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The Russia-Ukraine Conflict: Polish Historians’ Perspectives on the War Next Door! - WB 2nd April 2022
120 Plays2 years ago
The Russia-Ukraine Conflict: Polish Historians’ Perspectives on the War Next Door! - WB 2nd April 2022
Welcome to Watching Brief. As the name implies, each week Marc (Mr Soup) & Andy Brockman of the Pipeline (Where history is tomorrow's news) cast an eye over news stories, topical media and entertainment and discuss and debate what they find.
#archaeologynews #thepipeline #archaeosoup
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/archaeosoup
0:00 Introduction
4:05 Paul Barford Interview
28:44 Alina Nowobilska Interview
1:04:08 Closing Thoughts
***
Link of the Week:
Disasters Emergency Committee:
***
Links:
Pipeline April Fools’ Article:
CBA, CIfA & FAME LAUNCH JOINT MEDIA OPERATION:
http://thepipeline.info/blog/2022/04/01/cba-cifa-fame-launch-joint-media-operation/
Paul Barford:
@PortantIssues on Twitter
Portable Antiquity Collecting and Heritage Issues:
https://paul-barford.blogspot.com/
Alina Nowobilska:
@WW2girl1944 on Twitter
@hack_history on Twitter
Refugees fleeing Ukraine (since 24 February 2022):
https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine
‘Black Archaeology’ in Eastern Europe: Metal Detecting, Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Objects, and ‘Legal Nihilism’:
https://www.counteringcrime.org/black-archaeology-in-eastern-europe
Raphael Lemkin Center for Documenting Russian Crimes in Ukraine:
The word “genocide” was first coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin:
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
At least 53 culturally important sites damaged in Ukraine – Unesco:
Inside the Efforts to Preserve Ukraine’s Cultural Heritage:
News about the war from the official Ukrainian perspective:
135 war crimes against cultural heritage recorded in Ukraine:
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Soupcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Soupcast, coming to you from Archaeosoup Towers. By popular demand, we're taking selected videos from the Archaeosoup back catalogue and bringing them to you as convenient podcasts. As the name implies, with Archaeosoup you get a bit of everything thrown into the pot. Archaeology, discussion, humour and debate. You can find out more at archaeosoup.com. So sit back, relax and enjoy our hearty helping of Archaeosoup.
Mr. Brockman's Cheeky Article
00:00:37
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Watching Brief for the week of the 28th of March 2022. Although I suppose it's the beginning of April really, it's the 2nd of April today as we're recording and you may have
00:00:55
Speaker
found Mr Brockman's April Fool's article on the pipeline as hard-hitting, tantalising and downright cheeky as I did. If you haven't seen that one, do check it out. What inspired you to write that article, Andy? Good morning, by the way. Good morning. What inspired me? Panic.
00:01:19
Speaker
I always wanted an April Fool story of the pipeline. It's become a little bit of a silly tradition now and I got to, not long before midnight on the 31st of March, I was sat there watching TV with a cup of coffee and I think, and that's something that, oh no, I haven't done an April Fool yet. What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?
00:01:41
Speaker
Anyway a few minutes thinking and it sort of writes itself and I'll leave our viewer too. It was all too plausible. You sent me the link like at gone midnight just about. I just got off a live stream and I was like really
00:02:00
Speaker
really really and then of course it was you know it didn't take me too long to realize what was going on but yes it's a gem and it's very topical if you've seen last week's Watching Brief.
Impact of the Ukraine Crisis
00:02:13
Speaker
However, regardless of Andy's cheeky humour at times, our watching brief does concern... I prefer to think of sort of dark, up-to-the-moment satire of it anyway. All too...
00:02:31
Speaker
it was funny because it was true put it that way um regardless our watching brief continues and this week uh despite having front loaded this with a bit of reflection on uh on ourselves and our writing and our um our april fool's experiences the rest of this episode is really us clearing the floor
00:02:54
Speaker
for two people who are much closer to events in Ukraine than we are and than we are ever likely to be. So who have we got on this week's Watching Brief, Andy?
00:03:10
Speaker
We have two people and we invited them on because they both have perspectives of the crisis in Ukraine from, as you say, much closer than we do here, me in London, you in the Northeast, not South Shields as I say in the interview later.
00:03:31
Speaker
walls and north time zone and not south, I apologize, I have a picture of Arbea Roman fort in my head. I know, I know that, so that's exactly, Mr Supe was like, why did he think you didn't sell Sia or the mate's Arbea? You should be thinking Seguidinum, Seguidinum. Seguidinum India, but no, so
Insights from Paul Walford & Elina Novobilska
00:03:49
Speaker
Our two guests, the first is Paul Walford, who people might know as a prolific blogger, and particularly with an expertise in metal detecting, but also antiquities trafficking. And also Elina Novobilska, who is a British born Polish historian, both of them currently live in Warsaw. And we felt really that they could give a perspective on the Ukraine crisis that
00:04:17
Speaker
is much more pertinent because they're living in the fallout from it daily as you're here on the street as it were rather than us just sitting here experiencing it through a tv screen.
Paul Barford on Ukraine Invasion & Archaeological Cooperation
00:04:33
Speaker
So our first guest is Paul Barford and this is what he had to say.
00:04:39
Speaker
Well good afternoon Paul and thank you for joining us from Warsaw. You have been living and working in Poland since I think 1986. So the reason we asked you on the programme today really was to take a longer view on what the situation in Ukraine as it faces archaeologists in Europe today. What was your initial thought when the invasion happened at the end of February?
00:05:13
Speaker
You know, I think a lot of people here also didn't expect it to actually happen. A lot of us thought it was just a big bluff. These exercises have been taking place before, including in Belarus. So, you know, when it happened, in fact, it's very embarrassing.
00:05:46
Speaker
of false alarms, but yeah. So just totally unbelievable that all these years after the fall of the iron curtain and the one thought the disappearance of the nuclear threat, suddenly we have the same thing happening again and not very nicely 260 kilometers that way across the border.
00:06:11
Speaker
And before the actual outbreak of war, stroke, special military operation, or whatever we're going to call it, I think we're going to call it a war, aren't we? I think we are, I guess. Yeah. What was the relationship like between archaeologists in Poland, in Ukraine, and in Russia? And Belarus. We mustn't forget Belarus is also involved in this, at least peripherally.
00:06:39
Speaker
What was their cooperation? Was there mutual understanding? Or has there been? So go on. In terms of Ukraine, there's a huge amount of work being going on still, in fact, in theory, still going on between Polish archaeologists of various institutions, various
00:07:06
Speaker
Ukrainian teams. Not only excavation, but also the restoration of historical buildings. You must remember that about one third of Ukraine, the western half, at some stage did belong to Poland and a lot of the buildings were put up by Polish magnates and so on.
00:07:33
Speaker
have been going out there and restoring these buildings. And of course, now that they're threatened with destruction or damage at least. There also, of course, has been, I mean, as you know, Poland was part of the Soviet bloc. And when the whole thing collapsed, then the contacts that existed in that period continued.
00:07:58
Speaker
I'm not so sure that it is the same, to the same degree in Institute Crete, but certainly there was contact. Good. You know, I've, I've had, I've had Russian archaeologists in my home through, through these contacts. Yeah. So, yeah. And when the war broke out at the end of February, how has the archaeological community in Poland responded?
00:08:29
Speaker
as the academic community in general, because of course, these contacts were not just in archaeology. As you've probably heard, you know, Poland has been very open towards, excuse me, has been very open towards these refugees, the people who have been fleeing, we have sent a lot of aid of various kinds, east and the archaeological community has been joining in with
00:08:59
Speaker
approach to Polish society, I think. It's one of the things, in fact, that Poland can unite around. Poland has been, the situation in Poland has been rather divisive recently, politically. And this is one thing which everybody could unite around. In terms of the academic institutes,
00:09:26
Speaker
At least as far as I've been able to work at, at least seven universities have completely severed ties with Russian institutions. There was a lot of joint work going on grants and things like this. And seven universities, in fact, almost immediately severed ties with these institutes. The first one was the University of Krakow. Unfortunately, my own university, Warsaw, doesn't seem to have done that yet.
00:09:56
Speaker
although the Ministry of Education and Science has, the Polish Academy of Sciences also has, and the also Polytechnic has, and of course there was a lot of work going on in the physics and electronics and so on.
Cultural Object Trafficking from Ukraine
00:10:20
Speaker
In the introduction we said that people might know you for your work on particularly the trafficking of cultural objects or archaeological objects and anyone that's familiar with your blog will have seen references to material allegedly coming out of Ukraine.
00:10:38
Speaker
Can you explain a little bit of the background to that for our viewers and also what might be the potential ramifications of the current disruption in Ukraine and to the civil society in Ukraine on the potential for trafficking of cultural material? Basically, Ukraine has been, unfortunately,
00:11:09
Speaker
for foreign markets, possibly not to the same extent that only internal markets, a lot of it seems to be being looted for export. And a lot of it is going to Western Europe, most of it's going to America. And from what I can work on, it does seem to be going in a fairly direct route to the United States, to North America, rather than through intermediate European
00:11:38
Speaker
intermediaries, let's say, middlemen. Sam Hardy has been doing a lot of work on this as well, trying to work out just what the scale of this damage is. But some of the figures he's coming up with are really quite shocking. And indeed, if you go on to eBay, for example, just eBay in general, without any problem at all, you can find enormous numbers of antiquities. Unfortunately, most of them are real antiquities.
00:12:14
Speaker
Viking. Viking is a heading that is used to sell all sorts of things, not just from Ukraine, of course. But anything that looks a bit sort of weird and wonderful is called Viking. And in fact, it finds it quite easily finds buyers. If you look at people selling this material, this stuff does sell quite readily at some quite considerable prices. You have individual items for $60, $80 each.
00:12:42
Speaker
you then multiply that with other objects which are being handled, then a lot of people are making quite a bit of money out of this. Another thing which is very interesting is that Antipod is being openly marketed as Kievan Rus. So, again, a lot of this is coming from Ukraine.
00:13:06
Speaker
There's very little material actually coming out of Russia itself. It's the Kevin Rus, the first Russia was really the
00:13:23
Speaker
the two halves. Another thing which has very readily bought are coins, a lot of antiquities. Many of Russia produced a really weird series of small silver coins
00:13:48
Speaker
I found an enormous number of these have suddenly appeared on the Polish market in the past couple of days. It's not difficult to guess what this is. As you said, with the movement of people through the borders, with very few border checks going on, this produces opportunities for people to bring all sorts of things through.
00:14:15
Speaker
And of course you know small things like silver coins and
00:14:43
Speaker
which is the region which is now being shelled, where the military activity is taking place. And again, I've seen an influx over the past few weeks of this material from particularly this area. And it makes you wonder where this is coming from. Is it that the metal detectors has got huge amounts and his home was looted by, let's say, soldiers or somebody and that's how it got on the market.
00:15:12
Speaker
is the guy fleeing himself and taking the stuff with him. It's difficult to follow back what the process is, but certainly it does seem to be coming in some quantities at the moment, and there's no reason to think that this is going to stop.
00:15:29
Speaker
And the antiquities market in particular is rather awkward to follow because of course dealers don't say, oh, I got this from a bloke who stole it from a site in Ukraine or whatever. They try to dress it up in some kind of willingness that it's from an old collection made before the 1970s or something like this. Nobody actually asks a dealer to actually prove that. Can you give me documentation that this is actually the case?
00:16:01
Speaker
And we've had some really quite shocking cases recently, which I and several colleagues have been finding, of items which are being sold by British dealers from an old collection, blah, blah, blah. And you then find that
00:16:32
Speaker
and it's very clearly that the very same object has got the same, you know, pop marks in the corrosion and everything. And so the dealer is just lying, yes, or the dealer is producing false information. The person who gave it to them maybe was the person lying. Somebody along the line is lying about how long that object has been out of the ground and where it came from, yes.
00:17:12
Speaker
market. It's not just stuff that you talked about, the Kievan Rus, you talked about the classical period along the Black Sea, and I think it's worth mentioning, if people haven't seen it already, there's a UNESCO report from September last year, I think it is, that talked about illegal
00:17:30
Speaker
excavations and the legal export of archaeological material from occupied Crimea as well. So we're talking about a situation that was already extant before possibly being exacerbated by the current crisis. But also, I think I'm right in saying, militaria has also been exported, the massive amounts of material that can be derived from the great battles across the
00:18:00
Speaker
The steps of Ukraine, the step of Ukraine in World War Two has, particularly the German material has a premium on the collector's market. Yes, yes. Yes, interesting. It is mostly the German material, isn't it? There's very little Soviet material coming from these sources.
00:18:29
Speaker
the stuff which produces Nazi material, which is quite interesting quite disturbing in fact you know what what is the reason behind this. When you mentioned Crimea, when Crimea
00:18:52
Speaker
or the taking over and then the beginning of the fighting in Donbas, which has been going on all this time. When that first happened,
00:19:05
Speaker
material in Warsaw, some broochers, Crimean, Gothic-type broochers, let's say, a guy in the market said, hey, you want to see what I've got here? And he pulled out these silver broochers. And they're quite massive things. They were very good at it. He wanted quite a lot of money for them. But they were fakes. They were very clearly of modern manufacture.
00:19:39
Speaker
possibly this was what the buyer would have then done with them to put them onto the market. It's very interesting that the juxtaposition of the time, I've not seen anything like that come on the market since then. It's quite obvious that it was sort of a nudge and nudge, I've got this stuff, you know where it comes from sort of thing. I didn't buy it, of course.
00:20:08
Speaker
And it's like the old news of the world, excuse me, I made no excuses and left. Perhaps just to finish, and I think it's important that we stay with the people because in the end this is about people and suffering the people and what we can do too.
00:20:26
Speaker
I just wonder if you could sort of paint a picture when we were talking again in preparation for this piece you talked about just the difference in the streets when you walk out of your flat and also in terms of your own family and network in Warsaw. Could you explain what has actually happened? What's the difference between the streets that you walk out into now and as it would have been in mid-February before all this happened?
Ukrainian Refugees in Warsaw
00:20:57
Speaker
Basically there's a lot of Ukrainian, well a lot of people speaking Ukrainian or Russian or there's a mixture between them too. Not so much in the streets, the place where it's most noticeable is in the playgrounds. If you go to the playground you will see lots of ladies with young children and because the people who have
00:21:22
Speaker
these are women with children, the men are staying behind to fight and of course these women haven't immediately sorted out something to do to make a living or whatever. So the population of Warsaw within a few days increased by 15%. Of course these people are coming in
00:21:50
Speaker
probably because they might have friends here, friends and family. They probably feel that they're more likely to find work here than elsewhere. And of course, it must be said that in Poland in general, there had been a lot of Ukrainians coming into the country to work in places like shops, doing domestic work as well. In fact, in the area around here, there's not a single
00:22:25
Speaker
that they obviously, Ukrainians were able to work for slightly lower wages and in different conditions than Polish workers. So they had pushed out most of the Polish workers already. That probably doesn't leave a lot of space for them to find something to do, yes, that the new people are coming in. Yeah, so as I say,
00:22:54
Speaker
You can meet them in the streets much more frequently than before. In our own family, we have three sets of Ukrainians that my sister-in-law has a flat, which she's led out to one family. My daughter's parents-in-law have a house, which is almost empty because their kids have grown up and gone, so they've let him and other family. And my mother-in-law is looking after a lady. Well, she's living with a lady, let's say.
00:23:29
Speaker
officer in Ukraine, who has only two years to go before retirement. And, you know, he thought he would just live out his last two years in work and get retired. And then suddenly this happens. Yes, of course, it was huge worry about what happens to him. Yeah, so it's all very worrying. This is this is quite a normal
00:24:01
Speaker
lots of people are going down to the borders with food and clothes and things like this, because these people leave home with one bag, basically, all they can carry. As I said, it's unbelievable. This is like you see films of the Second World War, of the evacuations and this kind of thing.
00:24:24
Speaker
and it never really occurred to you. And it's interesting to think why it never really occurred to you. It can happen to, you know, in your own circles, in your own environment.
00:24:35
Speaker
And the final question is that we appear to be on the verge of losing the link to London and South Shields and Warsaw, the one of them on technology, but we're stretching it to the limit. But one final question really. We've been reporting on the efforts of the UK archaeologists, the UK archaeology community to
00:25:03
Speaker
assist really in in in cash and in kind and obviously looking hopefully looking forward to a more peaceful future there have been hints that maybe some kind of peace plan may be in the offing at the same time that appears to be being contradicted by events on the ground but what what and obviously none of us are a clairvoyance in this and certainly none of us are in the
00:25:31
Speaker
mind of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. But what would you hope, what would you think would be the priorities going forward? What would you say to the UK archaeology community? What should they be looking to do going forward to assist the situation that is facing our European friends and colleagues and particularly our friends and colleagues in Ukraine? First of all, I'm a bit disturbed by
00:26:01
Speaker
and podcasts. It's quite astounding that many institutions in Britain seem
00:26:30
Speaker
a declaration of support for Ukraine assurances that they will do everything they can including many of them also are providing workplaces for Ukrainian archaeologists who managed to make it over here to provide them with a place to work while this is going on. Obviously and also the conservation institutes are sending
00:26:58
Speaker
They're not sending so much expertise. Ukraine actually is much more developed than many people give it credit for. That they don't necessarily need that much advice from outside about how they know what they've got to do. The main problem is with materials which just haven't been for various reasons stockpiled
00:27:30
Speaker
But this is something which, obviously, whatever happens, this is not something which you just send over once this is some, you know, if a building loses its roof. You don't just need to secure the things in that building.
00:27:47
Speaker
and of course to conserve them and eventually put them back. Yes. So this is something which is not some, and this is what everybody's afraid of, of course, is that we will just get fatigue with, you know, this month's big, big story, but next month will people still be so concerned and so on. And, you know, we've got to keep up the efforts.
00:28:13
Speaker
with materials, with material help, with support. And I think that's the most important issue. And I think that's probably a good point to finish up on. So Paul Barford, thank you very much for joining us today. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much.
00:28:32
Speaker
A perspective there from Paul that is practically the better part of a lifetime in the making, really. I feel as though, you know, having witnessed and having been, as it were, adultily conscious at the time before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, and now seeing this return, observing
00:28:53
Speaker
As he says, population rises of up to 15% in a matter of days in Poland. It's a description that, well, that's the whole point of this week's episode. It's a description that we couldn't have given, and hence inviting Paul.
00:29:13
Speaker
Our second guest is Alina Novobilska who I first came across through a common interest in the history and archaeology of modern conflict about 10 years ago. Viewers today might know her best through her work as half of the history hack team who've been absolutely prolific through lockdown. We asked onto the program today because she's now living and working in Warsaw and as you'll hear the situation in Ukraine has
Alina Novobilska's Professional Impact
00:29:40
Speaker
come into her daily working life as well as her personal life living in the city which as you've heard as we've already said and heard from Paul the population has increased by something like a fifth in days.
00:29:56
Speaker
We asked her to take a long view on the relationship between Poland, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. And as you all hear, some of the issues that she discusses, including from near the top of the interview, some viewers might find distressing.
00:30:18
Speaker
We're now joined by Alina Novibalska, who is a historian who is based in Warsaw, although, as you might recognize when she starts speaking, she was actually born in England. Thanks for joining us, Alina. I'll start by asking you, as somebody really who belongs to the post 1989
00:30:38
Speaker
Berlin Wall coming down generation. What's it like to be in the middle of something like a war in Europe when we're supposed to put all that behind us?
00:30:49
Speaker
Do you want to know? I actually experienced the 89 war coming down. I was in Germany. I was three years old and remember the bells ringing. But I never thought in my lifetime I would be literally on the front line of a war, literally next door, because it is. The bombs were landing a couple of miles away from the Polish border.
00:31:10
Speaker
not long ago and it's incredible. I kind of, like I said, I can't imagine this. Is it possible in the 21st century for something that I've been studying for years could come to fruition, could happen again? Is it possible?
00:31:25
Speaker
And you are currently working at the Pilecki Institute, if I get it right. Yes, I am. I'm a popular historian working at the Pilecki Institute. We're actually working on a project. I mean, we can talk about the project now. We can talk about it whenever you want. But it's a very interesting project relating to Ukraine.
00:31:48
Speaker
Well, in fact, I was going to ask you, how has what's been happening since the end of February between Russia and Ukraine affected you and your professional community?
00:31:59
Speaker
My big boss called all of us up and said, every project you have got going now that it's not relevant, get rid of it. So I've kind of dropped half of my projects that I've been working on. My book, everything has just been thrown aside because we've created the Lemkin Center. And the Lemkin Center is basically, I mean, if people who don't know who Rafa Lemkin was, he was the man who basically created the word genocide.
00:32:25
Speaker
And in 1947, don't quote me on the date, but I'm not a Afro-Lemkin historian, but he coined basically the term genocide and we've decided to call the Afro-Lemkin Center after him. And what we're doing is we're collecting as much evidence as we can of things happening in Ukraine. So for example, the Wagner group that has been spotted and those who don't know who the Wagner group is,
00:32:50
Speaker
Anybody who, again, say how much historical context should I give into this? The Durlavaga Brigade is a prime example of how we can compare the Wagner group. And they were a brigade of sadists and psychopaths that were sent in specifically into the Warsaw uprising, where they went and murdered and raped and horrifically dismembered bodies and set buildings alight with people inside of them.
00:33:15
Speaker
I'm going to give one very quick example in this context where there was a young lady under a table spotted by a witness and she was holding her stomach while there was a group of Darlavanga brigade sort of sitting on a table and playing cards and drinking. What actually happened is they gutted her and she was trying to hold her insides in as she was under this table and they were playing cards on top of her. So these are the sorts of sadists that Putin has sent
00:33:45
Speaker
pretty much into Ukraine. And these are the sorts of things we're trying to document. All of these rapes that are happening because these reports are coming back, bombings of civilians. And we're looking for as much details as possible when it comes out because all of this at the end of the day is going to go to the Hague and it's going to go, and we're going to try all of these criminals. And we're not just looking at prosecuting, for example, Putin, because everyone's going to go after Putin, for God's sakes.
00:34:10
Speaker
we're looking at going off to these average every day-to-day people that are committing these crimes because you've got to remember, Soviet Russia didn't stand trial in 1945, 46, 47, nothing. In that whole time period, they have not paid for their crimes of what they've done to the Ukrainian people, to the Poles, to the Belarusians, to the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Romanians, or the whole region.
00:34:40
Speaker
They've not paid for anything that they've ever done, even in East Germany. Sorry, just to throw that in.
00:34:47
Speaker
And you're drawing a very specific parallel there between events in World War II and the private army, the Wagner group that you're quite rightly talking about in connection with the current invasion. And again, they are being reported on open source intelligence sources and military sources and so on. Can you give us a bit of background really, again, for people who aren't familiar with the history of
00:35:15
Speaker
Eastern Europe and what have been called, I think by Timothy Schneider, who is the American historian in the blood labs. What is the cultural and historical background that we see that is influencing what we're seeing played out in Ukraine today?
00:35:34
Speaker
I've got to say I need to underline this and stress this. I am not a military historian. First of all, I am a historian of Poland. I am not a Ukrainian historian. I am not a Russian historian. So all I can do is talk about this from the Polish perspective. Again, we've had this conversation many times on social media.
00:35:53
Speaker
that you've got all of these people coming and claiming to be all sorts of experts. I'm not claiming to be any sort of expert, only on my field that I've been working on. But the tensions between Poland and Ukraine has always been not the best. So for example, Poland gained independence during the interwar period, and Ukraine did not.
00:36:15
Speaker
During the Second World War, there was a lot a lot of tensions happening in that region, especially when the Soviets came in the Soviets invaded Poland in 1939 to
00:36:28
Speaker
liberate the ethnic minorities, including the Ukrainians, because Poland had seized all of this land and taken it away and were oppressing minorities. I mean, this is a whole different, long, very long conversation that we just don't have time for. But I'm just kind of giving the ins and outs of this. This can be further discussed. People want to talk to me. Feel free to contact me a bit more about this.
00:36:53
Speaker
things were happening in Ukraine during the Second World War. So, for example, a lot of people don't know about the Vorin massacre, where a lot of the Polish men from the Vorin region, which is, if you look at modern day, sort of like Lviv, going sort of that southern area of Ukraine, because that was part of Poland in 1939. Well,
00:37:16
Speaker
1939 but into war period that was all part of Poland because obviously Poland didn't exist as of the 1st of September 1939 because of the invasion from Germany and from Russia, Soviet Russia, sorry because it was the Soviets at the time. So I was so used to saying Russia at the moment that I keep forgetting to use the word Soviets at the time so
00:37:36
Speaker
bear with me, because obviously conflict at the moment, you can't say Soviets because it's the Russians. The volume massacre, for example, the Ukrainian partisans basically started attacking Polish villages and they were murdering women and children because there were no men at the time. Women and children, Polish women and children with
00:38:04
Speaker
else you could think of, to basically purge them of the area. And thousands of Polish innocent women and children, this wasn't war, this was an attack on a civilian population. And Poland hasn't really truly forgiven or forgotten. Till
00:38:24
Speaker
the 24th of February, 2022. I was going to say, you know, against that background, we are seeing, obviously, there is a European Union initiative in terms of visa free travel and entry for Polish refugees and so on. But of all the countries that are in the frontline, Poland is the most. The UN, I think, last time I looked, was talking about as many as four million people being displaced.
Poland's Support for Ukrainian Refugees
00:38:52
Speaker
And Poland has been
00:38:54
Speaker
it would appear incredibly generous in allowing people in supporting those cues of people we see coming across the border control points.
00:39:03
Speaker
Well, look, in general, we've always had a large influx of Ukrainians, always. Because we are neighbors, we are Slavs at the end of the day, even though we've had our own conflicts. And still to this day, to me, I just can't comprehend Slav attacking Slav, but that's a whole other issue, which we don't have time for today. But I looked at the statistics just before we went live on this. I looked at the statistics. We've got, as of this morning, 2.368 million
00:39:33
Speaker
crossed over the Polish border since this morning. But just to give you another statistic, the first day of the conflict on the 24th, which most Poles heard about, I think it was just after midnight hour time, the invasion began, or just before midnight, I was up on the sofa and I didn't sleep all night.
00:39:52
Speaker
and I sat and I watched the invasion happen live on TV at the edge of my seat wondering what is happening. But on the first day you had 38,200 people across the Polish border, Ukrainian border. The second day you had 58,300 people and it's been sort of consecutive between about those numbers every day. So you're looking at about
00:40:14
Speaker
on average 50,000 people crossing the Polish Ukrainian border a day. Can you imagine the amount of people, and you're not just having people cross in cars, you're having people cross by foot. People are walking, they're walking from Lviv to the Polish border.
00:40:34
Speaker
You know, no sleep, no food. I've been watching people on social media who've been literally doing this. And it's incredible. They reach the Polish border. They reach, for example, the biggest Polish border in the south of Poland. And they're welcomed with open arms. You've got people that have created like these food trucks where they're sitting and they're feeding thousands of people.
00:40:57
Speaker
they've got makeshift tents for people to be able to have a sleep because they've been on their feet or in their cars. I mean, the queues to get into Poland are just miles and miles long. You've got people helping children, people helping you get to the train station. It was a week ago, there were trains going, maybe it was two weeks ago, there were trains going into Germany.
00:41:20
Speaker
And unfortunately, they were being halted because the Germans couldn't handle such a large amount of refugees. And we're talking about a couple of trains. Yeah, in Poland, you've got an average 50,000 people crossing the border, and you've got Poles going and taking people by car, taking them to Warsaw. Warsaw, last I heard of the statistic, you had 300,000 refugees in Warsaw. In my area, sort of like
00:41:47
Speaker
I don't know how to translate this into English, like a complex of buildings. We've got such a large amount of refugees, especially in the hotel next door. The hotel is completely booked down. Polls went on to Airbnb. Our rent has gone skyrocketing high because everybody, everything has been rented. There is nowhere to find on Airbnb because they've been rented for Ukrainian refugees.
00:42:15
Speaker
even if the refugees can't pay it for themselves, the polls are giving up their wages. I went into the shops to try and help because that's what we're doing. We're doing massive collection points for food, for hygiene products, for nappies, for children, all sorts of things, nothing. There was for
00:42:33
Speaker
There was nothing on the shelves because everything had been bought out. I was trying to get hold of, again, my English just got out the window, Spivore, which are sleeping bags, trying to get hold of sleeping bags and head torches and batteries and things that you get from Decathlon very easily. You know, you just walk into Decathlon, is there? Nothing.
00:42:56
Speaker
Poland had literally been sold out of so many products and they just couldn't stock fast enough for people to be able to do it.
00:43:07
Speaker
Now, another thing, and we did speak about this briefly before we started recording, but this is coming on top of an existing refugee crisis where refugees from the Middle East in particular, Syria, Iran, Iraq, have been, as some people described it, weaponized on the Belarusian border by President Putin as part of what appeared to be some kind of destabilization
Refugee Situation at Belarusian Border
00:43:34
Speaker
plan. And again, Poland was right in the front.
00:43:36
Speaker
line of that. So how do you see the things being connected? They're still happening now. We just don't talk about it anymore because right now, in the news, Ukraine has taken the front page. So we're not talking about it. Literally, the border guard posted on Twitter, I think it was a few hours ago, that there was another attempt last night, 72, 74 people had tried to cross the border, the Belarusian and Polish border. We just not
00:44:04
Speaker
talking about this. These people, these innocent people taken from Iraq and Syria were promised by Lukashenko. Look, come on, we'll help you cross the border. We'll do this for you. But they're entering the EU illegally.
00:44:19
Speaker
If they'd gone to the border crossing and done it as they should have, claimed asylum, it would have been a different matter. But Lukashenko and his dirty thugs, yes, I'm gonna use that word because they are dirty thugs, were shoving these innocent women and children straight into the front row of Poland. They were showing them how to tear down the makeshift sort of walls that they'd put up and everything else. They'd forced these people to sit out in the cold
00:44:46
Speaker
with no food, no water, no nothing. And it's freezing. On that border can get down to minus 20, minus, even in the past, it's been down to minus 30. You know, and this was just a weapon done by Lukashenko, done by Putin, who is, we all know, the real puppet master behind this.
00:45:06
Speaker
to try and destabilize Europe. Putin has been playing the long game of destabilizing Europe and specifically trying to destabilize Poland, because at the end of the day, we are his buffer states. At the moment, he's not going to invade Poland. Poland is completely and utterly safe. We're under NATO. Nothing is going to happen, even though secretly, Poles are afraid of this happening at the end of the day. We're scared. We're all scared. There's part of us and all of us that we're worried something will happen, even though we know that it will not.
00:45:35
Speaker
It is such a situation that has been happening for years and Western Europe has been so stupid and so blind to all of this propaganda. Poland has been racist and anti-Semitic and evil country for a long time. Well, hold on a second. Wasn't that just said about Ukraine?
00:45:58
Speaker
You know, listening to you, I can't think of another situation in the world at the moment where the past and the present are colliding quite so hard and with quite such global significance, actually. I mean, obviously there are many, many trouble spots in the world. There are people being treated appallingly in other countries as well. But the situation in Ukraine seems to have a particular resonance and a particular actually darkness about it, as well as
00:46:28
Speaker
um the positive things you get from seeing people trying to help each other as we were talking about a moment ago so um again with the historian's perspective how do you how do you see it i mean when was the last time we had a war in europe what 1994 not that i remember that very well because i would have been 10 at the time no eight at the time it's been nearly 30 years since the last war we've had on our doorstep it's quite um
00:47:00
Speaker
I'm trying to find the right words for this because it is quite a difficult situation because for Western Europe, Russia's quite far away. And I was talking with a friend of mine recently, just randomly, and I said to her, when did England last fight a war literally on its home front? And I don't mean the bombings during the Second World War. Last on English soil,
00:47:29
Speaker
When was the last war? I mean, it was a really long time ago. I don't know that far back. I don't do history that far back. Don't judge me on my historical knowledge. I have a 20th century history of history in it. And I said to her, she's an American. I said, what was the last time that happened to America? I said, what, the Civil War? Was the last time you guys fought? For us, a physical war for us was 80 years ago.
00:47:53
Speaker
And now we're witnessing this again, literally on our front doorstep, miles away from our border, and you can hear the bombing off the borders. Every time Lviv is bombed, you can hear it. It is so close to Polish hearts, and it's something that we could just not do not to help. We had to.
00:48:14
Speaker
Because, again, people have laughed at me for rolling this line, but Poland knows what it's like to be the first to fight. Poland knows what it's like to be on the front line. We know what it's like to have to live through an occupation. Me, maybe not so myself, but all of us who study, read it, and learn about it, we put ourselves, as you know, a person in history and archaeology, we put ourselves in the position of these people that we're working on.
00:48:41
Speaker
We feel what they feel. We listen to what they say. We visualize in our heads that moment that that person has to have their head shaved in Auschwitz. They're beaten off of the train. You know, the identity is being taken away. We may not have lived through it, necessarily actually lived through it, but we see it in our heads and you have it day to day to day to day to day. So to a point, modern day polls understand more than anybody in Europe
00:49:11
Speaker
what it truly is like right now. So we had to help. And pick that point up from that perspective of a modern-day poll, but someone who's also got the historical perspective, where the resonances of, for example, the fact that one of the alleged justifications for the action in Ukraine is to quote de-narcify
00:49:40
Speaker
Ukraine. And yes, there were Ukrainian auxiliaries in the SS, including in the camps, which is your particular area of expertise. But at the same time, you talked earlier about identity as fellow Slavs.
Shared Slavic Identity Amidst Conflict
00:50:02
Speaker
It's complicated, but in terms of trying to get perspective on all this, for people who haven't lived that, haven't got that lived experience, haven't got that lived cultural memory as well,
00:50:14
Speaker
What message would you pass on from your point of view in Warsaw to us, as you say, hundreds of miles back here in London, marks in South Shields in the northeast, in a country that, as you say, apart from the bombings in World War II and the troubles in the north of Ireland, haven't faced violence on the landmass for hundreds of years?
00:50:40
Speaker
Stop listening to fucking Russian propaganda. That's the first thing I'm going to say to you. And I'm sorry for swearing because it really agitates me. There was a lot of disinformation happening over the past give or take month because it's been a month since the invasion.
00:50:56
Speaker
For example, the absolute bullshit that we weren't allowing coloured people into Poland because they were, I mean, Jesus, you know, videos were being cut, videos were being manipulated to discredit Poland because, oh, how dare the Poles help the Ukrainians. You know, we are the number, apart from the Ukraine, we are the number one enemy of Putin.
00:51:23
Speaker
you know, so everything, please check your bloody sources, don't follow idiots on social media, read, even the BBC has fallen to the shit, even the Daily Milk, Daily Milk always falls into all that shit, but you know, every new source, please check your sources, don't just randomly
00:51:43
Speaker
I think recently there was a video posted on social media of Ukrainian soldiers randomly shooting at the poor Russian POWs. Check the video.
00:51:57
Speaker
it's all propaganda. And I even saw someone who's studying history, right? Oh, could this be true? Well, of course it's not fucking true, is it? Check your bloody sources. Look at who the person is that's posting the video. They are a Russian propagandist. And it's just, you know, go onto the MFA website. You know, it's just, if you want to have a laugh, go onto the Russian MFA website. It is absolutely
00:52:24
Speaker
Utterly, it's just hysterical, the sort of things they come out with. For example, oh, Russia didn't invade Poland, we liberated it. Like, come on, really? That's my biggest thing. Go and check your sources, go and check and read about the situation. Pick up a book, pick up a goddamn book.
00:52:42
Speaker
Go and find people like, for example, Swavomiyodemsky, who is fantastic in this field. He is a political scientist. Follow key people. Don't follow people who have got 100,000 followers, and they're sprouting crap. There is a lot of these people on social media. Please be careful. Please go and follow the relevant people. Me for history, because obviously, I have good historical content. So I'm just going to self sort of promote myself here. But otherwise, find the right people that I just, yeah, and read about it.
00:53:14
Speaker
And I think we will put some recommended links below this video when we publish it, so we'll certainly endorse that. And in fact, one of the first things we said when the crisis broke out was exactly what you've just been saying, given the propensity for
00:53:29
Speaker
social media to talk first and think later, shall we say, being polite.
Importance of Source Verification
00:53:35
Speaker
Yes. Absolutely. As a historian, you say who, what, when, where, why as the most basic questions and it's never been more important to do that. I think we both agree. We're hearing in your voice, this is a hugely emotive subject.
00:53:54
Speaker
give you maybe a little bit more perspective. There's the old saying that the first casualty in war is truth. And again, as a historian who's used to dealing with sources, do you think that our job as historians as commentators on these issues is
00:54:20
Speaker
more difficult than it has been before because of the immediacy of the ability for people to respond and respond at length to events and post videos and so on. Or do we just really need to behave as we've always done before when we're addressing primary sources or secondary sources?
00:54:37
Speaker
Okay, so I'm gonna I really don't want to bring up this but I'm going to, and I'm really apologize if I find anybody and any historians, and I highly I'm really sorry. But at the end of the day, you should be following historians that are
00:54:51
Speaker
involved in the subject. So, for example, like I've mentioned before, Swavomiyodemsky, he's a political scientist, but he's also a historian. He's a historian in political diplomacy, especially in the political diplomacy between Poland and Russia. So these are the types of people, these are the types of historians you should be following,
00:55:11
Speaker
Um, there are so many, I will give you guys a list off the top of my head. I can't think of everybody because I've just had a long rant, but I will, I will send this to you, Andy, to add some historians to really, truly follow. If you want to know the real, real story behind this, how propaganda has worked, do pick up some books that talk about Russian propaganda, Russian manipulation. And there's a lot of new things coming out, especially from the nineties.
00:55:38
Speaker
because, for example, we all know that at a certain point, Russia collapsed and it was like, oh, you know, we're really sorry for cutting. For example, we apologize. But then they suddenly revert back to themselves, go, well, that sort of stuff didn't really happen. So they've gone from one flip side to another. You want to check your primary. So where did this video come from? OK, better example. When the issue
00:56:06
Speaker
hit of propaganda and the war broke out. I saw, within the first few hours, I saw many videos of Russian tanks and Russian airplanes flying over Kiev, for example. Have a look at where this video was posted from. Look at the comments below. That is so key because there's many people that are, for example, from Kiev that will say,
00:56:34
Speaker
Well, that's not Kiev, is it? It's X, Y, and Z. Explore, have a little bit of a depth in it because I do that myself. So for example, I don't quite know where certain videos are filmed because I've not really been to Ukraine. I don't know Ukraine as well as I do. I'm not a military expert, first and foremost. I don't know what tank is from the other. I don't know what gun is from the other. But talk to me about World War II. I'm a little bit better on that subject.
00:57:02
Speaker
do your research. For example, Andrew, you spoke about a meme that was going on just before we started about a meme to do with the sort of weapons that were coming out about in Russia. Again, check your memes, please do, because
00:57:18
Speaker
people, any old Bob Dick or Frank or Harry can stick a couple of things together. Remember things are so easily manipulated today. You could have a whole video that shows you the whole context of an event and they suddenly just cut it because they want to show what they want to show, not the initiative or the initiation of, you know, why this person punched this person in the face. They're just going to show this person punching this person in the face.
00:57:46
Speaker
I think people will get that allusion to what happened at the Oscars in the other line. I was thinking about that, but now we're going to hub. There have been various cuts of that, just a simple event that's not to do with Ukraine, that's something that's been cut, recut, and mean, and so on, as an example of what can happen in social media. I think that's a good example.
00:58:10
Speaker
I mean, just as perhaps a final point and maybe to leave people with some thoughts. At the beginning I asked you how did it feel to be living in the middle of something we were supposed to have left behind is when the wall came down in 1989.
00:58:30
Speaker
Given, again, your particular professional expertise, how does it feel to be also responding to the kind of things that maybe we thought hoped, prayed we'd left behind in 1945, which is alleged deportations, deportations of women and children to unknown destinations, cultural erasure?
Destruction of Cultural Sites & Preservation Efforts
00:58:54
Speaker
through the destruction of things like theatres allegedly and so on. Well I was going to say that and again we talked about the various projects to preserve particularly digital archives that are so vulnerable if the servers get destroyed.
00:59:13
Speaker
We talked about that earlier in one of our earlier watching briefs about Ukraine. So how do you feel seeing that happen again? And can you offer us from, again, your perspective as a Pole in Poland, any ray of hope? We've had hints that maybe there's some sort of peace process underway, but at the same time, it seems to be being contradicted by events on the ground.
00:59:42
Speaker
that was completely contradicted. That was for five minutes. Russia was like, Oh, peace, peace. And then suddenly there's no peace. Like I said, just, I'm going to very pretty, please just use your brains in this, in this war. I mean, it is a social media war, unfortunately. And I just really wish people would
01:00:05
Speaker
switch their brains on for this. But coming back to your question now, the minute I saw that Babi Yar was bombed, my heart sunk. I mean, my God, really, they're now destroying cultural monuments, and they're destroying, for example, recently, one of the bombings affected the Kathy memorial.
01:00:22
Speaker
and the Russians are trying to eradicate all of this. I mean, they got rid of memorial for God's sakes, you know, an institution that was bringing to light all of these documents that have been hidden deep in Russian archives that are so important for us to be able to see more about what happened in the Gulags, what happened in Poland, what happened during the Great Famine, you know, what happened in 1946 to all the cursed soldiers,
01:00:49
Speaker
where people have been buried, where bodies have been buried, we don't know any of this. And we need to find out. And again, they're eradicating memorial. So even though they're doing this to Ukraine, they're doing it to their own culture and their own society and their own history. So they're trying to hide it all. They're trying to eradicate any trace that Russia was ever bad. Russia has always been good.
01:01:17
Speaker
We are the one and only master race. Now, where have we heard that before? Certainly, in a recent speech to some cultural rewards, the other day, President Putin was talking about Russian culture having a particular special resonance. Exactly. Exactly.
01:01:40
Speaker
And for those that don't know, Memorial was a Russian civil society project, which was, as you say, researching and bringing to light and publishing the records of the Gulags and what the NKVD stroke AGBs, one of the various iterations of the oppressive parts of the former Soviet state were up to. And as you say, trying to shine some light on things. Again, as you say, are still incredibly resonant for many Russians whose families went through those experiences too.
01:02:08
Speaker
Exactly. They helped my institute a lot. They helped us with the al-Gustaf round-ups, for example, to find out where these people had disappeared to, when they're going to under decisions. I just want to bring up this idea of deportations, actually. It's not my specialty specifically, especially considering I concentrate more on the German occupation rather than the Soviet one.
01:02:30
Speaker
But so many poles were literally ripped out of their homes and sent, like you said, to unknown destinations. And if you look at a lot of documents, especially from German to Soviet, whichever way you're looking at it, this line comes up all the time, sent to an unknown destination or an undisclosed, what's the word? I've just lost the word in English, direction.
01:02:57
Speaker
And you don't know where these people are going. I mean, thousands of people starved to death in Siberia and in the cold. They had no food. They had no water. They had no shelter. And this is exactly the same thing that is happening now. And I don't like to do parallels between the Second World War and what's happening today because today is a very unique situation in its own. It's today. It's not 80 years ago. But you do see glimmers of
01:03:25
Speaker
a repetitive history happening here and there because we can't compare Putin to Hitler or Stalin because he's not either one. He is Putin. Putin is Putin. There is no one like Putin, you know, and it's so important for us to be able to get that through our heads.
01:03:44
Speaker
idea of following people that know what they're talking about, please do that. And I cannot stress that enough. Stop comparing this situation to the Second World War. We can in certain areas, like I did, for example, with the Wagner Group, because there is nothing else that we have that we could compare this to. Or, for example, the deportations, because again, 80 years ago, we have that comparison. But Putin is Putin. He's not Hitler or Stalin at the end of the day.
Alina's Conclusion on Crisis Information
01:04:15
Speaker
And I think with that really pertinent reminder, it's time to end this conversation for now. So, but Alina, another bill to give, thank you so much for giving us, I think very powerful, a very disturbing in many ways perspective on this, but thank you for joining us from Warsaw.
01:04:37
Speaker
What a wonderful combination of cultural traits Alina brings to the table. She has that sort of East London forthrightness, shall we say, but also she definitely absolutely has a Polish perspective on the world. And it's kind of heartbreaking to hear someone
01:05:03
Speaker
having to confront the fact that some of the things that she's studying from decades ago, close to approaching the better part of a century now ago, could be about to unfold or rather say that knowledge is once again pertinent to current events. I suppose that's the best way of putting that. It's a genuine shame and again it's a perspective that
01:05:26
Speaker
we just don't have here in the UK. And again, hence inviting her on to speak. What are your thoughts on this week's episode? As with the subject itself, it's complicated. We have an experience that
01:05:49
Speaker
All of us who sit down and listen to the news or pick up a newspaper or watch a television program, we think we're experiencing. We have a version of that experience.
01:06:03
Speaker
As I said at the beginning of today's programme, we've got two people here who are actually also physically living it in their daily lives. We heard from Paul that his family are currently housing refugees from Ukraine.
01:06:22
Speaker
And, you know, Alina's place of workshop that they were told to drop everything and work on Ukraine projects, including projects to begin to catalogue alleged war crimes. Yeah. Is this isn't foreign affairs that is happening to other people a long way away. It's happening to our colleagues now and they are just that they're not even Ukrainian.
01:06:49
Speaker
So I think, I mean, it's quite telling, isn't it, that we both have, we both know people who are reaching out to Ukrainian colleagues and quite poignantly, what I saw a couple of days ago on Twitter was that there was a historian who was like, well, I will get back to you, but right now I'm fighting to protect my country. And he's there in combat fatigue. He's got a weapon helmet.
Emotional Impact of Ukraine Conflict
01:07:20
Speaker
As you say, it's a world away in many ways from our day-to-day lives, and I think that's probably the value of getting as close as we could reasonably to the effect of this conflict, and also, as you say, drawing on historical and historians and archaeologists' perspective on this as well.
01:07:42
Speaker
I think that's the thing I'd finish with, I think, that we're dealing with something which is so immediate, creates such profoundly, in many ways, emotional responses, which we're not supposed to have as historians, we're meant to be objective, we're meant to use sources and then come to an objective academic conclusion. Here we've got that, and we heard it again with Alina, that we've got that training, that experience, that expectation.
01:08:10
Speaker
But it's fighting again with our cultural experiences and our humanity actually. I think as we're recording, the United Nations is suggesting the latest United Nations figures are something like over 4 million people have been displaced in Ukraine. This is not going to be over any time soon, even if
01:08:40
Speaker
you know, the soldiers were able to go home on both sides tomorrow. This is going to take decades to play out and Ukraine is going to take decades to recover from this in the scale of the destruction.
01:08:55
Speaker
Well, there we have it. Hopefully you guys at home have found this episode useful or otherwise engaging, informative.
Conclusion & Responsible Story Sharing
01:09:10
Speaker
I don't know what we'll be talking about next week. I think this week and last week we've been very much wanting to do our best on this issue.
01:09:17
Speaker
So I won't ask for a teaser, Randy. I suppose I would just say, do share this episode. Do comment below. Do your best to tell about human story. Because, I mean, ultimately, a very famous archaeologist once said, we find people in the ground. We find humans. We find human lives. And this is not archaeology. This isn't history. This is history happening now. And so, of course, as humans, as humans who study humans,
01:09:47
Speaker
we are rightly affected by this and um and so are our colleagues and we just wanted just to bring a little bit of that to you this week just to repeat what Alina said when you do talk about this share things check your sources first please yes yeah um thank you for watching until next time do take care bye
01:10:15
Speaker
This podcast episode has been produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network in collaboration with Archaeo Super Productions. Find out more podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
01:10:31
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.