Poland: ENTER AT YOUR OWN EUCHARIST

I hate saying anything negative about Poland, especially in a medium that can be read by anyone and easily misconstrued. But I think at this point you’d have to be pretty damn daft not to realize that I’ve met some of the most intelligent, genuine and sensitive people during my year abroad.  On a personal level, I’ve made wonderful friends, for which I am everlastingly grateful.

On an institutional level, however, I have to admit that Poland is still not a welcome place for anyone non-Polish, non-Catholic or non-white. The hospital didn’t allow me to have a translator in the room, even though an English philologist who translates professionally was waiting for me and offering her services. They had no understanding of the anxiety and terror that comes with getting injured in a foreign country, and would only get angry with me when I didn’t do what they were asking, instead of realizing I didn’t understand them. Same with the police. When it comes to public services and legislation, Poland is not a welcome place, and I don’t think it will ever restore its diversity until that changes.

I write “restore” deliberately, because for centuries Poland prospered as a colorful mosaic of peoples. In fact, Poland was once a safe haven for non-white, non-Catholics when other countries in Europe drove them abroad. Jews, Muslims, gypsies—they all found refuge under the protective laws of religious tolerance and social autonomy that defined Poland until 1573, when the Jagiellon dynasty ended and nobility overtook the nation. My Jewish friends and family often forget that our ancestors were in Poland for a reason—because, once upon a time, it was where they were most welcome to live without compromising their beliefs.

Yet today (perhaps as much a reflection of the zeitgiest of the contemporary West), Polish legislation has made it harder and harder to be an "other" in Poland. This became abundantly clear last week, when the Polish parliament passed a ban on halal/kosher meat. Given that every non-Christian monotheistic religion requires this ritualistic slaughter for their meat to be deemed clean, this law essentially makes it clear that Jews and Muslims are not welcome in Poland. No non-Christian, myself included, wants to live in a country where a fundamental tradition of their culture has been outlawed.

I’ve been a vegetarian for 16 years, and I doubt I will ever eat meat, kosher or not, again. That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that I will never need kosher meat if I live in Poland. It doesn’t matter that I find the gratuitous consumption of meat immoral when it serves neither our survival nor health. What matters is that banning the tradition my people have done for millennia that shows the utmost respect to the slaughterer, animal and consumer in a nation of factory farming is an incontrovertible act of discrimination and hypocrisy.

The argument behind the law banning kosher meat is that the practice of ritual slaughter, shechita in Hebrew, is inhumane. In shechita, the shochet, or slaughterer, performs the killing with a single incision at the neck in one swift movement. This causes an instant plummet in blood pressure that causes the animal to quickly lose consciousness. The shochet receives rigorous training before being able to perform this task, such that his movement is deft and flawless; the cut must sever the trachea, esophagus and major blood vessels in one quick and continuous cut. For this reason, the knife must be twice as long as the animals neck and perfectly sharp, with no nicks (before every animal, the shochet must run his fingernail along the edge of the knife to make sure of this). Along with training in the prayer, ritual and technique of the act, the shochet must also be deemed adequately intelligent, show love and respect towards animals and have high moral character.

While the scriptures do not provide specific instructions regarding the treatment of the animal during its life, the animal should be treated with same respect it receives in life as upon its death. When a company in the US producing kosher meats was discovered using electric prods on animals’ faces, as is common practice in animal farming today, the Jewish community expressed their outrage and asserted that such behavior makes the meat non-kosher. The president of the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative Movement wrote to its community of rabbis that “When a company purporting to be kosher [causes] pain to one of God’s living creatures, that company must answer to the Jewish community, and ultimately, to God.” The Orthodox chair at Bar Ilan University reprimanded the company and deemed the meat non-kosher as well, because “to insist that God cares only about his ritual law and not about his moral law is to desecrate His Name.”

So why has the Polish government deemed kosher or halal meat inhumane? The official reason is that all livestock must be stunned with an electric probe before slaughter, which is not included in the kosher ritual. In other words, kosher meat has been banned because the animals don't get electrocuted. In legal farms, the animals live pressed body-to-body amongst their own filth eating a stew of antibiotics and GMO corn, dragged to their death either by a mechanical chain around their necks or by getting prodded with an electric taser, hung by their feet and “stuck”—the industry term for being stabbed in the neck and left to slowly and inefficiently bleed out—but don't worry; they still receive the humane and all-absolving electric shock before their death. So basically, non-kosher animals can live inexcusably miserable and disgusting lives as long as they're deemed unconscious during the actual moment of death. That’s the legal situation to protect animals right now.

Maybe you're still thinking, “Well, that probe is more humane, isn’t it? Why shouldn’t it be required for all livestock getting slaughtered?” After all, requiring the same treatment for all animals isn’t hypocrisy and certainly not anti-Semitic. Except that carp and fish don’t get stunned. Oh, and except that hunting is a popular and encouraged sport in Poland. Try arguing that one.

Look, whether kosher or not, eating meat is cruel. But at least in the Jewish and Muslim tradition, it is a cruelty we have to face and accept ourselves, rather than blocking ourselves from the reality of our actions with machines. And at least in the Jewish and Muslim tradition, life matters as much, if not more, than the short seconds of death.

How to Hail a Cab in Poland

So remember how I complained in my last entry about nothing exciting happening to me on my Polish Fulbright?

Well, that was stupid of me.

Because now I feel like I was sort of asking for it when a drunk-ass idiot taxi driver decide to plow into me at 35 km/hour, then screech on the brakes, stomp over to where I lied bleeding in shock on the pavement and yell at me until police cars, rubbernecks and an ambulance quickly flooded the scene around a disoriented and terrified foreigner.

But let’s rewind and start from the beginning.

I was heading back to my apartment for my running shoes because I wanted to exercise before sundown. It was about 19:30 (7:30 in the evening for those Americans too lazy for elementary subtraction), which in Poland in June means the sun had just crossed over the zenith. It was cloudy and cool with no rain, perfect jogging weather. I was on the bike path that parallels the busiest street in Wroclaw, a four-lane boulevard called Pope John Paul II Avenue, which is basically what any significant infrastructure in Poland is called (if you travel through Poland, you can go see a John Paul II bridge, fountain, sidewalk, underpass, park, square, tree...you name it, it's probably been dedicated to our newest member of sainthood). As I biked along this designated bike path, I crossed a small street with a car still a good 30 meters away, meaning that he would have more than enough time to slow down and stop to let me pass, as he is legally required to do.  What I didn’t realize is that this car was speeding and had no intention of slowing down or acknowledging the crosswalk in any form, and that he would swerve onto the crosswalk in the course of a right-hand turn--ergo into the parking lane. So I was hit before I even entered the open street. 

Before idiot taxi driver mauled me...

after idiot taxi driver mauled me

Next thing I knew everything was black and I had a strange underwater sensation, a series of angry male voices eddying around me. That part was actually kind of pleasant. But then I surfaced.

Panic rushed in and my foremost and immediate concern was my teeth. My first impulse was to cover my bleeding mouth and check my newly loosened teeth. I didn't concern myself with my brain or my foot or my hands, all of which hit the pavement with equal force and are indisputably more important to my vitality—I cared only for my teeth. I remember the terrifying realization that I hit my right-side canine and all I could think about was that I might loose this tooth forever.

Thankfully there were plenty of witnesses to the accident, which also explains the yelling. Three burly young Polish men had already fenced in the aggressively ill-mannered taxi driver and informed him that he needs to slow down at crosswalks (what a novel idea!) and that he better sit tight and deal with the police because they already have a photo of his license plate thanks to a brilliant liability-inducing invention called a camera phone.  They then helped me off the road, got my former bike and future hunk of scrap metal and called an ambulance for me. My lip had got the brunt of the pavement and produced a healthy flow of blood and my foot looked quite deformed and off-color, but otherwise I was okay, so that was a relief. The ambulance came surprisingly quickly and they hoisted me onto the rolling bed and into the back, where we then proceeded to…sit there and talk to police and fill out paperwork for 40 minutes. I had to take a breathalyzer test, which was near impossible with a busted lip, granted that didn’t stop them from insisting upon getting a reading. After innumerable attempts, the policeman just handed me the device and told me to work on it while he interviewed the witnesses, and that we wouldn’t leave for the hospital until he saw a result. I felt like a child (no cookies until all the broccoli are gone from your plate!), except the requirement was an alcohol level reading, and the withheld “reward” for doing my job was the emergency room.

Finally, I got a number (0.00—don’t worry, I don't like vodka that much), in which we proceeded to…wait some more. The ambulance driver turned on the radio, they offered me a veinful of painkillers and we filled the time by practicing Polish-English together. I was grateful for their jocular and casual manner—this clearly wasn’t an emergency to them, granted they did tell me my foot looked pretty broken. “At least you didn’t get hit by a taxi in the US,” the drug-donning blonde informed me. “Then you wouldn't get treatment at all.”

Finally, it was time to roll to the ER. I waved goodbye to my three burly knights in sweaty cotton and sped towards the hospital with my new trio of doting men. And here’s where I have to lay out the one true loss and travesty of this whole fiasco: the one time in my life I get unbelievably high on top-notch drugs as three attractive young men lay me down on a soft bed and serve my every need to the soundtrack of “Pour Some Sugar on Me” (gotta love Classic Rock radio) has to be in the back of an ambulance when all I can think about is whether I’m going to be in a wheelchair for the next 6 months. FML. 

What a wasted opportunity...

I got taken to the new wing of the hospital, which was quite comfortable and relatively aesthetic. Within seconds, my friends and housemates were rushing through the doors for me, and I felt much safer and at ease. Everything being said, I realized things could be much, much worse. With my spirits on the rise, I asked them how long until I would get treated.

“Eh, az pięć lub sześć godzin.”

Five to six hours? I repeated, incredulous. Yes, they told me, and then proceeded to tell me how I should be grateful I’m not in the US, where it could be days. They explained to me how in the US doctors don’t talk to you, hospitals don’t have equipment and typically people are just left to die. I got these lectures repeatedly from staff in the hospital during my wait. Another staff member woke me up as I waited in my gurney to explain that “you Americans” are always demanding and impatient and think that nobody else matters and have no respect for Poland. I’m not sure where this animosity came from, since outside of the medical community I’ve felt a generally positive attitude towards America. It baffled me. Actually the general attitude of hostility in the hospital from my admission to my dismissal at 3 a.m. surprised me. I understand that the place is understaffed and they didn’t want to deal with a scared American girl, but they were straight-up mean the majority of the time, and their impression of the US medical system seemed to be based solely on ad hoc 60 Minutes horror stories. 

After a few hours of waiting, a man came up to my gurney and began to roll me through the hospital without a word. Nothing is quite as anxiety-invoking as being on a moving bed with no explanation of what’s happening, where you’re going, or why. Who was this guy? A technician? Nurse? Surgeon? Janitor? I had no idea. So I asked. I asked, as politely as possible, where we were headed. He told me to stop whining. When we got to the CT scanner (aha!) he turned to his colleague and called me a big fat American baby in Polish, assuming that wouldn’t understand. That’s when I finally began to cry, which probably didn’t help refute his case.

Well, by 3 a.m. the nightmare was over. We checked out of the hospital and headed home, where my wonderful roommates helped me up the apartment and put me to bed. No broken bones, no missing teeth. All in all, I feel pretty damn lucky.

But I will miss my old commie bike...