The recent protests at the gated Refugees’ Camps in Poland remind us about the challenges that migration, refugees and multiculturalism bring – and about the inability, the shear clumsiness of our policies that attempt to address these challenges. Poland is not a country that has historically been the destination for refugees. We are having a hard time, though there are some signs of more promising responses.

The question of refugees hit the news October of last year, sparked by a refugee hunger strike at Guarded Centers around the country. Foreigners settled at these centers were demanding their basic rights: the right to decent living conditions, to have access to information, and to have contact with an outside world. Mostly, however, the strike revealed the injustice and cruelty of the system. These centers work, in effect, as prisons. They confine the under-aged (including young children), affecting them, especially those who have recently experienced war, in ways that are hard to imagine. They don’t have full access to education, nor contacts with their peers. Their situation excludes the opportunities for the regular development.

The news of these problems was alive for three weeks until the end of the hunger strike. However, the challenges of immigration, refugees and multiculturalism remain, in a society that has little or no experience with any of this. The challenges must be faced not only by refugees themselves, but also politicians, people working with refugees, and mainly Polish society. Polish towns are unprepared, as they are becoming increasingly multicultural.

In 2009, the information about a beating of two Chechnyan women in Lomza [in north-eastern Poland, actually close to Jedwabne, M.B.] made the news in the Polish media. A young man assaulted the women because they are Muslim and Chechnyan. Both of them were living in Lomza. Their children attended Lomza school. They had Polish friends. Why, then, were they targets? What was their mistake?

Their first basic “mistake” was in appearing in a place (this town, but in fact Poland as a whole) in which the inhabitants were . . .

Read more: Refugees in Polish Towns