During my stay in Warsaw this week, I saw numerous displays of Polish solidarity with the Ukrainians in the ongoing invasion. These ubiquitous displays served as hard-hitting reminders of how sheltered my life has been, and this is the closest I have physically been to a war zone. Despite the gravity of the situation, there was something heartening about these shows of solidarity, but they also opened up for some reflections about how to decode these impressions. For instance, I was told that with the continuous economic pressure, the material support that Ukrainian refugees in Poland need is dwindling, so even though these various displays of solidarity capture both public and private initiative, I was also reminded that to show solidarity is easy enough, but such shows do not always capture the more complicated truth of everyday life. Moreover, once I had first allowed myself to be impressed with the signs of Polish-Ukrainian kinship, I reflected on how little I actually know about the life on the ground in countries so close to an ongoing war, and how some of these signs were very good indicators of grassroot feelings. While the flags of the two countries flying at the gates of the humanities campus of Warsaw University is clearly a decision by the university leadership, some drawings hung on the wall of a pub in a Warsaw suburb Friday evening represent a much more visceral emotional strain.
There was something good about these displays and especially in their great variety which better served to capture the attitudes of the Polish people. Yet I also could not help reflecting, time and again, on the dissonance between display and action, and how little I know about the actual support. Displays of solidarity are sometimes grandiose because they are meant to create pathos and stir people to the right actions, but sometimes they serve as window-dressing, as distractions and disguises. During my week in Warsaw, I was constantly reminded of my lack of knowledge, of my lack of a solid foundation for correctly interpreting these signs of our times. And aside from teaching me a lot about current sentiments in Poland, these signs also reminded me to be careful and slow when analysing a situation, and not to get carried away by enthusiasm when it first sets in. Put differently, the very public nature of some of these displays alerted me to my deep-rooted scepticism of public uniformity, which is a great hindrance for the nuance that everyday complexities contain.
Some of the displays of Ukrainian flags were certainly heartwarming - the paper ones containing the words "solidarity with Ukraine" that colleagues at the history department had placed in the window, the sticker in a taxi, the drawings in the pub - all these rang true to me and seemed to reflect genuine emotions, although I have no right to speculate about the exact pitch of those emotions. The display of the Ukrainian flag at a car sellers conference at the hotel where I stayed had a very different tone to it, and it was difficult not to sense the impulse of capitalist adaptation to exigencies.
In all, it has been an educational week in more ways than one, but the most important consequence for me has been the exercise in nuanced thinking that these impressions have opened up for me.
The gates to the humanities campus of Warsaw University
The history department
A window in the history department building
The elevator of the history department
A pub in a Warsaw suburb
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