Poland’s ministry of memory spins the Holocaust

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

For years Olympic slalom canoeist Dariusz Popiela, 36, trained on the Dunajec river in southern Poland. During his twenties, he paddled every day on a churning stretch between two bridges in his hometown of Nowy Sacz. He never thought that this place so familiar to him would become the source of what can be called his memory rebellion. Popiela has always been fascinated by history. He grew up quizzing his grandfather about his childhood memories of life in Nazi-occupied Poland.

But there was an enormous chapter that his grandfather had ripped out of his mental storybook of recollections: the nearly 12,000 Jews who lived in Nowy Sacz before 1939 — about a third of the town’s pre-war population. They had disappeared from the town’s memory. Absent from lessons at school, it wasn’t until Popiela began his own research that he learned about the scale of Jewish life in Nowy Sacz and in Poland. With a thousand years of Jewish history, the country was home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of the United States at the start of World War II.

Popiela was floored when he read the details of how Jewish residents from his town were transported to the neighboring Belzec death camp. Many spent their final night in Nowy Sacz huddled on the riverbank exactly between the two bridges where he had paddled in his canoe so often.

“They saw this same view. They heard the same river voices and sounds,” Popiela said when we stood by the riverbank this past May. Running through some of the most picturesque scenery in southern Poland, the Dunajec river flows through steep gorges, pine forests and fields of tall grass growing right up to its fast-moving waterline. Popiela pointed to families cycling by and couples walking along the river path. “Half of the city disappeared and you have no memory,” Popiela said, shrugging his shoulders. “How is that possible?”

Since his discovery, Popiela has led dozens of commemorations to Jewish life across Poland through his foundation “People, Not Numbers.” Popiela is part of a new generation of Polish citizens, historians, writers and educators pushing for a more honest confrontation with Poland’s 20th century history.

For decades, Polish-Jewish history was kept in what scholars call “the communist freezer.” Around three million Polish Jews were murdered by the Nazis. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Polish communist authorities tolerated much discussion of the genocide. When they did — such as during an anti-semitic purge of the party in 1968 — it was to blame Jews for not showing enough gratitude towards ethnic Poles who tried to save them.

After the fall of communism, some of that silence was broken. More recently, the country’s ruling right-wing government has been consolidating a nationalistic narrative about the past that emphasizes pride over what they say are a politics of shame. It has been effective. Recent surveys show Polish people believe that more than half of Poles directly helped or hid Jews in their homes during Nazi occupation, an absurd overestimate. Those like Popiela who work to commemorate Jewish victims are accused of promoting what’s been coined by the government as a “pedagogy of shame.” The term is used as a political slur by Jaroslaw Kaczynski and members of the party he leads, the ruling Law and Justice party. It has come to mean a liberal historical agenda that exaggerates dark facets of Polish history.

At the center of these competing historical narratives is Poland’s ministry of memory — called the National Institute of Remembrance, IPN in Polish, which was created in the early 2000s to deal with the country’s communist legacy, manage the historic KGB archives and prosecute crimes committed under communism. Today the Institute also largely deals with the legacy of Nazi occupation and is charged with defending the country’s “good name.” The IPN was at the center of international fury in 2018 when the government passed a “Holocaust law,” known as the “IPN law” within Poland, making it a criminal offense to “defame” the Polish nation by claiming Polish people had responsibility for Nazi crimes.

The IPN is one of Poland’s most powerful institutions, with its budget making it the largest institute of historical research in the country, eclipsing university history departments and independent research institutes. A one-of-a-kind bureaucratic creation, it is the country’s most prolific publisher of historical texts, a prosecutor’s office, a production house of historical films and games, and a major authority shaping what students across the country are taught about history in school. The Institute of Remembrance’s budget has nearly doubled under the Law and Justice Party, which has been in power since 2015. Today it has an annual budget of 430 million PLN ($105 million), a staff of about 2,000 and 11 regional branch offices.

With its leadership appointed by parliament, the Institute is controversial in an already highly polarized political environment. There is demand from a number of leading historians for the Institute to be dismantled or reformed. Far more widespread opposition comes in the form of local level initiatives like Popiela’s that are trying to change memory culture in Poland.

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

A memory rebellion

When Popiela learned about the concentration camp on the banks of the Dunajec, just steps away from the beautifully preserved town square in Nowy Sacz, his first feeling was in fact shame.

Each new detail that emerged felt personal: the dam further up the Dunajec river was built by forced Jewish labor, he discovered; and he later found slabs of 17th century matzevot, or Jewish gravestones, used in the construction of town infrastructure, their Hebrew script just barely still legible off the curb of a busy roadside.

“But the shame was something that gave me power,” said Popiela. “It gave me rebellion and the power to do something.”

For the past ten years, Popiela has devoted the time he has outside of his sport to commemoration work. With just a handful of members, his foundation, People, Not Numbers, has researched archives and interviewed older residents to identify the name, surname and age of Jewish victims across rural Poland. They’ve installed 10 monuments and discovered 10 mass Jewish grave sites. Volunteers maintain a number of Jewish cemeteries that were abandoned. Popiela self-publishes what he calls — with a wink — his “underground” monthly newspaper about Jewish history in Nowy Sacz. He leaves out stacks at local coffee shops and in the town hall.

When we meet in May, Popiela is about to break ground on his most recent project: a memorial park in Nowy Sacz located within what had been the town’s Jewish ghetto along with the installation of a plaque along the Dunajec river bank at the site of the former camp. All of the efforts are crowdfunded by Popiela. I asked him, why is he — an Olympic canoeist about to compete in the European Championships — doing this in a country that’s created an entire state bureaucracy to deal with historical remembrance.

“They are caring about other stories,” he said. I push him to elaborate and he gives an example. A few years ago the foundation tried to team up on the commemoration of a Jewish family of eight, murdered in 1944 after being turned over to the Gestapo by their neighbor. The Institute’s local branch said the memorial plaque must say that this family was killed by the Nazis. Popiela refused.

“Do you put the name of the murderer of your family on their grave?” asked Popiela. It’s the same demand he’s just recently received in an open letter from several local, patriotic organizations in opposition to his plan for building a monument to Jews killed in Nowy Sacz. “They don’t have the point of view of the victims. The most important part for them is the sign that the Germans made the Holocaust.”

Poland has long tried to police language around the Holocaust. When former U.S. President Barack Obama referred to “Polish death camps” during a 2012 visit to Warsaw, the White House was compelled to apologize. Right-wing lawmakers made several attempts to introduce a three-year prison sentence for using the term.

A widely shared perception among Poles is that the rest of the world underappreciates Polish suffering during Nazi occupation. “They have this obsession that starts when people say that Polish people are responsible for the Holocaust. Now the narrative of the IPN is that nearly all Polish people had a Jew hidden in their basement,” said Popiela. “They are saying that we were all heroes. But from the archives, it doesn’t look so nice.”

I took a ride with Popiela over to the neighboring town of Grybow where in 2019 he and his team of volunteers had installed a memorial in a Jewish cemetery on a hill overlooking the town. Abandoned for 80 years, the cemetery was a fenced-in jungle. Today, it’s a peaceful, wooded plot with several informative plaques displaying photographs of victims installed by the foundation. The centerpiece is a large granite monument of a splintered matzevah, with slabs on either side listing the name and ages of the nearly 2,000 Jewish victims killed in Grybow during the occupation, nearly a third were children under the age of 13.

Further uphill, Popiela crouches down and starts pulling the weeds coming up over a mass grave site they had discovered using a drone and geo-radar. He tells me about some of the online hate he gets for his work, people accusing him of working for George Soros or telling him he’d be better off spending his time cleaning up Catholic cemeteries. When seeking funding, he’s often told to find some “rich Jew” to pay for the memorial.

We drive back down the hill from the cemetery to town and pass the local Grybow church. It’s Sunday afternoon and the red brick church is packed, with dozens of people crowding at the doors and even standing in the square outside. Just a few steps away from the towering basilica stands Grybow’s Jewish synagogue, abandoned and with its windows knocked out. There are no Jewish people in Grybow. Across from the synagogue an artist has recently painted a large mural in sepia tones. The mural is based off of a 1922 photograph showing three generations of Grybow’s lost Jewish residents.

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

The Ghosts are coming back

“We are the main enemies of the Institute of National Remembrance,” said Agnieszka Haska, a cultural anthropologist at the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw. It’s one of the first things she tells me when we meet.

Much of Haska’s work focuses on questions of collaboration and Jewish escape from occupied Poland and she says the IPN has put her publications and other writings from the center constantly under the microscope. The institutes’ team of fact checkers flags perceived mistakes, sometimes even a footnote, and publishes lengthy rebuttals. The vice president of the IPN told me it’s part of an “ongoing academic debate.” Called traitors on public TV channels, Haska said “it feels much more like an ongoing war.”

It can also get petty. Haska says she’s called the IPN numerous times asking them to stop their regular deliveries of the latest IPN volumes of historical research to the Holocaust Research Center’s office. The institute’s historians are prolific, publishing up to 300 titles a year. The publications flood national bookstores and are subsidized, making it even harder for non-IPN authors to sell their titles. “They are trolling us!” Haska said.

Some of Haska’s recent writing looks at Polish antisemitic science fiction, a popular genre during the 19th century. Writers could pass off their anti-Jewish texts as “fantasy” books to get by the Russian empire’s censors. Haska is focusing on one novel written by Tadeusz Hollender in 1938 called “Poland Without Jews.” Largely lost to history, Hollender’s fantasy fiction was meant as a critique of Polish antisemitism. In Hollender’s satire, the Jews of Poland finally decide they’ve had enough. Families across the country pack up their belongings and begin a long journey to a new land, settling on Madagascar. Suddenly, Christian Poles find that they have no more Jewish neighbors, no one to beat up or to blame for their misfortunes. It turns out that life in Poland without Jews isn’t what they had hoped. So the characters in Hollender’s fiction summon a delegation that sets off for Madagascar and begs their Jewish compatriots to return back home with the words, “We don’t know who we are without you.”

Just a few years after Hollender’s book was published in 1938, the German army retreated from Poland. The Jews had been almost entirely exterminated. Close to 90% of Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. About 20% of Poland’s total population died of war-related causes, including author Tadeusz Hollender who was shot by the Gestapo in 1943 for his role in the Polish underground. After the war, many of the Jews who managed to survive emigrated to Israel or the U.S.

Writing about the Second World War in Poland, the country’s most well-known historian Jan Gross quoted a Holocaust-era memoir: “This was a war which no one quite survived.” Nearly six million Poles perished during the six years of Nazi occupation. Gross gives some numbers to describe the utter devastation of Polish urban life: nearly a third of all urban residents missing following the war, 40% of Polish doctors killed, 30% of university professors and Catholic clergy and 55% of lawyers dead by the end of the war. Soviet occupation brought its own brutality, with the massacre of 22,000 Polish military officers by the Soviet Army in 1940 in Katyn and campaigns of terror waged across the country by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.

To this day, many in Poland remain bitter, believing they had been sold out to the Soviet Union by the West at the end of the war, condemned to 50 years of communist authoritarianism. “Eighty years on, the Second World War still dictates our present,” said Haska. “It’s really scary if you think about it, but the world really ended on the first of September 1939.”

Haska then tells me about one of her first trips to Israel years ago. She remembers her shock, and shame, when people across the country immediately recognized the name of her hometown of Ciechanow in northwest Poland, population 43,000. She got a history lesson from the Israelis she met about how the town used to be nearly half Jewish and about Roza Robota, one of the four women who led an uprising in Auschwitz in September 1944. She was from Ciechanow.

“Everybody knew where Chiechanow was and everybody knew her name,” Haska remembers. “I grew up 50 meters from a Jewish cemetery in Ciechanow and I had no idea.”

The only trace of Robota’s life in Ciechanow is a street named after her, stretching for three blocks on the outskirts of town. Three short blocks that reflect the preference for certain historical narratives by the Law and Justice party and the IPN. Jewish victims of the Holocaust are commemoratated as a backdrop for a sweeping story of Catholic Polish heroism and resistance. Little to no space is allowed for one of the cruelest truths of 20th century authoritarianism: People became complicit in their own subjugation.

This truth is one of the opening observations in Jan Gross’s book “Neighbors,” which rocked Poland on publication in 2000 and is still highly controversial today. The book details the previously unstudied July 1941 massacre of Polish Jews by their non-Jewish neighbors in the town of Jedwabne. During the pogrom, Gross writes that German involvement was limited to standing by and taking photographs. In the early 2000s, the newly created IPN confirmed that it was the Polish residents who killed their neighbors. A year after the book was published, at a ceremony in Jedwabne, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski publicly begged for forgiveness.

More recently there’s been backlash. There is an ongoing campaign to exhume the bodies of the Jewish victims in order to prove that they were killed by German soldiers, and not their neighbors. Commenting about Jedwabne and the Kielce massacre, led by Polish residents in 1946 in a northern town after the war, the country’s minister of education refused in a 2016 interview to acknowledge that Polish people were responsible, saying that this “has been misunderstood many times.”

Overnight in Jedwabne, an entire town learned that their grandparents either took part, or stood by, in the brutal massacre of Jews, many of whom were burned alive. There are a number of historians studying historical backlash in Poland. Social psychologist Michal Bilewicz has looked at how people who have experienced historical trauma are more prone to believe in conspiracy theories as an adaption to the trauma, and how educational programs about the Holocaust have in some cases caused symptoms of PTSD in Polish participants or fueled disbelief and a rejection of the facts.

During our meeting in Warsaw, Haska told me a story about her aunt who a few years ago got a knock on the door of her home, a beautiful villa built in the 1930s. The woman at the door was German and she had come to see if her old family home was still standing. She had grown up there as a little girl when the territory was part of Germany. In January 1945, the family fled as the Soviet Army advanced across Poland. The women spoke to each other in German. Haska’s aunt told the visitor how her two brothers were killed by the Gestapo in 1943. The German woman shared her memory of her little brother dying as the family escaped their home in the winter of 1945.

“Half of Poland is living in someone else’s home, not only Jewish but German too,” Haska said. “But the ghosts are coming back.”

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Patriotic Blackmail

Across Poland, there’s a history museum boom. Over the past fifteen years, nearly a dozen new history museums have opened. In pre-covid years, museums in Poland — a country of 38 million — had 38 million visitors, topping ticket sales for the national soccer team. A number of these new museums have also ushered in scandals and embarrassing international headlines.

In 2020, the director of Warsaw’s renowned POLIN Museum, historian Dariusz Stola, was pushed out by the government. In 2017, the Minister of Culture replaced the director of Gdansk’s new World War II Museum with a more friendly candidate — historian Karol Nawrocki, who today serves as President of the Institute of National Remembrance. The Museum of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising hasn’t even opened yet but is already drawing accusations of politicizing history. Another museum, the Warsaw Uprising Museum which opened in 2004, found itself again in the media spotlight after unveiling a new “Room of the Young Insurgent” exhibition, filled with stuffed animals, crayons and the “inspirational” stories of young child combatants in WWII, along with a statue of a Polish child soldier holding an automatic weapon.

While the IPN is not tied to any of these museums, the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews is perhaps the best brick and mortar representation of the institute’s politics. Opened six years ago, the Museum was curated by the IPN’s current vice president, Mateusz Szpytma.

Polish President Andrzej Duda attended the opening ceremony of the museum — located two and a half hours outside Krakow in the village of Markowa, population 4,000.

“The world does not know the reality that prevailed in Poland during the years of occupation, and it is this ignorance that hurts the good name of our country,” Duda said in a speech in the museum’s courtyard.

In photos from the opening day, Duda is lit up by some of the courtyard’s thousands of glowing plaques, each carrying the name of a Polish citizen murdered for helping Jews during the war. Many of them have received Israel’s esteemed designation of the Righteous Among Nations given to people who undertook extraordinary risks to help Jewish people during the war. Poland has the largest number of Righteous internationally: over 7,000 Polish citizens, many of whom were killed for their actions.

The museum tells the story of the Ulma Family who sheltered eight Jews in Markowa during German occupation. After being denounced, the entire Ulma family along with the Goldman, Didner and Grunfeld families were shot to death, seventeen people including children and an unborn child.

Walking through the courtyard to the museum entrance, visitors first see a large illuminated photograph of the Ulma family, taken by the family’s father, Jozef Ulma. Ulma was by all accounts a renaissance man who took dozens of photos of his family with his camera, a rare and prized possession in a Polish village in the 1930s.

The exhibition, housed in a minimalist, modern metal and glass structure, features many photos he took of his family, neighbors and surrounding landscape, some still stained in the family’s blood. The Ulma Family Museum highlights the cruelty of the war, that 20% of Markowa’s Jews survived the war in hiding — an unusually high survival number — and the intense pressure villagers faced to collaborate and inform.

“I would like every visitor to this museum, among others, to know the drama that befell the Jewish people during World War II,” said the IPN’s Vice President Mateusz Szpytma who was the first historian to lead the investigation into the Ulma story. He estimates that tens of thousands of Jews survived in Poland thanks to help from non-Jews. “I would like them to know that even in the most difficult moments of totalitarianism there is the possibility of helping people in need. It is up to us individually how we behave, whether we stand with traitors, whether we are heroes, whether we risk our lives for other people.”

Outdoors there’s a large memorial grave to the family with a Polish coat of arms, a cross and on the ground, a fresh bouquet of red roses. Seven urns with the remains of the Ulma family are displayed. The Jewish victims who were hiding at the Ulma family home are buried elsewhere, in a military cemetary about 15 miles away. Golda Grunfeld, Lea Didner and her child as well as five men by the name of Goldman are not listed. They are memorialized collectively with some of the three hundred nameless Jewish Poles murdered during the war and buried there.

Some of Poland’s most prominent historians, Jan Grabowski, Agnieszka Haska at the Holocaust Research Center among others, have been vocal critics of the framing of the exhibition. The Ulma Museum in some ways is an important break with the past. For decades in Poland, people given the Righteous designation hid it from their neighbors and family members out of fear of stigmatization and persecution. Honoring them on a national level has been long overdue, but critics say this is being done at the expense of the Jewish people they saved who are reduced to vehicles for Polish heroism.

“As a Polish citizen, a Polish researcher, I’m totally into commemorating these rare exceptions of noble Poles who were brave enough to somehow oppose this wartime reality. But at the same time these biographies are being used as a kind of patriotic blackmail,” said Maria Kobielska, who co-founded the Center for Research on Remembrance Culture at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She has been researching new history museums and has written about the Ulma Museum.

“The general message is that this was the typical attitude of Polish people, to act as Jozef and Wictoria Ulma. If you oppose this narrative and this museum you somehow oppose the memory of the Ulmas,” Kobielska said. “These people are used as an alibi for anyone who is Polish.”

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Maria Babinska at the Center for Research on Prejudice at Warsaw University has been running social psychology surveys over five years. “We asked people to imagine — since the specific historical percentages are not known and will never be known — their estimate of how many Poles collaborated with Germans and the percentage who were indifferent,” said Babinska.

The study showed that Polish people believe that close to 60% of Poles selflessly helped Jews during World War II, but also believe that 25% of Poles collaborated with Nazis.

The results were highly polarized, a split based on which political party respondents voted for but also by factors such as expressing antisemitic views or supporting the IPN Holocaust law.

I asked the IPN’s vice president Mateusz Szpytma what he made of these numbers: “I don’t think Poland is an exception here, people misperceive history,” said Szpytma. “It’s important to show history as it was, what you have to be proud of and the things that were bad, you have to be ashamed of them. These two sides are strongly present in our work at the Institute of National Remembrance.”

Babinska attributes the results of her research to basic human psychology: members of a community often overestimate the morality of their group.

Morality, identity, being part of an ingroup have all been powerful themes in the Law and Justice party’s electoral campaigns. Campaign slogans and speeches reinforce the country’s Catholic and Polish identity, patriotic resistance to Nazi occupation and communism.

“Memory policy is a substitute for ideology that legitimizes the party,” says Dariusz Stola, the deposed director of Warsaw’s POLIN Museum and a historian at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Since 2015, the Law and Justice party has crafted an official party “strategy” for its historical policy with President Duda saying that “conducting historical policy is one of the most important activities of the president.”

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

People’s history

Maciej Sanigorski and Jeremi Galdamez are guarding a different kind of memory that is even more unpopular in the country than Jewish-Polish history — the history of Polish communism. Since 2017, the IPN has reinvergerated the country’s decommunization efforts of the 1990s, changing street names and removing over 200 monuments across Poland which “symbolize or propagate” totalitarianism. It’s the most public-facing work of the IPN, with the Institute’s current president holding video press conferences as workers drill and demolish monuments behind him in the shot.

Sanigorski, who works in transport for the Polish post office, and Galdamez, who writes for a history magazine and whose father was a member of Chile’s communist youth and fled political persecution for Poland in the 70s, are both left-wing organizers in Warsaw and have led a campaign to preserve the memory of Polish volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Poland had the second largest group of international volunteers fighting in Spain against Franco’s fascists.

So far, their biggest victory was gathering over a thousand signatures necessary to oppose an IPN order to change a street name in Warsaw named after the Polish brigade. It was a considerable undertaking in a post-communist country where anything related to socialism remains toxic.

Sanigorski and Galdamez took me past the sites where some of Warsaw’s communist monuments have disappeared overnight. Along with holding discussions about historical policies, they organize an annual memorial service for Poland’s fighters in a military cemetery in Warsaw, with delegations from Spain, Germany and Italy joining this year.

“I always say if I lived in communist times I would fight for the memory of the anti-communist resistance because you have to fight for the things that are being thrown away from history,” said Sanigorski.

Valentin Behr, a political scientist at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, says the group is one of dozens of grassroots initiatives in opposition to the decommunization of public space and demonstrates that sometimes national memory politics can end up backfiring.

“It’s a way to produce a counter narrative to the official narrative and to show that there is another Poland that is not conservative, not fascist, which is progressive and that is forgotten most of the time in collective memory.”

Both Sanigorski and Galdamez object to the historical policies of the IPN — which they call an Orwellian ministry of truth, enforcing memory politics down to street names in small towns all across the country. However, both said it would be complicated to do away with it completely. Nearly everyone I asked had a different take on what to do with the IPN. While there’s no indication of the Institute going anywhere under the current government, there is an ongoing debate on how it could be reformed, or even dismantled if the opposition regains the majority.

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Guardians of Memory

Adam Musial, a high school history teacher in Krakow for 22 years, quit his job in 2019 after finding it increasingly difficult to teach the Holocaust. “The general atmosphere in Poland surrounding memory simply reinforced my decision,” he said.

As part of a research grant he has been interviewing about 20 teachers across the country. They tell him it’s become more difficult for them to work. “The atmosphere is stifling,” he said.

He offered an example of a teacher who had tried to bring a Jewish Holocaust survivor to the school. During a faculty meeting, another teacher suggested that if they go ahead with the visit it would be best to bring in more than one speaker to offer students different perspectives on the subject. “So what, I should invite a Nazi?” the teacher quipped, eventually dropping the idea altogether.

For the past year, lawmakers have debated a new Polish law that would make it even harder for teachers to bring in outside speakers or participate in extracurricular programming. Right-wing politicians have rallied against “moral corruption” in schools — largely code for sex education — and pushed through a law that would make teachers seek written permission to bring in any outside speaker or organizations that aren’t on a selective, pre-approved government list. Along with sex education, this would shut down the majority of in-school Holocaust education activity. However, after passing through the Polish parliament, the law was vetoed by President Duda who asked lawmakers to ”postpone it,” citing the ongoing war in Ukraine. It appears the law would complicate integrating the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugee students into Poland’s schools.

But the year of uncertainty has already left a mark: Poland’s largest and oldest non-profit organization dedicated to Jewish-Polish communication has been restructuring their programming, orienting away from schools to be more resilient to politics. Since 1998, the Forum for Dialogue has brought Holocaust survivors and educators to nearly 10,000 students in 400 schools across Poland, focusing on programming in small towns and villages that once had a Jewish community. A core part of the program — known as the School of Dialogue — has students at partner schools lead independent research on their community’s Jewish history, which culminates in a student-led public walking tour for local residents.

Now, the Forum is leaning into their other programs such as directly educating teachers and growing their existing network of over a hundred local historical activists across Poland. The Forum calls them “guardians of memory” — Dariusz Popiela from Nowy Sacz is one of them.

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Backfire

Back in Nowy Sacz, Popiela tells me about how he got lunch with his grandfather a few years ago. Popiela had already started his commemoration work at that point and they were discussing a project. At one point he noticed tears in his grandfather’s eyes. For the first time he told Popiela about a memory he had as a young boy. The town’s ghetto had been liquidated and the walls separating the ghetto from the rest of the town had come down.

His grandfather told him how he walked through the empty ghetto streets and then saw a few boys his age hiding in one of the buildings. Books, some even with gold Hebrew lettering, were scattered across the pavement. He told Popiela how stupid he felt that his family and others had gathered and burned the books because they had nothing left to make a fire with. And then he started to cry.

While his grandfather and father both support the ruling party, he says they’ve come around to his work and today the entire family pulls together on the commemoration efforts including Popiela’s young children.

Popiela says he will move out of town when his daughter turns 18 if there’s still no monument dedicated to the Holocaust in Nowy Sacz. When we met in May, he was still waiting on authorization to start building the memorial. The day before, he had been cheering on his 11-year-old daughter in her first canoeing competition down on the riverbank between the two bridges where he plans to build the second part of his commemoration.

In the weeks since, construction was greenlit. There’s an opening ceremony planned for mid-August.

One in every five Polish vets has considered suicide: “I broke down on December 23rd when I had to put down nine animals in one day.”

A preliminary task: count the amount of people around you who have committed suicide in recent years.

Vets are conscientious, detail-oriented, and great at science. Calculations are a normal part of their work. 

Magda Jaszczak takes a moment to consider. One, two, three… Thirteen people, she counts. 

The first was a doctor who employed her in a clinic in northern England sixteen years ago. He was kind enough to give Magda two months to move out of a neighbouring town and organise her life in the new environment. When she moved there for good, he was already dead. Next, there were three female vets. In 2019, they passed away one by one, all within a span of three months. One of them used to be Magda’s mentor. She had just founded a thriving clinic. The second one was an internationally renowned academic teacher. She trained veterinary nurses. A few months ago, another acquaintance of Magda, a 50-year-old vet, passed away, also having committed suicide. In the Swedish town where she currently runs a clinic, a vet killed himself four years ago. Quite recently, at a hospital in a large city next door, it was a young female graduate, an intern. And so on.

Magda: “In this industry, everyone has a colleague who has died in this way, regardless of whether you work in Poland, England or Sweden.”

Natalia Strokowska, a vet working in Warsaw, says that for her, it’s three people. “Last year, it was a friend from university. She suffered from bipolar disorder. Earlier, a colleague who I helped find a job abroad. He was addicted to drugs. Oh, and a veterinary technician. He treated my guinea pig once. He had been stealing drugs, he was addicted to them. Nobody knew.”

Szymon Najdora, the owner of a veterinary clinic in Katowice, knows two people: “Four years ago, it was one of my employees. A great vet who was adored by her clients. A few hours before she had called me to ask about her vacation; she had wanted to extend it to meet a friend. At that time, we were taking care of a dog at the clinic who had had a strange accident. He was left at home with a group of children, and when the parents returned, his hind legs were paralysed. The owners left him with us. They did not want to contribute to the treatment. It was a tough experience for the entire team, but this girl was hit the hardest. She fought hard for that dog. We even got him a trolley so that he could move around. The dog is doing well now, the partner of our late colleague adopted him. 

I went to another funeral last November. She was a young, talented woman who had achieved a lot. Also around 30 years old. That’s why it hurts so much. Among my other colleagues, there have been five suicide attempts in the past few years.”

Paula Dziubińska-Bartylak is the owner of a clinic in Bydgoszcz and specializes in exotic animals, dogs and cats: “In 2020, my close friend committed suicide. A few years earlier, in the first year that I worked in Poznań, it was a female colleague who was on duty on New Year’s Eve. At another clinic, years ago, another female colleague. She tried to do it at the clinic. Our chief, who went out to consult on a horse, came back because she’d forgotten to take her equipment and medication with her. She arrived just in time. The girl was lying on the office floor, and they managed to resuscitate her. If I were to count the suicide attempts among my colleagues and close friends in the industry, I would run out of fingers.”

A few years ago in the UK, vets were asked, “If you couldn’t treat animals, what kind of profession would be an alternative for you?” Many of them filled in accounting. Magda: “Yes, it makes sense. Most of us are perfectionists, proficient in sciences. Maybe if we were dealing with figures and not animals, we wouldn’t lose so many people.”

The murderous training begins at university: veterinary medicine is one of the most difficult and demanding programs. Before the first major exam, students need to learn the anatomical systems of several species: from pigs and cows to horses, sheep, dogs and cats. You need to remember every bone name in both Polish and in Latin. And this is just the beginning. There is also mental conditioning, an aspect where students, especially female ones, learn that they are nobody.  

Natalia Strokowska is originally from Kraków. Seven years ago, she completed her course in veterinary medicine at Warsaw University of Life Sciences (SGGW). For the first three years of the program, she alternately studied, worked, and slept. She hardly had time for private life. She spent half of her time breathing formalin fumes in the dissecting room and the other half looking through a microscope. From the very beginning, lecturers told her she wouldn’t make it. Students took to sedatives. Every now and then, someone ‘disappeared.’ They dropped out of university, took a medical leave of absence, or ended up in a psychiatric hospital. It was whispered about in the university corridors. 

Natalia also ended up consulting a psychiatrist during the third year of her studies. She received a referral for publicly-financed therapy in her hometown Kraków. She could not afford a course of private therapy in Warsaw, so every Friday she would buy a cheap ticket for a TLK train to Kraków, attend a therapy session, gather strength among her relatives and friends, and then on Monday she would return to the capital for classes. Natalia is an attractive, tall blonde woman and over time she started to earn extra money by modeling. She also took part in the Miss SGGW competition. One professor asked her, “My dear, would you prefer to become a vet or walk down the runway?” Another lecturer, infamous for his ‘weakness’ for pretty girls, handed her a note after a class inviting her to his office. A few years later, he got dismissed on a disciplinary basis. There was also another professor who liked to lean against female students under the pretext of peering into the microscope from behind their backs. He flunked Natalia by a quarter-point, forcing her to resit exams in the September session. At the end, he commented, “I hope this time you can demonstrate your abilities.” He currently teaches at another university.

Today, Natalia is completing her PhD thesis and is a lecturer herself. She notes that some of her students are no longer capable of even hiding signs of self-harm. Natalia sees the suffering in their pale, tired, grey faces. She is able to guess their condition by looking at the pulled-down sleeves of their jerseys. And although the current authorities at her university are aware of the importance of the mental health of future vets, the measures taken are just a drop in the ocean of their needs.

Natalia: “The profile of a veterinary surgeon has changed during the last thirty years. Until the 1990s, the profession was dominated by men who treated farm animals. Today, there is a demand for the treatment of pets, and it’s mostly women who want to study veterinary medicine. They often have a strong sense of purpose, they love animals and want to save them. Then, once they’re at university, they bump into old-school lecturers who sometimes openly show their disrespect. There is an unwritten rule of ‘survival of the strongest.’ In my class, after the first two semesters, the drop-out rate was 40%. In the following years, we were joined by the so-called “parachutists,” those who ended up a class down to repeat a year. The record-holder in my class repeated his year three times, he was several years older than us.” 

Magda graduated from Warsaw University of Life Sciences 16 years ago. “After the third year, I had a mental breakdown and took a leave of absence. Mobbing was ubiquitous at the Faculty. Any pretext was good enough for the lecturers to flunk a student at the exam. One of the lecturers derided me for having red hair. I got a diploma with a mere Pass. When I did my specialisation course in England, I graduated with honours.”

In England, Magda became involved in the activities of Vetlife Charity, which runs a helpline for vets and veterinary students. “In England, they see changes similar to those occurring in Poland. There, the 50-year-old vets in checked shirts and dirty gloves are being replaced by the so-called “pony girls,” the daughters of wealthy parents who loved their ponies so much that they decided to study veterinary medicine. Then, when such a “ponygirl” is confronted with reality, she experiences shock. They are often perfectionists, slim, flawless women wearing well-fitting clothes who, unlike their older colleagues, do not take to drink but suffer from anorexia or torture their bodies in gyms. While I was working at the charity, we received about 20 emails a day from male and female vets. They wrote about self-harm, anorexia, depression, suicidal thoughts, and problems with their clients and bosses. Our task was to offer them support, which included referring them to an appropriate therapist.”

Paula: “The word ‘leisure’ was removed from my vocabulary when I was first started studying veterinary medicine. The amount of work you have to put in is shocking: the treadmill never stops, you have to give it 120% all the time. There were times when I would go to sleep in my day clothes which I came home from uni and then I would wear them the entire following day. I didn’t want to waste time changing my clothes, I would rather study. Studying veterinary medicine, I learned to reduce my own needs to zero.’

Szymon: “I don’t have bad memories from my studies in Katowice. But I did see the pressure that the female students faced. Derision from the lecturers and claims that there is no place for women in the profession was a daily occurrence. The women had to work a lot harder than the men to achieve the same results.”

If there existed a survival manual for vets, the first chapter would be about the university and might end with something like this: “So you have survived university and believe that it will get only better from now on, huh? You don’t even realize how wrong you are.” Szymon: “Maybe if someone told us right away in the first year that this job is not really about animals only, then we wouldn’t have to attend so many of our colleagues’ funerals.”  

Survival Manual, Chapter Two: “You will barely make ends meet and you’ll be considered a rip-off merchant.”

It’s 2014 and Natalia’s just started her first job at a clinic near Warsaw. The boss mentally abuses doctors and 17 employees pass through the clinic in three years. Natalia’s earnings: PLN 980 handed over in an envelope, no social security. Natalia models on the side so she can get by. When she receives her doctoral scholarship, she reaches 2,000 zlotys a month. For several months she passes through various veterinary clinics in Warsaw where she is employed illegally or part-time. In 2015, she registers as a freelancer and starts teaching Medical English. The doctoral scholarship is spent paying the social security contributions, a bookkeeping service provider and a room at a dormitory. She also gets her first contract for doing on-duty jobs at British clinics. After a few years, she finds jobs in Sweden. This is the first time she sees any savings in her account. 

Sedlak & Sedlak’s report shows that the average net salary of a veterinary surgeon in Poland is PLN 2,900. The research conducted by the company Natalia works for (Vetnolimits) in 2018 shows that more than a half of Polish veterinary surgeons have financial problems.

Natalia: “People often consider a vet to be a rip-off merchant basking in luxury. The reality couldn’t be more different. The wealthy ones are the clinic owners who have worked for their position over the years or the vets that take care of large-scale industrial herds. Single-vet surgeries or small clinics often barely get by. Clients require services at the level of human medicine, so vets go into debt buying very expensive equipment like ultrasound scanners, X-ray scanners and tomographs. Products that amount to hundreds of thousands or even millions of zlotys of credit. On top of that, there are the costs of specialisation courses and life-long training, which we pay for ourselves. And our clients are not always willing to pay for the service delivered. What if the animal does not wake up from anaesthesia after surgery or dies despite our attempts to save it? Has the service been delivered or not? Some think it hasn’t been and are prepared to fight to prove they’re right. I hear from other vets that uncollected bills for veterinary treatment may even exceed 50,000 zlotys.”

Szymon: “People buy a pet at a pet store for 50 zlotys and expect its medical treatment to cost more or less that amount. They are shocked when they learn that a surgical procedure will cost them several hundred zlotys. They raise hell, they insult us. Sometimes clients who cannot afford treatment leave their pet, for instance, a rabbit, with us and then we pass the animal on to charities. This is not a good thing because it teaches people that what is broken can be left behind. Several times a year, we also find animals in serious condition abandoned at the door of our clinic. That’s why I believe that having an animal should be a privilege. A luxury.”

Survival Manual, Chapter Three: “You have no idea what extreme despair or extreme rage truly mean.”

Natalia remembers a woman nine months pregnant who came in to have her old dog examined. An ultrasound examination showed that the animal had a giant, bleeding tumour on its spleen. The owner howled in shock and despair and fell to the floor. She lay with the dog for a dozen or so minutes and wept, holding her pregnant belly. Her mother was sitting next to her, also crying. Natalia sat down next to them and held their hands until they calmed down.

Paula: “When an animal dies during surgery, people can roll on the ground and shout, “It can’t be true! It is not possible!” On such occasions, I don’t know what to do. Go out? Lie down next to them and comfort them? I definitely cannot say, “Please pull yourself together and take a seat.” During our studies, no one prepared us for what it would be like to work with people. We never had psychology classes. At the beginning of my career, I didn’t feel equipped to inform clients about the death of their pets. I would dial the number and hang up because I was crying. Finally, there is also the question of the bill. I might forgo my own remuneration, but what about the cost of the procedure? The fee of the anaesthetist who will send me an invoice?” 

The despair of clients is sometimes paired with aggression. 

Five years ago, Szymon consulted a client about his dog. The animal weighed 10 kilos, half of its intended weight. The dog was vomiting violently, it had a tumour that covered almost half of its leg and a few airgun pellets in its body. The owner reluctantly agreed to euthanasia. Later on, he gave Szymon a single-star internet rating with a comment: “If I hadn’t chosen that particular vet, the dog would probably be alive today.” Szymon: “Not a week goes by without me being called a quack and a murderer. Over time, you’re supposed to become immune to such things, but when someone leaves crying out, “We’ll burn this shack of yours to the ground!”, your skin crawls. The worst part is that these aggressive owners often cause their pets’ fatal conditions themselves. We recently had a rabbit with an enormous tumour on its testicle, decayed teeth, a stone in the urethra, a broken leg, and a tangle of fur and dried faeces. The owner looked straight into my eyes and said, “He was fine yesterday.” He tried to pass on the responsibility for the pet’s condition to me.”

Paula feels like she has already heard everything out there. She was called a “heartless murderess,” and one client threatened to kill her child. There were also those who announced that they would destroy her or “fight her until she broke.” 

She also had cases like this one. A dog already has heavy dyspnoea but the client doesn’t agree to euthanasia because she wants the pet to die at home. It will be in agony for two days because “the owner loves it so much.” Paula questions this love. Because if the owner did love the dog, why didn’t she seek medical treatment for the dog six months earlier instead of waiting for the tumour to drag over the ground, decay and eventually rot? Paula sees multiple cases of such neglect every week: “Most of these animals could have been cured. As it is, instead of curing them, I have to euthanise them or watch their human take them home, thus condemning them to more torment. How am I supposed to recover from something like this?”

At the other extreme, there are clients who are not going to let go. Even now, Paula can remember an old cat with kidney failure whose owners kept dragging it from one specialist to another for a year. They spent thousands on its prolonged death: more pumps, more nasoesophageal probes, more nasopharyngeal tubes and drips. The cat was as good as dead. Paula recalls it spread on the examination table like a wet cloth, surrounded by cables and IV drops and tormented by suffering. Paula couldn’t do a thing. The owner can do what they like in this situation. If they want the animal to suffer at home unattended, no one can stop them. But if they are willing to spend tens of thousands on persistent therapy, the vet is equally helpless. The common denominator of both situations is suffering. The kind of death that Paula would not wish on any human being.

Paula: “Desperate people are capable of anything. Why did no one teach us at the university how to talk to them?”

Natalia: “We shepherd our clients through powerful crises even though we don’t have any psychological training to help us to do so. We do it intuitively, at the price of our own sanity. Over time, some cut themselves off from their own emotions in order to survive. It even has a name: “compassion fatigue.” Emotional exhaustion is caused by your own compassion. But if you’ve stopped feeling anything, it means it’s high time to consider changing your profession. 

In January 2019, the US CDC (Centre for Disease Control and Prevention) published the first large-scale study on mortality rates among American vets. The results were alarming: in male vets, the probability of suicide turned out to be more than twice as high as in the general population; for female vets, this factor is as much as 3.5 times. Research has also shown that vets specialising in the treatment of pets are at the highest risk of death by suicide.

Researchers try to explain these statistics by referring to the specific working conditions of vets: working overtime, poor work-life balance, the growing demands of clients, and the necessity of performing euthanasia – not only in old and sick animals but also in those neglected by their owners. 

But that’s not all. Research done in both the USA and the UK shows that veterinary medicine attracts people of a specific personality type: conscientious, empathetic perfectionists. These traits in themselves can contribute to the development of mental disorders resulting from high levels of stress, and when we add in extreme working conditions, this creates a perfect storm – a combination of circumstances in which tragedy comes easy. The issue of money is also important. Most veterinary medicine graduates leave university with massive debt that they have to pay back over the following years.

In Poland, no statistics similar to the American ones have been collected, but there are many signs that the problem is universal and exists in most European countries. The research of Natalia Strokowska shows that one in every five Polish vets has considered suicide, and 4% of vets have frequent suicidal thoughts. In addition, they suffer from addiction, mostly alcohol and drugs, from financial problems, working overtime, low levels of job satisfaction and disturbed family relationships.

Survival Manual, Chapter Four: “You will see more suffering than you can bear.”

Szymon: “There are happy moments, but in general this is a so-called disaster industry.”

Natalia: “I was devastated by a recent shift during which I put down a dog.”

And it was not so much this single death, but the endless loop: life, death, life, death. The euthanised dog’s owners wanted the presence of a tumour confirmed by post-mortem examination. Natalia carried the dog over to the examination table and opened its stomach. While her hands were inside its still-warm body, the receptionist burst into the room, “You need to hurry up, there’s a client coming with a kitten to be vaccinated.” Natalia put away the liver containing the tumour, took off her gloves, disinfected her hands, and stretched her mouth with a professional smile. It’s a joy to meet a new family member. You need to admire it, stroke it tenderly, and enjoy its arrival together with your client. But your thoughts are elsewhere. They’re next door, with the body of the dog that an hour ago was still very much alive. For which someone is mourning. The client with the kitten left, and Natalia came back to the other room to close the dog’s body. She could not swallow her lunch. Within minutes, she would be performing another planned euthanasia.

Magda: “In England, where I worked for 13 years, I once had to put down a pregnant bitch together with her entire, as-of-yet unborn litter. The client could not afford a caesarean. The bitch was in bad shape and she probably wouldn’t have survived the surgery; despite that, this euthanasia was one of the worst ones for me. In my own clinic, I could have let the client pay for the caesarean in instalments, but it was a veterinary corporation, so I didn’t have that option. The clinic owners only took care of the bottom line. The killing was on me.”

Paula describes her last working day. First, patient number one dies – a rabbit brought in by the owner two days too late. On Saturday, the man sent an email to the clinic, in which he said that the animal refused to eat. He was told to bring the rabbit in immediately. He wrote back that maybe he would find time on Sunday afternoon. He didn’t. He brought in the extremely dehydrated rabbit on Monday. The fight for its life began immediately because the animal no longer had the swallowing reflex. By Tuesday morning, the rabbit was dead. During the post-mortem examination, it turned out that the ulcers had perforated its stomach wall and all the undigested content had spilt into its belly. Patient number two: a guinea pig that suffered from pneumonia. Paula had been fighting for it for months, but on that day, despite resuscitation, the guinea pig died. Patient number three: a rabbit with gastric dilatation. It might survive. 

Paula: “Don’t forget to mention that this was, in theory,  my day off. I just drove over to the clinic to help the girls who just couldn’t handle so many emergency patients.”

Magda: “I broke down on the day on which I had to perform nine euthanasia procedures. It was on the 23rd of December, a date known to vets all over the world as the ‘holiday cleaning’ day.

Paula: “In Poland, we call it the “warehouse clearance.’”

Magda: “In England, we would put down the biggest amount of animals before Christmas Eve. They were mostly old dogs, often in poor condition. However, with a little push, they could live a little longer. But the thing is that an old, deaf dog with a smelly muzzle is hardly attractive to Christmas guests. Especially when a breeder is already waiting for a new puppy to be collected. Pre-Christmas euthanasia procedures are interspersed with vaccinations of puppies. It hits your psyche. The more so because neither in England nor in Sweden am I entitled to refuse to perform euthanasia. There, everything can qualify as persistent therapy and for that, I can be sued.’

Paula mentions that before Christmas Eve, the owners try everything to persuade her to perform euthanasia. “He’s definitely going to get worse during Christmas,” is one claim clients often make. In such situations, she says that her decision depends on the outcome of the clinical examination. If she finds the dog to be in very bad shape, she agrees. After all, this is a final act of mercy towards the dog. Since the owner had done nothing for the dog for ten years, they could just as well have taken it out to the forest and abandoned it there before Christmas. Instead, they brought the animal to her. If the dog is not in a desperate condition, Paula informs the client that it needs medical treatment. Some clients take offence and leave. Others change their mind. 

Paula: “I once had a client whom I told that her dog needed a blood test. She looked at me in shocked disbelief, “How’s that? A dog has blood?” I try not to get upset with such things. When I bought my first car, I had no idea that the engine oil needed to be changed at times. The mechanic looked at me with pity. Some people have a similar approach to buying a dog. Then I try and educate them and sometimes I see a change: suddenly they start taking good care of the animal, buy specialist food, and order the most expensive tests. Such miracles also happen.”

Magda took a medical leave after the ‘holiday cleaning.’ The family doctor she saw couldn’t understand what her problem was: Do you have debts? Family problems? Are you in danger of losing your job? Magda shook her head. No, the point was that within a single day she took nine lives. The doctor shrugged and gave her a referral to a psychologist. The therapist was young, a recent graduate. She couldn’t bear to listen to Magda’s story.

Magda: “That’s why we screened the psychologists we employed at the Vetlife Charity. Vets had repeatedly complained that the therapists in England didn’t view them as patients but rather saw them as professionals. Some of them went as far as taking out their phones mid-way of a therapeutic session to present pictures of their own dogs. Or they would ask, “Okay, so which anthelmintic is the most effective in your opinion?”’ 

Chapter Five: “There will always be someone to say you haven’t done enough.”

Natalia: “We often face painful dilemmas. For instance: the animal could be cured, but the owner cannot afford to pay for the treatment. I feel like crying when I read the criticism on the Internet that says that we should save such animals at our own expense because being a vet is a mission in and of itself. My reply would be: Do doctors adopt babies found in baby hatches? Do dentists take pity on the homeless who hang out in front of their offices and put tooth crowns in or give them root canal treatment for free? Because we, vets, constantly pick up injured birds, cat litters, tormented dogs or puppies stuck in boxes at our clinic doors. And we treat them, often for free, and find them new homes. But to many people, especially those who comment anonymously on the internet, this is still isn’t enough.”

Paula: “Not long ago, I had a client whose rabbit did not wake up from anaesthesia after surgery. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, I warned the owner beforehand about how this sometimes happens. Despite this, the woman could not believe it had happened. She sat down in my office and, in tears, demanded an explanation. Meanwhile, clinic employees were calling other owners to say that their pets’ surgeries would be delayed. “So what the hell are you doing there all day?” a client waiting for his rabbit to get castrated shouted. That day, we called it a day at one in the morning. It’s impossible to please everybody.”

Chapter Six: “Save yourself.”

Paula: “I’m not tired of my own compassion, I’m tired of death.”

For Paula, the need to keep jumping from mourning to joy and back is similar to bipolar disorder. In 2020, she felt that none of the versions of herself was real. Not one who comforts distraught clients, nor the one who expresses happiness about having cured a dog’s lymphoma. Arriving home from work, she would stare at the wall and feel nothing. She had the impression that she was made of cardboard: clean, without any feelings, perfectly indifferent. And this is where it gets dangerous. It doesn’t matter to a ‘cardboard person’ whether they live or die. When her close friend committed suicide, the thought crossed her mind that ‘just one step and we can be together again.’

Paula: ‘Our entire industry is steeped in dying. To us, death seems a simple and perfect solution. After all, we know everything about it. We are getting accustomed to it every day. This way of thinking is extremely dangerous.’

This year, Paula decided: “Enough is enough. I need help.” She started therapy and also attends classes with a coach to better cope with the management of the clinic. She does it both for herself and for her little daughter. The ‘new Paula’ tries to turn the phone off and reminds herself that she cannot help everyone. The ‘old Paula’ goes to the clinic even on vacation and sometimes doesn’t come back home for three days in a row, sleeping at the office. That’s how she is: someone else’s suffering torments her. As long as it’s possible for her to reduce it to a manageable level, she keeps working. She feels pity for both animals and people, even when the latter’s ignorance or neglect infuriates when. 

Magda has set up her own clinic in Sweden. She’s also become involved in creating the country’s first charity to support vets with mental health problems. For Swedes, who don’t like to speak out about uncomfortable problems or emotions, this is a novelty.

Szymon says that he has therapeutic support available at home because his partner is a psychologist. And when he notices that a client is unable to cope with a pet’s death, he discreetly hands over her business card.

Natalia Strokowska has founded her Vetnolimits company where she offers mentoring and professional support to vets. Not long ago, together with Halszka Witkowska, a suicidologist, she talked about the risk of suicide in her profession at a virtual Congress of Polish Psychiatrists. Several hundred psychiatrists listened to her speak. 

She talks a lot about mental health with her students. Natalia: “This is a generation that is different from mine. They are not ashamed to talk about what hurts them. For them, consulting a psychiatrist or a psychologist is not a reason to feel ashamed but a logical solution when the realities in their life become too difficult. They thank me every time I tell them about my own experiences because it makes them feel less alone. This does not mean, however, that the call for systemic changes should be stopped. First of all, the ways in which vets are trained has to be changed. In order to prevent tragedies, students should learn something about psychology, ethics, and mechanisms of coping with difficult situations during their university years. One thing will not change for sure: this profession will always attract people who are exceptionally sensitive and empathetic beyond compare. We must not let them be destroyed.”