Aneta Prymaka-Oniszk: The History of Ordinary People

aneta-prymaka-oniszk-fot-mdabrowski.jpg, default, Aneta Prymaka-Oniszk, December 2020, photo: M. Dąbrowski, Aneta Prymaka-Oniszk: The History of Ordinary People

#language & literature

#heritage

We talk with the journalist and author of the book ‘Bieżeństwo 1915: Forgotten Refugees’ about the past – as seen through the eyes of people for whom history has held no place so far.

Bieżeństwo (bezhenstvo) – mass evacuation, also known in Polish as ‘exile’, is the resettlement or displacement of people, mainly Orthodox, from the western governorates of the Russian Empire deep into Russia. This occurred in the period from 3 May until September 1915, when the front line was interrupted by German forces. In Russian, the term means ‘refugeedom’.

Michał Dąbrowski (MD): Five years have passed since the premiere of ‘Bieżeństwo 1915: Forgotten Refugees’. How do you view the book today?

Aneta Prymaka-Oniszk (APO): It still holds a lot of value for me. The story described in it is still relevant, despite the fact that it regards events from 100 years ago. Unfortunately, this is not good news for us as a society.

How come?

APO: When I started writing Bieżeństwo in 2012, I had the impression that I was dealing with a historical, bygone topic. That the war no longer concerns us. Of course, there is still fighting going on somewhere in the Middle East, but we in Europe are done with wars. What happened in the Balkans in the 1990s was only an accident. I really wanted to live in this bubble. We all wanted to.

While collecting the materials, I found horrible images of the war, such as the one with refugees walking through Polesie; typhus was prevalent, and many people were dying. Mothers with infants, whose other family members had been lost or died, who were frantically seeking for ways to care for their children when they themselves became ill. But who could have taken care of someone else's child while having to fight for their own survival? So, using the last of their strength, the mothers drowned their children before they died, so that their children would not have to die then by their corpses.

Soon after I read this description, images of people fleeing the war in Syria began to appear in the media – the bodies of children being tossed by waves onto Greek or Italian beaches. Russia annexed Crimea at around that time. War broke out in Donbas – that is, in the areas where the heroes of my book were heading in 1915. Right next to us, next door.

Our wellbeing has started to deteriorate. It turns out that, as a society, we’ve learned little during these 100 years. Politicians have used the tragedy of refugees for their own gain – fuelling fears that have echoed throughout society.

Picture display

mały obrazek (568px desktop)

Bieżeńcy, photo: Letopis vojny / biezenstwo.pl

Picture image

biezency-fot-letopis-wojny.jpg

MD: In ‘Bieżeństwo’ you described the fate of the refugees from Podlasie, mainly the rural population. Was this book an attempt to fill some sort of gap?

APO: This history has not been present in the public sphere thus far. It is the story of groups who have been excluded from the mainstream community. In recent years, in literature, cinema as well as art, we’ve heard a lot of stories told from the perspective of these people, and so we have begun to face this past.

On the other hand, there has been enormous resistance to their acceptance and a fierce defence of the traditional narrative about the Polish community being defined through their ethnicity and nationality. Textbooks are dominated by stories of the nobility and landowners, with the military, politicians and intelligentsia stemming from them. As a result, the perspective of other social groups disappears.

Picture display

mały obrazek (568px desktop)

Bieżeńcy z Galicji, photo: Letopis vojny / biezenstwo.pl

Picture image

biezency_z_galicji1-1915.png

MD: Is the situation of minorities different at the local level?

APO: The regional history is told in a similar way, regardless of its ambiguity and ignoring of the marginalised groups of people who live there. As a result, in the Museum of the Sokółka Land – in the region where I live – we get a story that is not much different from the one we can hear somewhere in Mazovia. Queen Bona dominates, who is connected with the beginnings of the city of Sokółka and the Polish national-liberation struggle. The perspective of the local (tutejsze) minorities, present and past, is practically absent. There are only Tatars, but they are more of an embellishment. Since the Sokółka region is associated with multiculturalism, then: ‘Here you go, we have Tatars. We don’t need to mention the others’.

Please don’t misunderstand me – the Tatars should definitely be here, they are part of this land, its history as well as the present. It’s about their objective use. They are a ‘safe’ minority for the myth about the eternal Polishness of these lands, for which there is still a great demand in our country. Tatars were brought and settled here by Polish kings, so this history does not threaten the myth. But with other people, for example the Belarusians, the matter is more complicated – so they are not mentioned in the museum.

Picture display

mały obrazek (568px desktop)

Rejestracja bieżeńców, photo: Letopis vojny / biezenstwo.pl

Picture image

rejestracja_biezencow-fot-letopis-vojny.jpg

MD: Why?

APO: This is not specific to Sokółka, Podlasie or the local national minorities. This concerns the dominant story of who we are as a country. The perspectives of minority groups are excluded. We say ‘minority’, although often, when it comes to numbers, they are majority groups – for example, peasants in historical terms.

Yes, at school we mention Drzymała's wagon and being oppressed, but only recently has there been the first attempt to tell history from the people's perspective – namely Adam Leszczyński's A People's History of Poland. Our story also lacks the perspective of women, national and religious minorities, and other social groups.

This is the framework of culture in which we all function, duplicating it. This usually happens outside the consciousness of individuals.

MD: It’s different in Hajnówka – there is a high school and a museum telling the history of the Belarusian minority, but there’s no trace of the Tatars.

APO: It only seems different there. If you take into account the mechanisms of exclusion I mentioned, the situation is exactly the same. Well, there is a museum in which you can cultivate Belarusian history among Belarusians, organise exhibitions, etc. – but the Polish majority pays little attention to this. It's a kind of ghetto. It’s similar with the Belarusian high school. The point is to go beyond the ghetto, to a common space and exist as a subject there. It’s much harder to do this.

Let us look at the issue of remembrance of the victims of Romuald Rajs, known as ‘Bury’ – something that is very important for the Belarusian community, i.e. the civilian inhabitants of the villages near Hajnówka, mainly women and children. The current version of history which is dominant in Poland deems Rajs an unbreakable, flawless hero. Institute of National Remembrance historians publish works proving that his civilian victims were collaborators, although there is no evidence for this, and common sense even contradicts it. The Belarusians of Podlasie are not concerned with depriving the Polish majority of their heroes, but with an honest approach to history and taking into account the perspective of those citizens who do not belong to the majority.

And the Tatars? They live near Sokółka – in Kruszyniany, Bohoniki, Malawicze, not near Hajnówka. If they lived here, then they should have their voice. The main problem here is not the exclusion of one minority at the expense of another, but the mechanism in culture which makes the voice of all minorities inaudible.

MD: What is your attitude towards ‘localness’?

APO: I think of it warmly and with interest. It’s a very broad concept – it can mean a lot of things. In Podlasie it is customary to speak of ‘local people’ with indulgence. That ‘local people’ are those who have not yet matured into having clear national declarations, and in order to become ‘fully fledged’, they must make them. But they may have it behind them, or they may not fall within the unambiguous, limiting definitions of identification or identity. The stories behind all of this interest me very much.

It is also worth remembering that how people define themselves depends on many factors. What they say means something else when an unfriendly census enumerator comes, and something else again when someone interested in them asks them – someone they trust.

MD: It seems to me that reluctance to an unambiguous definition of nationality doesn’t have to result from a lack of knowledge.

APO: Sometimes it even results from an excess of knowledge – for example, about what unbridled nationalisms can lead to. It may also result from a reluctance to follow a definition that is too narrow.

Nowadays, when people travel frequently and relationships are formed with various nationalities or ethnic groups, such univocal definitions no longer fit. Should the daughter of my friends, a Pole and a Spanish woman, choose one identity? Or even me. Both, the Belarusian and Polish cultures are mine. This is my wealth. Besides, this does not exhaust my identity. I'm also ‘from here’ (tutejsza).

I would encourage people who believe in the existence of ‘national purity’ to dig honestly through their genaealogy. They will surely find their blood to be far richer than they could have imagined.

MD: Was going to college an occasion for you to inquire about your own identity?

APO: Certainly. After all, I found myself outside of my surroundings – where everything is always clear and defined. New situations test what is important to you – it makes you ask questions. Many things can be seen more clearly from a distance. After a few years of living in Warsaw, which I really liked, it turned out that a large part of my ‘Warsaw’ friends come from Podlasie – from Hajnówka, Bielsk Podlaski, Suwałki Region. And like me, they belong to the minority.

When we were still living in Warsaw, my daughter became best friends with a boy at school who came with his family from Ukraine. It seems that I’ve not only reconstructed what had been important for me from my world, but I’ve also passed it on to my children.

MD: How would you define the identity of the inhabitants of the Suwałki Region, where you currently live?

APO: I have no need to define it. I am not going to tell my neighbours that they are Poles, Belarusians or somebody else. I'd rather leave this to them.

Rather, I am interested in listening to them and trying to understand them. I am interested in how the stories about the past and the narratives we find ourselves in affect our identity choices. Also, identity is a process for me, not something defined once and for all.

I am interested in the fact that certain groups – in this case, Belarusians – do not exist in the hegemonic Polish narrative in the public sphere, but there are some quite unpleasant stereotypes and myths about them. You can hear about, for example, ‘tsarist remnants’ or ‘Soviet spies’.

MD: In the vicinity of Sokółka, you can hear a dialect reminiscent of the literary Belarusian language, but can it be said that this area is inhabited by the Belarusian minority?

APO: Yes, this is Belarusian, its dialect.

I would say that the Sokółka region is largely inhabited by people from the broadly understood Ruthenian culture (not to be confused with Russian – it’s about Ruthenian principalities, not about Russia), whose identity choices over the centuries, especially in the 20th century, were quite various. And of course, the Belarusian minority also lives here.

MD: Let’s return to ‘Bieżeństwo’. What traps is it possible to fall into while writing about history from more than a century ago?

APO: For me it’s important not to assume the role of an omniscient narrator. To remember when describing specific people and their choices that they don’thave our current knowledge of what’s going to happen. Often, when I talk about bezhenstvo, I hear: ‘They ran away unnecessarily. After all, when the Germans arrived in 1915, they did not torment the civilians at all. They did not cut women's breasts – as people feared’. Indeed, there was no cutting or tormenting, but we know that. They didn’t know it then, when they were waiting in terror for the horrors of war caused by the front. They ran away convinced that in this way, they were saving their lives as well as their children's lives. Attempting to see the perspective of the described people opens us up to them. It allows us to understand them better and to move away from stereotypes.

Mindfulness and awareness are also important – I think a critical approach as well. Do we not fall into the traps of circulating myths and ideas? Don't we automatically judge an illegible peasant as a backwards coward and fool, when we already know that he fled from the war? Do we have the same associations seeing refugees from Warsaw in September 1939 – wealthy people, the intelligentsia?

Picture display

pełna szerokość (1160px desktop)

The Eastern Front, 2 May - 30 September 1915, photo: Wikimedia Commons

Picture image

front-wschodni-w-okresie-2maja-30wrzesnia-1915-wikimedia-easternfront1915b.jpg

MD: You are mentioning two wars, but in ‘Bieżeństwo’ the main history takes place in the background. Why?

APO: Because it’s a story about everyday life, which is strongly influenced by history, serving as a background for it. It would be difficult to describe this life while focussing on political treaties or battles deciding the fate of the wars.

While working on Bieżeństwo, it happened that people preferred to tell me the ‘respectable, real history’. Especially men. I visit the elderly, for example, in their 80s – both of them had parents and grandparents who were part of bezhenstvo. A woman begins to talk about the fact that her grandmother, in order to support her children, used to go to the Cossacks to weed gardens. [Editor’s note: Cossacks is a name referring to a multi-ethnic population group with a dominant Russian substrate; the most numerous group of Cossacks lived around the Don River.] To which a man interrupted her, saying: ‘Wait, this isn’t so important, you can talk about it later’. And then he repeats the story he heard from his grandfather about the civil war after the revolution, about how the ‘whites’ attack and the ‘reds’ retreat. Or vice versa. At the same time, the grandfather didn’t take part in these battles.

The history of battles, wars, politics, i.e. men's history in general, is regarded as significant. It is the one that is placed on a pedestal – streets are named after it, and lectures or talks are organized around the topic. It also dominates at schools. We trivialise the stories of everyday life, also of women, although it’s usually been these stories which have determined our survival. We are taught that this is fit for ‘women's literature’ at best, but not for mainstream literature.

MD: You were inspired to write ‘Bieżeństwo’ by the story of Nadzieja Prymaka, your grandmother.

APO: Yes, her stories were the starting point for writing Bieżeństwo. ‘In Rasiya’, as we used to say then, my grandmother lost her mother and brother, got married and gave birth to her first child. The experiences from that period were so strong that they shaped entire generations and continue to influence the reality of Podlasie to this today.

I am interested in this ‘ordinary’, overlooked history. While working on Bieżeństwo, I would sometimes listen to it in passing – for example, while going to get some milk from my aunt. And my aunt would start telling me a story she heard from her mother-in-law of my grandmother's return from exile with a baby at her breast. The baby was crying incessantly. The soldiers controlling the train were convinced that the baby had typhus and wanted to take it away to prevent the spread of the disease. My grandma didn’t give up her daughter, despite the fact that the soldiers threatened to escort both of them off the train. Had they done so, Grandma would not have come home and would have faced an uncertain fate. Seeing my grandmother's stubbornness, the soldiers gave up. Her daughter survived the bezhenstvo and lived to be 95 years old. Such stories are heard casually, usually without the adjectives ‘heroic’ or ‘epic’.

Nadzieja Prymaka’s story can be read on biezenstwo.pl.

MD: What story will you tell in your next book?

APO: This story will be about how identities – sometimes chosen, sometimes imposed –determined the fate of people on the borderland and often determined their lives. I am writing about the time after World War II. This is the period that arouses the most emotions today and around which the authorities conduct historical policy.

Now I am dealing with the history of the other part of my family. My grandfather was shot in his own house in May of 1945. My grandmother, who was spared, heard that in three days she was to go ‘to paradise’, that is, to the Soviet Union. It was a time when the communist authorities put pressure on the so-called ‘population transfer’. The Orthodox native inhabitants of these lands (the denomination was considered the main criterion of Belarusianity) were to leave for the Belarusian Republic, and Poles from there were to replace them. Pressure from the authorities was ineffective – people didn’t want to leave. However, the recognition by the state of a certain group as undesirable made them easy targets for those who wanted to get rid of them.

I am interested in how post-war events affect today's inhabitants of these areas. Although I am describing the past, I am actually writing about the contemporary world and about us – the people living in it.

^{Interview conducted in Polish, translated by ADW, May 2021}

Tytuł (nagłówek do zdjęcia)

In Our Own Way

Link URL

FIND OUT MORE

Language English

polish-belarusian border

polish-belarusian history

Belarus

borderlands