Poczobut, a journalist and activist for the Polish minority in Belarus, says he feels responsible for the Union of Poles in Belarus (ZPB), which he said has continued to operate despite years of pressure from the Belarusian authorities.
“I want to return to Belarus, to my people, to the organization that is still working, although others have collapsed,” Poczobut said last week.
Poczobut was released on April 28 and safely reached Poland after spending more than five years in a Belarusian prison.
His release followed long diplomatic efforts and an international operation involving several countries, including Poland, the United States, Moldova and Romania.
He said that if his main concern had been his own safety, he would have left Belarus in 2021, when Belarusian authorities detained him, ZPB chairwoman Andżelika Borys, and other Polish minority activists.
“If it had been about my personal situation, I would have left in 2021,” Poczobut said. “I would not have gone through all that torment in the penal colony in Novopolotsk, and today I would be healthier, fatter, and smiling more.”
He said the ZPB survived because people in the organization’s second tier stayed in Belarus and continued its work while its leaders were imprisoned.
“Not for a single day was the activity of the Union of Poles halted or blocked in its entirety,” Poczobut said.
“Thanks to the courage of these people and their determination, I have somewhere to return to today.”
The ZPB is the main organization representing ethnic Poles in Belarus. Poczobut said it remains essential because more than 3,000 children in Belarus are still learning Polish through its efforts.
The Polish minority in Belarus is estimated at some 300,000 people, with the majority living in the country's north-western regions.
Poczobut said every effort must be made to prevent Polish communities in Belarus from returning to the situation of 1948-1988, when he said there was no Polish-language education for 40 years.
Poczobut also explained why he refused earlier offers to leave Belarus in exchange for release. He said he felt responsible for young people who had taken part in Polish memory projects, including visits to graves of soldiers of the Home Army, the Polish wartime resistance force.
He said he had been responsible in the ZPB for protecting sites of national remembrance. Activities connected with Polish memorial sites were later treated by Belarusian investigators as criminal.
“When I was getting the offer to leave, children and students were being called in for questioning and interrogated,” he said. “I felt responsible for those children, and I could not imagine leaving while they stayed and were harassed.”
A central issue for Poczobut is the preservation of Polish memory in Belarus, especially the cemetery at Surkonty, where Home Army soldiers killed in 1944 in a battle with the Soviet NKVD security service are buried.
Before World War II, western parts of today’s Belarus belonged to Poland. After the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland and the postwar border changes agreed by the Allied powers, those lands became part of the Soviet Union.
Many Polish memorial sites in the region became places of local memory for Polish communities who remained there.
Belarusian authorities destroyed the Home Army cemetery at Surkonty with bulldozers in August 2022. Poczobut said the authorities later had to install surveillance because wooden crosses kept appearing there.
“How can those people be left behind?” he said.
Poczobut said the cemetery’s destruction was meant to kill the memory of the soldiers a second time. He recalled that the dead had rested for more than 50 years without crosses, but local people still remembered that Polish soldiers were buried there.
When political conditions changed in the early 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, the cemetery was rebuilt, and the ZPB looked after it for 30 years.
“I believe that sooner or later the cemetery in Surkonty will again look as it did before 2022,” Poczobut said. “The person who decided to destroy it will not achieve his goal. This memory will endure.”
He added that the inscription “Surkonty 1944” appears on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw.
Poczobut described harsh prison conditions, including isolation, cold cells, strict discipline, and periods in solitary confinement or a special isolated cell. He said he did push-ups to keep warm and recorded the number carefully, trying to improve his results each day.
He also read extensively, although the prison library offered little beyond Russian classics, and the use of Polish was banned. He studied more than 80 volumes of his criminal case files and took detailed notes, which were later confiscated.
He said more than half the case materials dealt with the Home Army in the 1940s and 1950s. He was accused of “glorifying” the Home Army.
“They used Stalinist investigations in which Home Army soldiers were sentenced for alleged betrayal of the Soviet homeland, which of course was never their homeland,” Poczobut said.
While imprisoned, Poczobut was cut off from regular news, but he said information still reached inmates.
He recalled learning around February 22 or 23, 2022, that Russia had attacked Ukraine when state radio was played during a prison walk.
He said prison officials were initially pleased and spoke of Ukrainians fleeing and “our people,” meaning Russians, advancing.
Later, he said, as Ukraine resisted and Russian convoys were destroyed, it became clear that the war would not be a parade but a brutal conflict.
Asked about Belarus’s future, Poczobut said he did not want to comment on politics after years of isolation.
He said Belarus’s fate has historically been tied to Russia’s condition and that Belarus gains its “five minutes” when Russia is in crisis.
He rejected describing Belarus as a co-aggressor in the war against Ukraine, despite the Minsk authorities allowing Russia to use Belarusian territory for the February 2022 invasion.
“Belarusian society is a victim of this history,” he said. “Belarusians did not want to invade Ukraine.”
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP
Click on the audio player above for a report by Marcin Matuszewski.