In early 2022 Poland and its central European neighbors opened their arms wide to millions of fleeing Ukrainians, the first of many waves seeking refuge from the Russian military offensive. The spontaneous outburst of generosity and empathy looked instinctive, like second nature to the Poles. Families, church parishes, and citizen volunteers raced to the border with warm food, clothing, and offers of accommodation; Polish border guards conducted themselves like Red Cross staffers. Officials, businesses, and volunteers organized buses to bring terrified Ukrainian families (and their house pets) to locations across Poland—and beyond, to destinations in western Europe. Since then, many millions of Ukrainians have passed through Poland, and now, about a million live and work there where they report, for the most part, friendly acceptance.
This kindness stands in profound contrast to the coarse, sometimes lethal treatment that African, Asian, and Middle Eastern refugees have endured at the Belarusian-Polish border since fall 2021, when Belarus’s autocratic leader, Alexander Lukashenko, began weaponizing migrants against Poland and the European Union. A year earlier, the EU had admonished Lukashenko for rigging elections and cracking down brutally on the mass demonstrations against the fixed vote. Brussels slapped sanctions on the Belarusian regime. Lukashenko hit back, pronouncing that in response, he would flood Europe with “drugs and migrants.” The “drugs” threat has yet to materialize, but the Belarusian strongman has been far more successful in making good on the latter threat.
In November 2021 the Lukashenko regime sent out word, to the Middle East above all, that interested parties could travel easily from Belarus straight into the EU—namely into Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, all of which have borders with Belarus. From there they could apply for political asylum, a right guaranteed by the EU. They were even led to believe that taxis would pick them up and take them to the Netherlands or Sweden or other countries. To people with enough money—somewhere between $2,500 and $5,000—to make the flight and pay the fee, the offer looked immeasurably better than the risks in taking the so-called “western Balkan route,” which leads over the Mediterranean Sea and up through the western Balkans, a treacherous journey that has claimed tens of thousands of lives since 2014.
The Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s new drama Green Border tells this story, weaving together the lives of Polish border guards, pro-migrant NGO activists, and several parties of asylum seekers who were fraudulently lured by Belarus and cast into the thick forests and swamps of the borderlands between Poland and Belarus. Her status as a major Polish filmmaker with credentials that reach back into the communist era endows her with a particular gravitas in Poland, where the film has become a box office hit. Since 1990 when her best-known film, Europa Europa, was released, her work has won Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Oscar nominations, and this year, for Green Border, the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival. In Poland she is known for the biting realism of her oeuvre that depicts Central Europe as a crossroads of clashing ideologies, identities, and cultures. The “green border” between Poland and Belarus, named so after the wild forests on either side of the states’ lines—also the border between the EU and easternmost Europe—is one such place.
Released in Poland this fall during a bitter election campaign that pitted Poland’s arch-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party against a handful of opposition parties, the film ignited a firestorm, mostly from the offended ranks of PiS and its culture warriors, for whom Poles are only ever victims and never perpetrators. Some observers even contend that the PiS governors welcomed it: the crisis created an atmosphere of fear and danger with PiS fanning the flames claiming the refugees travel with other people’s children and rape women on Polish territory.
Poland’s deputy interior minister Błażej Poboży called the film “disgusting libel” that is “harmful to the Polish state and Poles.” Other politicos blasted it as “anti-Polish” and compared it to Nazi propaganda. Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s prime minister, said, “This red carpet is only a preview of the red carpet that PO is rolling out for illegal immigrants, a red carpet that threatens to destabilise our homeland.” Any slackening of Poland’s hard line on the Belarusian border means letting rapists and terrorists into Poland, PiS claimed, the way Germany does to the detriment of its population. Part of PiS’s election campaign included a photo of Morawiecki at the anti-migrant wall built by his government on the Belarus border, with a caption reading: “As long as PiS is in power, we will not allow the relocation of illegal immigrants to Poland.” PO opposition leader Donald Tusk joined the campaign fray, criticizing the conservative government for allowing in too many “citizens from countries such as Saudi Arabia, India, Qatar, the UAE, Nigeria or the Islamic Republic of Iran to come to Poland.” Tusk was referring to state-sanctioned labor migration, but the comment’s anti-Muslim and anti-migrant thrust was interpreted as applying widely to Muslim and migrants in Poland.
Holland’s film clearly touched a raw nerve: she calls out Polish migration policy in a way that even otherwise outspoken critics of the regime have thus far failed to do. But Green Border doesn’t target patriotic Polish conservatives alone. The violent logic of national borders, the hollowness of human rights guarantees, and the callous policies that democracies justify to stem mounting migration flows are fraught issues for the entire EU—and beyond. This year, the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture published a report explicitly criticizing just about all of the member states on the EU’s external border for “inhuman and degrading treatment” of migrants pushed back from their borders.
There are scenes in Green Border that reflect poorly on the Polish patrols—“pushing back” refugees rather than processing their applications for asylum is illegal—but they are carrying out business as usual in Europe’s borderlands, a fact the film dramatizes. “Do you know how many have died crossing the Mediterranean?” a young volunteer snaps at a newcomer to their ranks. “I laugh when someone bullshits me about the sacred EU!” The film’s opening shot over a vast forest is simply labelled “Europe.”
Relying on extensive on-the-ground testimony for her script, Holland follows the journey of a tight-knit Syrian family of six who has been bombed out of their home in Harasta, a suburb of Damascus, and an older Afghan woman named Leila, an English teacher by profession, who is running from the Taliban. The two parties meet in October 2021 in an airplane cruising smoothly to the Belarusian capital of Minsk, oblivious to the fact that they’re being conned, used as human fodder for Belarus and Russia to jab at Poland and the EU. The Syrian family’s destination is Sweden, where a relative is waiting for them. Leila wants to apply for political asylum in Poland, a country she knows through the good-natured Polish aid workers and soldiers her family encountered in her home country.
But after landing and being dumped off at a border position guarded by Belarusian soldiers, the journey quickly turns into a nightmare. The seven figures, including an infant, two small children, and a grandfather, are shoved beneath the razor wire into Poland—“We’re in Poland! We’re in Europe! We’re in the EU!,” Leila cries with joy—where they roam through the forest in search of a road that will lead to civilization, a place where bombs don’t fall and girls aren’t banned from school. But the Polish patrols they encounter aren’t any friendlier than the Belarusians. Some are openly racist and sadistic. They see in the refugees only dark skin and Islam, both anathema to the white Christian nation that Catholic conservatives claim is the true Poland. The family is bundled into the back of a truck with African refugees and returned to another razor-wire fence, the glistening, treacherous material of borders, where they’re kicked to the ground and forced to crawl back under the fence into Belarus, attack dogs at their heels.
The migrants, all legitimate candidates for asylum, are booted back and forth between the two countries. At one point, they come to rest in a strip of no man’s land between Poland and Belarus: freezing cold, bloodied, robbed, hungry, and thoroughly disabused of their illusions about Europe. In this precarious slice of territory, like anywhere in the green border region, they have no rights at all—even less than they had at home under Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s or Taliban rule. But worse is to beset the Syrian family. This purgatory is replicated not just on the Mediterranean and its island detention hubs but also in prisons, asylum centers, and refugee camps across Europe.
Ever faster as the film progresses, Holland skips back and forth between the refugees, the border guards, an anarchist activist group, and a woman, a psychologist recently transplanted to the region, who becomes involved with the activists. In one scene, a high-ranking officer sent from Warsaw explains to the border guards the rationale of the task at hand. “Remember, this is classic hybrid warfare,” he lectures them, referring to a type of conflict that blends conventional and unconventional methods of combat. “They aren’t people, they are weapons of Putin and Lukashenko.” Compassion is a weakness. “If you don’t want to wear the uniform, you can leave now,” he tells them.
I wonder how many of the Polish nationalists apparently so angered by Holland’s film actually watched it. Holland draws stark contrasts among the Polish border personnel (in contrast to the uniformly evil Belarusian soldiers) by zeroing in on one young man who is deeply troubled by the moral quandary in which he finds himself. He isn’t a human rights activist or defender of European values but he struggles when confronted with the human beings he is ordered to heave back over the border—whether they are dead or alive. “We don’t want any corpses left behind. Just get rid of them, whatever it takes,” orders the lecturing officer. After one particularly grisly episode in the forest, the young border guard is pictured alone in his car, screaming.
Holland’s film indicts all of us living behind the high walls of the well-off Global North. But as grim as Green Border is, it doesn’t accept that we are powerless. In one scene, we see a band of young Polish activists creeping through the dense woodland to keep out of the border patrol’s sights, trying to help the confused and exhausted refugees in any way that they can: with dry clothes, medical attention, asylum applications, and sympathy. They are the equivalent of the NGOs in the Mediterranean that man search and rescue vessels, pick refugees out of the sea, and minister to them, saving lives. Both are working against the will of their governments: Italy treats the NGOs as criminals obstructing Italian border enforcement, just as Poland does the forest activists.
During World War II, millions of Jews and other enemies of Nazi Germany tried to escape to friendly countries but were denied entry—and had their lives terminated in Auschwitz or other death camps. In recognition, the UN committed itself to protecting those fleeing war and terror. The EU, upon its founding, followed suit. Has it kept its word?
Perhaps to some. In Poland, Ukrainians receive warm welcomes. Of course, the Slavic Poles know their Slavic Ukrainian neighbors and speak a tongue much like theirs. They have similar cultures. Many Poles see Ukraine’s war with Russia as their own, and fear they could be next were Putin to swallow Ukraine. And migration experts point out that a considerable share of adult (mostly female) Ukrainians have made themselves useful by filling labor gaps in Poland.
But others—the refugees entering from Belarus that are dark-skinned, mostly male, and Muslim—are spurned. Largely homogenous Poland has little truck with peoples from the Global South with non-Christian religions, which is why it has vehemently opposed taking even one refugee arriving via the Balkan route. As Polish-Jewish author Jerzy Kosiński portrays in his famous World War II novel The Painted Bird, racism runs deep in Poland and boldly manifests itself periodically when cultures and ideologies collide. And when governments sanction racism, the upshot is usually violence. Since, in response to far-right political parties’ gains across the continent, the EU is further restricting access to its borders, the nightmare of Europe’s borderlands won’t end anytime soon.
There are paths forward. The EU could start with altering its longstanding policy to stick its frontline countries with external borders, such as Poland, Greece, and Italy, with the task of accommodating and processing refugees and migrants entering the EU through their borders. Were refugees distributed across the bloc, the current numbers and more would be manageable. But Poland and Hungary have consistently blocked reforms. Observers hope that Poland’s new government, once it takes office, will comply with the EU’s proposal to oblige states to take in a share of migrants and penalize those that don’t, making the latter pay €20,000 into an EU pot for each migrant they refuse to accept.
But these are still only proposals. For now, it seems, Europe’s response to the ever-greater numbers pounding on its doors is to lay the razor wire on them thicker and thicker.
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