Juliusz Watroba – people to People (?

people(?) to People

1. There are moments in life when there is nothing you can say, when whatever you say is insufficient, as the burden of misfortune is just unimaginable. This has repeated itself throughout history, since Cain. What connects that biblical murderer with contemporary ones? The urge to dominate, enslave, abuse, humiliate ... In other words: power, the lust for which releases all moral restraints. It causes hearts to shrink into deadly stones, and consciences to pale and fade into maddened minds at the whispers of the devil himself. The vision of absolute power, over family, state, and the world, is blinding. Power regardless of the costs, without taking anyone or anything into account. It might seem that humankind, having seen millions of victims perish and suffer in successive wars over the centuries, would have reached a stage of development that would allow them to focus on making the world safer and its inhabitants better. To deal with diseases and epidemics and be able to save their dying nature. Surprisingly, the caveman mentality has not changed at all. It just that the props are becoming more and more perfidious – clubs have been replaced by rockets. Regardless, the effect remains the same: tears, blood, and senseless deaths. This has been happening shockingly close to us, with death among both the attackers and the defenders, old and young. We are not talking about toy soldiers, but people of flesh and blood, wanting to live ordinary lives. The evil that is born in insane minds is unimaginable. All dictators ended badly, a faith awaiting the current ones sooner or later. What hurts the most is the fact that, before they end up in the darkest corners of hell, they will instigate so much evil and start fires that will not be extinguished by the rain of oblivion. These are people without hearts and consciences. 2. I was in Ukraine some years ago and I still remember some things vividly about that stay: a glass of strong vodka drunk in one gulp with the owner of the hotel just before dinner, which, despite being different from “Europe-

People who act inhumanly are no longer human an” standards, had an aura of deliberate cordiality. Faith locked in churches, with beautiful icons and baroque altars; with the silent wisdom of cemeteries; wandering around castles with a common history. Meetings with Poles who have lived there for generation. Kids expecting sweets from us. Singing Polish-Ukrainian songs by a bonfire. The Lvov opera, filled with angelic voices. Stories that mix heroism with cruelty. Vast expanses of fertile land. An arduous journey towards Europe after regaining their independence. Later, I met Ukrainian poets who sang and recited their own poems. I brought a beautiful, though small, icon in a silver dress back from that trip, bought at the market with all the money I had because I liked it so much. This Ukrainian (or perhaps Polish) Mother of God with Child, hanging above my desk, greets me every single day, invoking tears for sixteen days. 3. Something unimaginably cruel has just happened, something you might connect with nightmares or disaster films, the directors of which expose us to unimaginable horrors. However, this isn’t a bad dream, nor a violence-infested movie. This horror is happening as we speak, much too close for comfort. War, a word that for some might conjure up glory and heroism, but which all too often conceals the vastness of misfortunes of children and old people, men, and women, entangled in a terrible machine launched by mentally ill individuals. Would someone in their right mind consciously condemn masses of innocent people to death, cause inhuman suffering and tear up the lives of millions of innocent people? Not to mention sending their own people to death in the name of criminal ideologies to enslave entire nations? As if “ordinary” misfortunes were insufficient to cause suffering – as if cancer, heart attacks, diabetes, depression, and hundreds of other diseases that plague people were not enough. It is difficult to discount victims of car accidents, or the aftermath of a pandemic that we still have to come to terms with.

By in what categories do people who cause wars think? It is simply beyond my imagination. Don’t they have their own precious loved ones, or have they perhaps never been loved? How is it that they behave as if they were without conscience, without heart, without humanity? They tend to addict their closest associates and even entire nations with their inhuman charisma. The world saw some clear examples of this phenomenon in Hitler and Stalin. Although it seemed that history would not repeat itself, the truth is there for all of us to see. Why does so much evil breed in crazy minds, turning insanity into reality, making it measurable in the number of casualties, wounded, people made homeless, hopelessly trying to cross borders, seeking sanctuary? Their world has literally collapsed on them – so many ruined cities, villages, houses, hospitals, and schools. Pregnant women giving birth in bombarded hospitals, people terrified every time they hear alarms, horrific photos of heartbroken people saying their last goodbye to loved ones covered in blood – all manifestations of cruelty without any limits! How will those who survive ever function normally again, their minds haunted by traumatic memories that cannot be erased? Will they be looked after abroad by some good-natured people? Will they be able to return to their demolished houses so they can painstakingly rebuild them? Nobody will be able to undo the injustice suffered, nor the cruelty that was unleashed. The only possible remedy, as always, might be time – pain may slowly fade, although it might take a generation or two before these deep wounds might be healed. 4 Even those of us lucky enough to have been born after World War II, able to live our lives without armed conflict, still inherited it from our parents. It seems that the stories of those who experienced the war have somehow been passed on in our genes. People who survived the war witnessed how the world was turned upside down. There were victims in almost every family, including my grandmother Zofia, beaten to death by the “liberating” Russian soldiers; my father, who died prematurely of a heart condition, after five years of captivity and forced labour in the mines in Wałbrzych; my mother, who heard the whistle of bullets around her head for the rest of her life. They never got the most beautiful years of their youth back. I can still see the helmets, bomb fragments, unexploded shells, the nameless graves in the forest, bayonets found in a garbage can. We were naïve to think that, believing in humanity, our advanced civilization, the exchange of goods, technology, and labour, would effectively protect the peaceful coexistence of nations, even if they believe in different political systems. We were wrong to turn a blind eye to subsequent annexations and ever greater claims that were made by a delusional leader – claims that rendered human life worthless, aiming to achieve more power. These sickly ambitious fantasies were realized bloodily, using the most perfidious types of weapons. The only comfort in all of this is that is has united the majority of a largely divided world. Most nations strongly disapproves of this and steps are being taken to try to stop the madmen – this time no longer through appeals and empty words, but through concrete joint actions of states. Actions aimed at making life worth living, rather than resort to war games, which would require sacrifices in casualties and destroyed houses that would need to be rebuilt. However, there would be no way to resurrect the fallen. I am constantly bothered by the question: how is it possible that in people’s minds house such insane visions (that later, unfortunately, are implemented)? This is more proof of the existence of evil, which is so difficult to overcome with goodness, of the existence of the devil trying to rule the world in various ways. “People prepared this fate for people,” wrote Zofia Nałkowska at the beginning of the shocking „Medallions”. Nevertheless, I do not agree with this statement of the writer, since people who act inhumanly are no longer human. [JW]