Olivia Victoria Andrzejczak
U.S. Student to Poland
Home Institution: Princeton University
Host Institution: Warsaw University’s Centre for Migration Research
Date of Grant:  September 2007 to June 2008

The ten months I spent deracinating myself from the United States and undergoing ‘re-racination’ in my parents’ native country of Poland, I was confronted with the mild feelings of foreignness I had been expecting, but also with an uncanny sense of familiarity. I had been prepared for both, but each of these came from surprising, altogether unexpected sources.

The idea for my Fulbright research project had its inception a year prior to my arrival, during a summer program in Warsaw in 2006 when I met Adam Borowski, the grizzled and gruff Polish Honorary Consul for the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Borowski was idealistic and resolute, fiercely committed to raising awareness about the Russo-Chechen conflict and the plight of the many thousands of people that fled it. His passion turned out to be contagious.

When I was accepted to be in the Fulbright Student Program, I departed hoping I would contribute something truly new and sorely needed to Poland’s ongoing policy debate about how to handle asylum seekers from the Russian Federation. By gathering empirical research material on the views of Poland’s growing Chechen diaspora, I wanted to explore the largely mono-ethnic country’s experiences – its successes and its shortcomings – in integrating a people with a complex history and an extremely complicated life situation.

I arrived in Warsaw in September of 2007, equipped with fluent, if not tremendously sophisticated, Polish speaking skills, an undergraduate degree in public policy and international affairs, and what I guessed was enough gumption to confront individuals with a background and a culture wildly different from my own. During the brisk autumn months, I worked hard to prepare myself for the fieldwork I planned to carry out. I researched diaspora formation theory, the history of the Chechen conflict, its precarious resolution and the evolution of asylum policy in Poland and the European Union. I enrolled in twice-weekly Polish, German and Russian language courses at Warsaw University. I agonized over the questions to be included in my survey: their phrasing, their sequence, their translation. Anything there was to intellectualize, analyze, rationalize – I spent a lot of time attempting to do it. 

Throughout this period, the people and the places which I expected would make me feel most accepted or ‘at home’ – my Polish peers and classmates, the gabby grocery store cashiers, the trendy coffee shops, the family restaurants, my wizened next-door neighbors – seemed to turn out somewhat indifferent or else impossibly distant. Whereas I had grown up in New Jersey feeling a good deal more Polish than American, for a while living in Poland made me feel more American than I ever had previously. Only as I forced myself beyond what I expected to be familiar, I discovered how fluid these ‘identities’ could really be.

That is, despite the many weeks I passed in intense preparation for the moment I would begin interacting with Chechen refugees – ‘familiarizing’ myself, I thought, with their situation – when it finally came time to first visit Dębak, Poland’s main reception center for asylum seekers, I felt completely speechless, spineless, clueless.  I remember, en route to the center, how my heart seemed to pound in unison with the train’s rhythmic thumping over the tracks. How my legs were weak as I walked the forest path to Dębak’s looming fences. How my mouth was ash-dry as I approached a young Chechen woman watching her toddler son at play, and asked her, in what came out as a nonsensical mix of Polish and Russian, if she would consider filling out a questionnaire. She did.

She was slender and graceful, with luminous white skin, pale red hair, and irises flecked with green and gold. As she checked the boxes of the questionnaire she told me, in slow but emphatic Russian, how she longed to return to her family in Chechnya, to take her son and leave her husband – who refused to even consider the option. Her cold hand closed around my wrist as she asked me if there was anything I could do to help her. Feeling endlessly helpless, all I could do was write down Adam Borowski’s phone number.

The feelings of helplessness were indeed an obstacle to overcome. I was asking these individuals for a favor while, in effect, offering nothing in return. Still, while many people walked wordlessly past me, slammed doors in my face, or asked me suspiciously about my “real intentions” behind getting their answers to the questionnaire, a good deal more welcomed me inside their rooms, offered me tea and sweets, and tried to explain to me what they once had and what they had been through, what they were enduring now, and what they still hoped for in years to come. Seldom had I encountered such resentment and unease – but also, in many cases, such motiveless candor and hospitality.

By June I had spent time at three reception centers – Dębak, Bielany and Linin – and surveyed more than 130 Chechens. I had made friends with a spry, good-hearted native of Grozny called Maga (for short), who lived in Warsaw and helped me tremendously when language barriers became insurmountable, or when traveling to the centers was particularly complicated.

In order to get to the center in Linin, for example, Maga recruited a few friends who shared a car for the trip. Four of us piled into a dilapidated Volkswagon Golf and, as we drove, the speakers pounded out plaintive Chechen pop music. Sitting in the front passenger’s seat, one arm out the window, I remembered thinking how I had done this very thing in summer months in the U.S., and how a Volkswagon filled with Chechens on a dusty Polish street differed so little from the cars on roads in Hackensack, in Princeton, in the streets of New York City or down by the ocean shore, and how familiar it all really felt, learning to call new people friends, to call a new place, at least for a while, home. All of us had learned to do it.

After a long day of administering surveys at Linin, we returned to the garage-turned-home in which four of the young men resided and all ate scrambled eggs out of the same frying pan for dinner. Then they drove me back to my apartment in Warsaw. Since I was soon moving out I offered them the ancient TV set I had procured for the stay; in exchange they gave me the CD full of music we had listened to on the road to Linin. We all wished each other luck as we parted.

The written outcome of my Fulbright experience – despite all my initial attempts to intellectualize it – turned out to be a hybrid of many things. My final report is not pure social science, nor is it an act of journalism, policy analysis or creative fiction. It is a mixture of all of these, and a reflection of the richness, the profundity and the poignancy of the experience, start-to-finish. It offers a window, I hope, into how the Fulbright Program often operates: plans change, objectives change, and often, along the way, something about your core changes. All there is to be done is to absorb as much as possible, and, hopefully, to be able to impart what was learned in order to change others one day, too. Even a small bit at a time.
I keep that in mind now that I am back in the United States, pursuing a Master’s degree at Columbia University’s Journalism School. The same plaintive Chechen pop music, once resounding down Polish back roads, these days crosses the George Washington Bridge, gets caught in traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, all with great regularity.

Biographical Note: Olivia Victoria Andrzejczak received her B.A. cum laude from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs in 2007, completed her Fulbright Scholarship research project under the auspices of Warsaw University’s Centre of Migration Research, and is currently pursuing a Master of Science at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she is a fellow at the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.

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