start the Ada Radical-Cultural Center Collective, a cultural and organizing space, as well as facilitating meetings within Poland’s burgeoning climate movement and participating in the 2019 Climate Camp, a protest encampment to block a coal mine in central Poland.
\n\nThe inspiration for the group’s name was “Invisible Hand,” a Polish TV program that existed from the 1950s to the 1970s, created by the founders of Poland’s scouting movement as a way to encourage altruism in young people—as well as to keep them out of trouble at a time when they were frequently left on their own due to the widespread poverty the country experienced after the Second World War. Small groups of kids were given opportunities to aid other people in everyday life, particularly those who were elderly or sick, by performing helpful deeds such as painting fences. Participants always provided this help anonymously, leaving behind only a hand stamp, and the TV program would select written reports of such assignments to feature on the air.
\n\nThe name of this new initiative reflects the vastly different era in which we live today. “Now, with social media, no one is anonymous, so the things we do are visible,” explains Gosia Golawska, who started a Visible Hand chapter in the city of Lublin in eastern Poland. Likewise, in the time of COVID-19, it isn’t feasible for people to help each other anonymously because it is necessary to be careful about having contact with one another. Most importantly, however, Filip stresses the importance of neighbors connecting and building trust during crises such as this. His background in anarchist organizing has provided him with experience in forming affinity groups, and he sees creating mutual aid networks—and giving others the tools to do so—as similar to this.
\n\nVisible Hand is only one of the mutual aid networks that exist in Poland. Food Not Bombs, the global initiative to rescue and distribute free food that would otherwise go to waste, has nearly 20 chapters in cities across Poland, which distributed countless meals to people who needed them during the early months of the pandemic. The hardships created by the countrywide lockdown have also given rise to groups that focus on tasks such as walking dogs for quarantined neighbors and preparing and delivering hot meals to seniors.
\n\nOne of the earliest and most widespread demonstrations of grassroots solidarity to emerge in the current crisis has been the collective effort to support healthcare workers. Even though the Ministry of Health sought to conceal the hospitals’ lack of necessary protective equipment and medical supplies in its statements to the media, it was evident to the public from the beginning that the government not providing hospitals with what they needed. People across the country began to respond to these needs themselves, either as part of existing activist groups or on their own—preparing meals for hospital workers, creating DIY face shields with 3D printers, and sewing hundreds of thousands of face masks, sometimes thousands or tens of thousands per month in one place.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/25/6.jpg\")
Visible Hand activists from a local group in Trojmiasto involving emigrants from Chechnya sew face masks for the local hospital.
\nFilip recalls how people would go out in their cars and distribute them to hospitals and to people on the street. “It was a huge movement,” he says. Filip says he saw people who had not previously been politically active get a “boost of energy” from organizing in their communities during this time, and gain a sense of community they hadn’t had before. He also observed how existing anarchist groups were well prepared to put mutual aid principles into practice in response to this crisis; he believes the “social resources” he had built up from being connected with other activists in Poland and abroad have made it easier to establish an effective mutual aid network.
\n\nFilip started Visible Hand as a private group on Facebook, but it wasn’t closed to new members. The small network of friends who comprised the group on March 11 began to invite other friends, and it grew exponentially. The initiative got its first media coverage on its second day of existence, in an online newspaper. By Friday, March 13, it had been widely covered in mainstream Polish media, including television news.
\n\nFilip describes the shock he felt that same weekend when he saw Visible Hand listed on the Ministry of Health’s webpage for pandemic resources. “I said, ‘What’s going on? Why is the government talking about this anarchist mutual aid stuff?’” He recalls giving about 70 interviews in the first two weeks, sometimes five interviews a day, as the growing movement was covered by Polish newspapers, TV, websites, radio and podcasts. Because he didn’t want to take all the credit or be seen as the “leader” of what was actually a communal effort being undertaken by many people, he asked his friends who were involved to give some of the interviews. Soon, the media began to focus more on the local subgroups that had formed, and their respective organizers were giving their own interviews.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/25/2.jpg\")
Visible Hand activists from a local group in Pruszkow offering support to the local hospital.
\nWhen the original nationwide group began, the members mostly discussed concerns about how to survive the quarantine, such as how to shop for groceries safely, as well as their need for emotional support to cope with fear and loneliness while confined to their homes. At the time, a friend of Filip’s had recently returned to Warsaw from abroad and was not allowed to do her own shopping while under strict quarantine, so group members coordinated with each other to assist her and other people in similar situations.
\n\n“People started solving different problems in a very creative way,” he says. Posts listing people’s needs would spark discussions on the group page in which members would resolve each problem using “community brainpower.” Filip describes one case in which a group of Poles were looking for a way to return to their country from Cape Verde. The pandemic had caught them on a visit to the island nation off the western coast of Africa, as countries were slowly closing their borders and stopping air traffic. Internet users combined their efforts to find connections that had not yet been canceled, and after four days, the group landed safely in Poland and began quarantine. This is just one of thousands of such examples of what the group could do, Filip says.
\n\nIn each post, group members used one of two hashtags, #ihaveaneed or #icanhelp, and specified where they were located. While many people posted what they could provide, Filip recalls, it often didn’t match the posted needs. “There were many people who said, ‘I can walk the dog.’ On the other hand, there were many, many people who said, ‘I don’t have a dog, but I need somebody to talk with me.’” The moderators of the nationwide group decided it would be best to prioritize the need posts during that initial stage.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/25/3.jpg\")
A Visible Hand activist from a local group in Zielona Gora supporting the local hospital.
\nAs the membership of this group increased, many noticed that the effectiveness of the discussions around solving problems suffered. Filip’s friends had offered to help moderate the posts, of which there were between 200 and 300 each day; about 40 people worked diligently to keep the group on point. Filip recalls, “We were writing to people, ‘This is not the place to chat about the political situation in Poland. We are in deep shit, of course, but let’s not talk about this, let’s talk about other people’s needs. This is the group’s main aim.’”
\n\nIt became clear to the moderators that smaller groups would be more constructive, and that communities would be better able to help each other if they organized locally. This was when Filip decided to “outsource” the idea. He asked friends to help by establishing regional chapters where they lived, and created a simple guide to help people start and operate chapters autonomously in their own neighborhoods. Less than two weeks after the creation of the first group, there were over 150 local chapters of Visible Hand throughout the country, as well as a subgroup for internationals in Poland, a separate one specifically for Ukrainians in Poland, and subgroups for Poles abroad in cities such as Berlin, Paris, and Vienna, as well as several in Great Britain. There are also groups that focus on meeting specific needs, including one in which people aid each other in finding employment, as well as a group where they can seek free legal advice. Many of the local chapters formed around existing grassroots activist groups, including feminist, anarchist, environmentalist, and Food Not Bombs groups, that already knew how to organize in a horizontal, bottom-up fashion, while others were started by charity organizations utilizing a hierarchical structure.
\n\nApproximately 75% of the membership of most Visible Hand groups, including the nationwide group, is female-identifying. Margo Kubiscik was among the group of friends who comprised the original Facebook group. When the nationwide group reached an unwieldy number of members and it became clear that they needed to decentralize the growing movement, she started one of the first local chapters in Lodz, the third largest city in Poland.
\n\nThe group gathered nearly 4000 people in its first few days on Facebook. “Initially, the majority were women,” says Margo. “In March, there were 85% women, 15% men and less than 1% non-binary people. Now, in early August, 78% of group members are women, 25% men, and less than 1% non-binary.” She says most members both request aid and provide it to others in equal measure. Margo, who is a reproductive rights activist, also coordinates Visible Hand’s reproductive rights group, which connects women in Poland with abortion resources. Poland’s abortion laws are among the most restrictive in the EU.
\n\nOn the subject of the movement’s gender demographics, Filip says he believes cis males often don’t feel as comfortable stating their needs and asking for help as people socialized as women do. “I think it’s a cultural thing,” he says, though he also believes Polish people in general have become less ashamed to ask for help as a result of this crisis. “When you create these small communities,” he says, reflecting on the outcome of people organizing autonomous chapters in their own neighborhoods, “they learn to talk about their needs, and they also learn how to help.”
\n\nIn keeping with the guiding principles of mutual aid, decentralizing this movement into autonomous local chapters allows neighbors to take care of each other’s needs at the community level. Filip has observed how people have become empowered through increased awareness of all the ways they can support each other—by sharing tools and appliances, skills, ideas, or simply empathy for their shared fears and frustrations. “There are a lot of discussions like, ‘I have material to sew, but I don’t have a sewing machine. Can you help me?’ People have created a lot of input into the group, but they have also gotten this feeling of community and mutual aid.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/25/8.jpg\")
Visible Hand activists from the local group in Wejcherowo working with a volunteer fire brigade to support the local hospital.
\nIn the early stage of the quarantine, Filip hosted watch parties on Facebook for members of the nationwide group to view movies together, selecting mostly comedies. There would be up to 100 people watching at a time, chatting with one another, after which Filip would receive feedback from many of them, telling him how they enjoyed the experience because it gave them a sense of community even while isolated at home. Once people began to form more local groups, he eventually stopped showing movies in order to give people a chance to connect within their own communities.
\n\nNow that most of Poland’s lockdown measures have been lifted, the most common needs for which people seek support in Visible Hand groups are housing and employment, as well as the need this initiative was originally intended to meet, emotional support. At the top of each Facebook group is a pinned post where members can ask for someone to talk with if they are anxious, depressed, or otherwise in emotional distress. During the quarantine, when people posted that they were experiencing crisis as a consequence of being isolated, many would respond with information about programs or crisis lines they could call for help, while others would offer simply to listen. Soon, professional therapists began to offer their services for free.
\n\nMargo says people continue to reach out for emotional support every day in the groups. Hundreds of Poles now receive long-term counseling free of charge from mental health professionals with whom they’ve connected through Visible Hand. “I think this is unusual for Poland,” Margo says, explaining that it has traditionally been considered a taboo in the culture to talk about one’s emotional and psychological difficulties. She believes that the pandemic has changed many people’s attitudes about this. Out of necessity, and perhaps because they know so many others share their feelings at the moment, they have become more willing to express them openly, even to people they’ve never met.
\n\nA key point that distinguishes Visible Hand from most mutual aid initiatives is that, despite its radical leftist roots, Filip and the other founding members decided from the beginning that the group would take a completely practical approach to meeting people’s needs and not promote any particular political ideology. On each chapter’s Facebook page, the rules clearly state that this is not the place to discuss politics or religion, that the only purpose of this space is to help each other. The job of the moderators is to check all of the posts, and if someone breaks the rules by posting about politics or something equally unhelpful in meeting people’s needs, to mute the thread or sometimes even block the person. “We read every post and every comment,” says Gosia, “so vulgarism, arrogance, racism, or simply stupid, useless comments are not allowed.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/25/4.jpg\")
A local group in Myslowice.
\nFilip feels it’s important for these groups to be clear that they have no hidden agenda—to build trust not through ideology, but by following through on what they promise to do. He believes this is one aspect that makes this sort of initiative more effective than aid from government or charity organizations. “Transparency is the key,” he says. Having observed the way far-right groups provided aid to hospitals at the beginning of the pandemic while making certain that their “branding” was always attached to the aid they provided, he saw these groups’ efforts as a blatant attempt to gain credibility, and envisioned this mutual aid network as prioritizing what people needed over the promotion of ideals.
\n\nThe network of friends who started the original Visible Hand group to support each other emotionally, some of whom eventually organized the earliest local subgroups, share a specific background of left-wing activism. Because of this, many of the moderators personally support the initiatives about which some people post in the groups, yet they stringently uphold the rule of no political discussion in these spaces. Margo, for one, describes her own political leanings as “all the way to the left.” She firmly believes, however, that while Visible Hand may have emerged from anarchist principles, it’s crucial for the groups not to get bogged down in political debate, but to meet one another’s needs without discriminating between left-wing and right-wing.
\n\nGosia feels the mutual aid provided in her regional chapter constitutes a kind of resistance even without promoting a political view. “I consider it a grassroots social movement and an answer to the incapacity of politicians,” she says. “Also, I wanted to create a friendly and positive space in contrast to all the fake news coming from the media.”
\n\nAs government-mandated restrictions are lifted and Polish society emerges from lockdown, the question becomes whether or not such “apolitical” mutual aid efforts can be sustained beyond this particular crisis. Is it possible that the connections formed between neighbors in a moment of unwonted danger can transcend ideology and change the way we live together? Especially in a country as politically divided as Poland is right now?
\n\n“Specifically, [Visible Hand] was created for the pandemic and the quarantine,” Filip says. “However, when the situation changes, I would like to see how the groups decide what they will do in their hometowns.” As he continues to observe and learn from how individual chapters operate, he hopes that going through this experience together will show everyone involved how to take care of each other in their respective communities. In this way, they will be prepared for future crises.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/25/7.jpg\")
Visible Hand activists from Piotrkow Trybunalski support the local Social Welfare Center.
\n“I think we will definitely keep this chapter,” Gosia says of the Lublin group. “It’s not going to disappear. People’s needs have changed, but still we think it’s a very positive and needed place. People already know there is a safe space where they can ask for help any time.”
\n\nThe main disadvantage for grassroots mutual aid groups, Filip believes, aside from not having access to the same kind of resources as government or charity programs, is the difficulty in maintaining continuity. “When people are overwhelmed with work and their families, there is not much of them left for mutual aid work. It’s good at the beginning of the crisis, creating and maintaining these connections.” While people may want to support each other, he explains, “There is a huge problem of burnout.” Now that lockdown restrictions have been lifted, many throughout Poland are still in need, yet it remains to be seen whether the movement can maintain its momentum as people try to meet the demands of getting back to “normal.”
\n\n“To make it constant requires resources,” says Filip, stressing that “resources” means more than money alone. Resources can include anything from a car, to storage space, to people with different professional backgrounds who can provide help based on their training as well as train other people. He believes the power of this kind of mutual aid lies in one very specific advantage, however, especially in times of struggle and shortage. “In my opinion, people can be very inventive when they are in need. And this kind of inventiveness is something that government and charity don’t have.”
\n\nMargo plans to keep the Lodz chapter’s Facebook group open indefinitely, and says she too would like to see Visible Hand groups used to prepare for future crises. In the wake of Duda’s re-election as president, she also believes solidarity and emotional support among marginalized people will be crucial to resisting threats to their liberty. “People are very afraid of what could happen,” she says, reflecting on recent conversations with LGBT+ people about the PiS’s promised legislative measures.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/25/10.jpg\")
The power of the volunteer: a Visible Hand activist from the local group in Zielona Gora.
\n“It’s tempting to make this an organization,” says Filip, “but we don’t want to be another charity. We just want to show people they can organize, that they can support each other’s needs in their own small communities. This is something that Polish society somehow forgot.”
\n\nHe recalls being a child during the last years of the Soviet era. “People were living under a totalitarian regime, so they had to organize themselves somehow.” Neighbors, he explains, formed informal networks of solidarity in which families like his would look after each other’s kids, and share food when there were shortages. Sometimes there would be one phone shared by all the residents of an apartment building, so a person would go to their neighbor’s home to call their family in another city. After the transition to a capitalist society, Filip feels those bonds between communities weakened, making it necessary to relearn how to take care of each other these past months. “The crisis showed us that we can organize this way. And this is my huge hope—that people will remember, and strengthen these bonds, and realize that you don’t have to wait for the government or charity.”
\n\nWhile there is no way to predict what long-term impact Visible Hand will have on Polish society, we can hope that the sense of community and empowerment people have found in these groups will remain with them. Margo expresses how much it’s meant to her personally to be able to do something for others during this tumultuous period. “It’s changed me,” she says.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/25/5.jpg\")
The local Visible Hand center in Piotrkow Trybunalski.
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