That (green) light in the night

While Poland begins to build an "anti-immigrant" wall, from villages and countryside, when it gets dark, men and women, in the name and in the footsteps of Saint John Paul II, fill backpacks and saddlebags and go. “Outstretched hands” of charity which is nourished by faith and gives hope. They go, through hidden paths, in the Bialowieza forest among the "damned" of Kuznica on the border between Belarus and Poland.
They say: “Trying to prevent these desperate people from dying while the leaders fight in Poland today is a crime that can cost prison. But we remember the lesson of Pope Wojtyla and we disobey in a legal way; forgetting food and clothes in the woods can happen and today it is indispensable ».

In those gestures of charitable slynesses that are still imbued with humanity I have seen as in a long flashback many images of the life of a saintly pope: those of him, a helpless priest, among the workers of Nova Uta to challenge the sinister communist regime; those, again by him, on a bicycle through the streets of Krakow, to help the people massacred, not only in freedom, by the brutal Nazis; those of his days in the mine by day, at night studying as an underground seminarian.
Well, I said to myself, that life of him, those choices of him have remained in the blood of many Poles, certainly not of all, but of many people. And, almost twenty years after his death, they are still building a lesson in life and brotherhood that goes beyond borders. Having the courage to invent this ingenious and simple stratagem is not difficult, to realize it amidst the (useless) screams of the European Union, the hard fist of the Polish government and the unworthy speculations of Belarus is not at all easy. It is very risky, but people's lives are priceless.

The Warsaw soldiers are ordered to turn a blind eye to the network of popular solidarity that is saving thousands of people, trapped by Minsk to hurl their despair at Poland and Europe. No official help pending
of forthcoming humanitarian aid in Belarus; however, informal mobilization is now being tolerated, preventing the unforeseeable explosion of an even more serious humanitarian crisis.
Camped in Lukashenko's "lair" and one step away from the freedom that EU law guarantees, children and old people are at their last resort. Potatoes, milk and apples offered by the Poles in a few minutes are thus finished; fires are lit in front of the migrants' tents.
Individual gifts, however, while xenophobic nationalists paraded in Warsaw against the refugees, are not enough to quell despair. Hundreds of families, fleeing Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Africa, gather when they can under the Kuznica checkpoint to try to break through the barriers, overwhelming the patrols equipped with dogs. Some even manage to cross the Minsk border: intercepted in fields and villages, inside the "security" corridor armored by Warsaw, they are always pushed back into Belarusian territory. The arrested, like the illegal immigrants awaiting deportation, would be hundreds. Scenes of hell that should have been avoided.

In the confusion and contradictions of politics , however, those Catholics with big hearts, who in the name of walking in the night for others are the image of Christmas 2021 and remind us of Paul's letter: "Faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love " (1Cor 13: 1-13).


Gian Mario Ricciardi
NP December 2021