In 2017 Polish State Forestry (Lasy Państwowe) erected a statue to a 17-year-old partisan, Danuta Siedzikówna (code name "Inka"). Communist courts sentenced her to death in 1946 for her alleged role in the anti-communist underground. Danuta Siedzikówna was not a fascist. Yet the commemoration and unveiling of the statue served right and far-right agendas related to logging the forest. The political party in power at the time, PiS (Law and Justice) centered on Białowieża, both materially and discursive to craft a nationalist narrative around the foresters and the work he does extracting things from the forest; sanitizing the forest and sanitizing the nation.
A pitched battle was underway where the far-right used Inka as a symbolic resource to bolster the “innocence” of their proposed project, often expressed in the slogan- “death to the enemies of the fatherland.” On the ground it looked something like this: A spruce bark beetle out-break threatened commercial logging within a forest that is partly strictly protected national park, partly logged forest, and partly nature reserves managed by State Forestry. The right-wing government mobilized a whole set of stories and myths about Białowieża, Polish forests and Polish foresters, all of whom would become emblems of Poland for ethnic Poles in a region with a large Belarusian population at the very border with Belarus. In this resurgence and reassertion of Poland for ethnic Poles, ecological activists mobilized in the forest to block the logging, organizing encampments where feminism, anarchism, nature spirituality, veganism, and critiques of capitalism circulated. They open eschewed Polish nationalism and PiS and local elements inscribed them them as "pests" (szkodniki) and "ecoterrorists" threatening national unity.
UNESCO and the EU condemned the logging for breaking habitat protection laws. The EU court of justice fined Poland 100,000 Euros per day in 2018 for each day it continued logging. State Forestry called in an armed-paramilitary group of foresters with the right to carry guns. The official "pastor of foresters, Tomasz Duszkiewicz, called the activists "Satan's helpers." In tandem, ultra-right wing marches began on the outskirts of the forest celebrating anti-communist partisans from WWII, some of whom had murdered whole villages of Belarusians after the war had ended. Marchers, belonging to the revived interwar anti-Semitic, Polish nationalist organization, Radical National Camp (ONR), founded by Polish politician Roman Dmowski, moved through the streets of Hajnówka, carrying photos of "Inka” and other “cursed soldiers"/partisans who had been interwar foresters.
Inka worked in the forest inspectorate in Hajnówka. Her father was also a forester, sent to Siberia by the Soviets. Her mother was killed by the Gestapo in nearby Białystok. Inka acquired her medical training as a member of the underground Home Army. Communists that tortured and executed her in 1946 accused her of violent and deadly attacks on policemen and even of giving orders, all contradicted in the trial. The contemporary revival of the “cursed soldiers”, cursed because their names and stories could not be discussed openly during communist rule, is has been heavily driven by the President’s office, including an official day to commemorate the cursed soldiers, elementary schools named after cursed soldiers, educational units in all schools about Inka especially and a flood of media programs honoring the courage of the cursed soldiers in not putting down their arms after the Yalta pact and end of WWII. The right often stresses that a Jew carried out her execution. That individual later immigrated to Sweden in 1968, claiming asylum from anti-Semitism. Thus, the timing of the statue's erection, led by the pastor of Polish foresters, Tomasz Duszkiewicz, it's meaning in relation to logging the forest by claiming that foresters were persecuted in the history of communist Poland, symbolized a fight with those who look outside of Poland for legitimacy and expertise. The right and far right celebrated Roman Dmowski's views that pursuing a nation’s own interests is the primary duty of the nation and that the true nation would be heartened in the struggle (against ethnic difference). Members of ONR's Hajnówka-based group attended the opening ceremony of the Inka statue. Chanting at marches, "instead of leaves hanging from the trees, let's hang in the communists," many local ethnic Belarusian and Orthodox Poles feel threatened by these chants. In their cultural memory, Polish foresters who were also cursed soldiers are remembered as bandits who threatened, murdered and looted their parents and grandparents.
The Inka statue was a renewed fight with those who looked outside of the Polish narrative of victimhood. This fight included the bark beetle, ecological activists and Belarusians that could be linked to communism. Ecological activists that defended the bark beetle and chained their bodies to harvesters began to be accused of also being "communists" at this time. Inka's death was sealed by "red Hajnówka", pointing directly to the Belarusian minority. Her revived memory in the form of the statue was a way for foresters, PiS, and strident ONR (Radical Nationalist Camp) members to assert that the "pest" (both ecological activists and bark beetles) would be eliminated by the ethnic-Polish foresters, and local Belarusian Poles were given warning that non-identification as Poles would come with a price. The forester, via the Inka, statue, in the territory of Polish State Forest commercially logged forest, would take care of the "intruders" and “outsiders.” The statue mythologized Inka and State Forestry as a historical embodiment of a martyred nation. Through the statue and related commemorative history and reinterpretation of local foresters, the history of the Polish forester became the history of Poland, transforming this “backwater” outpost of Poland to a claim of Polish centricity to its minority regions.
Tomasz Duszkiewicz
Marek Maślaniec