Next be your family
Ewa Banaszak on Facebook yesterday:
This is what has happened to our family last night !! This is so sad and disturbing to go through… Especially that we have been in here for 10 years, working, studying and putting all that we can… Please share and spread the word so that it doesn’t happen to someone else!!!
To stało sie w naszym rodzinnym domu wczoraj wieczorem !!! Jest to tymbardziej smutne i niepokojące przez co przechodzimy… Tymbardziej że mieszkamy tutaj 10 lay, pracujemy, uczymy sie i wkładamy wszystko co możemy… Proszę o udostępnianie i nagłaśnianie żeby się to nie powtórzyło…
Updating to add:
A Polish family are “scared to go out on the streets” after a racially motivated arson attack at their home.
Ewa Banaszak said her family wanted to stay but racist comments have “intensified” since the referendum.
Police said the fire was started deliberately in a shed at the house in Plymouth and a “hate-filled letter” containing threats was sent.
…
Ewa Banaszak, aged 22, has lived in Plymouth with her family for nine years. She described what happened: “My sister was in the bathroom and noticed the shed was on fire from the garden.
“The shed contains bicycles, an electric lawnmower and trimmer – there wasn’t any fuel in it. My dad used the hose to try and fight the flames. It wasn’t working well so he opened the doors and hosed inside.”
Ms Banaszak told the BBC she “didn’t feel safe any more”.
“It has been very intense after the referendum, with people saying ‘go back to your own country’. We’ve had verbal comments over the last couple of years but it has intensified after the vote and now this, which is the most serious incident yet.
“We have been here for such a long time. I will always be Polish but this is our home, where we live and work. People are scared to go out on the streets and speak Polish. We won’t go back.”
The police believe the fire was started deliberately.
Years ago I had a German girlfriend. It was only after a couple of years together, when we visited her parents in Berlin, that I found out she was racist through and through when it came to Turkish people living in Germany. Prior to this, she’d been living in the UK for years with housemates from France, Switzerland and Canada. We went to a few protests against racism together including a scary one where we were separated and questioned by police for just being part of a peaceful protest. She had scars on her hands and arms from where she literally assaulted the Berlin Wall along with everyone else in 1989.
And yet, when we went to her hometown together, she was dismissive of and sometimes outright rude to Turkish people living in Germany. She felt that they had no right to be there and were somehow breaking society with their presence. She saw no reason to be polite to Turkish-looking people.
The relationship didn’t last very long after that. What struck me was that she didn’t seem racist at all until there was a context in which she could be racist without immediate consequence. One where she was backed by significant political seething. When she looked at Turkish (or Turkish-looking in her eyes) people in her home town, she didn’t feel it was at all racist to want them out of her country. It was as though she suddenly had the opportunity and felt the right to be racist because the context had somehow changed when we crossed the border into Germany.
It feels as though something similar is happening in the UK at the moment. It feels as though Polish people are a convenient scapegoat; their existence is an excuse to be racist and horrible and horribly racist. We have nothing against the Polish people, it’s the Polish people living here that we can’t stand, apparently. It’s entirely arbitrary and it disgusts me.
I’m not explaining myself very well. I have an image in my head of a microscope with various filters that show up different things on the slide. The filters don’t change what was already there but they can make things look ugly.