„At times, someone standing next to me in a shop would start holding their bag tighter. They thought that I would steal from them. Sometimes I asked jokingly, „You know why I won’t steal from you today? Because it’s a Thursday”. On On Ukraine’s Independence Day, we talk to Nadia Ohly about religion, being a Ukrainian Romani and building a new life in Poland
“Considering how many refugees’ clothes and remains of camps are found in the Podlasie forests, it is reasonable to assume that many refugees are gone forever. Some drowned in swamps; some were eaten by animals. Those bodies will most likely never be found, they may never get a respectful burial” – the photojournalist Agnieszka Sadowska-Mazurek tells Salam Lab
He left Cuba because it became too cramped for him. When at the end of the concert he was asked to praise the Cuban Revolution from the stage, he realized he did not have enough freedom
’The trivialization of Islamophobia is like trivial nationalism, one that is unconscious. It is the air we breathe. The language, the currency, the symbol. It surrounds us so much that we no longer pay attention to it, reinforcing our ethnic identity. Islamophobia functions in the same way in Poland. We have stopped reacting to it’
Back in 1996 a boy of Palestinian descent living in Amman was gifted a skateboard and he started skating around the city, getting into troubles with the police and pedestrians evoking the dream of a skatepark in him. His name was Mohammed Zakaria. In 2009 he founded his own skateboard brand called ‘Philadelphia’
’I wish that people didn’t have to be scared anymore. I want them to ask questions, even the inappropriate ones . I prefer that Poles ask me from which part of Iraq I am, so that I can answer back and tell them that I’m from Iran and not Iraq. This helps us start a dialogue and get to know each other better. Those who don’t know are scared’. An interview with Farid, an Iranian living in Poland for 11 years
‘We never know who the other is, just as we never really know who we are ourselves.’ – says the author of The Guest, Ariane Koch.
We are used to the fact that it is white people who save those fleeing war or persecution. It wasn’t always this way.
“I knew I had to leave Iran. I’ve known it since I turned fourteen” – says Michał Rezazadeh, who creates Irańczyk w Polsce [Iranian in Poland] channel and fanpage living in Warsaw.
Ludwika Śniadecka – a Polish woman, the leading spokeswoman for the Polish independence movement, the unrequited love of Juliusz Słowacki.