7 minute read
Presbyterian Herald June 2022
Ukraine and Poland: a personal reflection
Stephen Williams provides some thoughts on the situation facing Ukrainian refugees, gathered from a recent visit to Poland.
On Easter Sunday, I conducted a Communion service for Ukrainian refugees in a house in Wroclaw, Poland. By then, I had been living for three days in that house, along with 15 or 16 refugees and their two hosts, the Polish-based English and American house owners. We were joined for the service by about 40 more refugees. Talking to one of them after the service, I said that I didn’t know what I had to offer, because I was not suffering what they were suffering. Her response was: “We are drowning; it doesn’t help us if you are drowning as well.” She followed this up with surprising words, spoken on the basis of her experience as a counsellor: “But I am also experiencing exactly what you are experiencing. You are experiencing guilt because you are not suffering as we are. I feel the same guilt because I am not suffering back in Ukraine as my family is.”
Out there in Poland, I learned how varied is the experience of refugees. A handful are personal friends or acquaintances. Some refugees have lived all their lives in villages and have never crossed any border. Some are used to travel and have international contacts. A remarkably high number are crossing back to Ukraine for an indeterminate time to see loved ones. Some have opted for a longer-term move to other countries in or outside Europe to find jobs. Most do not know what to do. They are often in shock: one day, the everyday business of life was going on; the next, they were getting phone calls urging them to leave their homes right away before their residences were under attack, or they had woken up to the sound of a blast. Some, usually women with children, encountered Ukrainian border guards demanding bribes of their fellow-citizens ‘for the defence of Ukraine’ before letting them cross. Such is human tragedy: the mixture of very sad smaller stories within the very sad larger story.
But there is more to the mixture than that. God can visibly use the straitened circumstances of refugees to bless those with whom they take refuge. A refugee couple travelled for two hours to talk to me (men under 60 with three or more children at 16 or under are allowed to leave Ukraine). They were Ukrainian Baptists from near the Black Sea, whose 13-year-old daughter was unhappy because she was having to learn set prayers at the school she was now attending in Poland; she believed that prayer was spontaneous, real communication with God, not something to be learned as one might parrot history or geography. She asked her teacher whether she could learn a psalm, as psalms are set prayers. The request was irresistible; she received permission, and learned it so well (Polish and Ukrainians have linguistic similarities) that she was put in charge of teaching set prayers from the Psalms to other Ukrainian children already in or coming to the school. A teenage refugee evangelist!
Although I had contact with Ukrainian refugees in Wroclaw, my main purpose in going out was to support Polish partners in an organisation with which I have long-standing connections: Central Eurasian Partners. They are helping the refugees, and many are exhausted. Polish hospitality and the level of its organisation has been admirable, but there are already signs of compassion fatigue amongst Poles, especially where there are a number of children in the house. There is a worry about skilled Ukrainian workers taking Polish jobs; their employers or government do not have to supply them with the same protections or benefits as nationals. On another level, there is a demanding attempt to come to terms with a new national self-image: Poland as a country with resources to help a neighbour on a massive scale. Historical memory pervades the land. On the one hand, there is huge sympathy for the Ukrainians, who are perceived to be experiencing at the hands of Vladimir Putin what Poland experienced at the hands both of Adolf Hitler in September 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, and of the Soviet Union, which entered Poland in the same month. On the other hand, another memory is also making the rounds. During the Second World War, in German-occupied territories in Poland and Ukraine, Ukrainians brutally massacred Poles. I was not able personally to ascertain with confidence just how much is being made of this in Polish media, though information on that may be easily available. But less than six years ago, the Polish Parliament referred to this as ‘genocide’, though whether this is a strictly correct designation is a matter of dispute. I spent one night in Krakow at the home of a US-educated Polish woman, whose grandfather was amongst those massacred.
Western media standardly reports that, whatever its exact objectives – often just a matter of speculation – Russian military action has been markedly unsuccessful because Ukrainian resistance, aided by Western powers, has been unexpectedly vigorous and heroic. That may be so, but what impressed itself on me was the thoroughly destabilising effect of the Russian threat. Even in those places where military action is either unsuccessful or not undertaken at all, the very prospect of Russian aggression is either driving out those who are able to leave or keeping out many who have already left. If war should cease, the shadow of Russian presence will likely deter many from returning, quite apart from what war has done to land and home. Whether that is a prominent Russian objective is not for people like me to judge, but the westward movement of peoples already has implications for the future of Ukraine.
In our churches and Sunday schools, we brightly teach adult and child about Abraham, the father of faith, who left country, kindred and family, knowing not where he was going. He is a prime example of faith. It would shock most of us to the core if we were called in some parallel way. And that is nothing compared to the people of Israel being carried against their will into exile in Assyria or Babylon. In Scripture, exile is judgment, and the exiled cannot choose where to go. So we should not assume an exact similarity in the Ukrainian situation. Yet biblical accounts of stepping out into the unknown and of exile will surely become stories which refugees will ponder. Whatever the similarities or dissimilarities of experience, it is the same God of Israel who will see them through.
The God of Israel is God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Obedient to the editor of the Herald, I have been first-personal throughout this article, so permit me to come full circle. At the Easter service, I took as my text the thrice-repeated greeting of the risen Jesus to his disciples: “Peace be with you” ( John 20:19,21,26). I began by saying that if I had come from the UK with that greeting, it would express a wish insensitively remote from their circumstances. (I used rather simpler language even via an experienced translator!) But on the lips of Jesus, the words of greeting are not wish; they are promise. For us to have a purchase on the peace of Jesus does not mean that we substitute a spiritual for bodily or social care and concern. On the contrary, the reality of the inner peace which Jesus brings spurs us on all the more to pray and work with fervour for peace in Ukraine. For the inner peace is not a purely individual peace; it is a peace for the body of disciples, an inter-personal, relational peace. May the church of Jesus Christ in Ukraine or amongst Ukrainian refugees contribute to a peace which flows beyond the boundaries of the church into the worst and darkest zones of war.
Stephen N. Williams is Emeritus Professor of Systematic Theology of Union Theological College.
