Rafał

For me it’s sadness—sadness for what is no longer there, for what I used to see and now can’t see anymore. That I could drive around, enjoy how beautiful the trees were growing here, that I was one of the lucky ones who lived here, that I could be here—in this place—and not somewhere in a crowded city, where people wait all year and save money for a vacation just to come here and be able to be here. And I was the lucky one—I could be here, walk among these trees. I could—because now I can’t. I could go into the forest whenever I wanted: I’d get up, feel like it, go and observe birds, trees—everything was alive. And now? Now there’s nothing there. That’s how I feel it: emptiness and sadness. Maybe it’s a relationship between a person and nature, right? With plants—but I can’t explain it any better. Maybe the People of the Forest, those who were born there, could say more. (…)

I’ve seen beautiful forests, yes—I’ve been to the Bieszczady Mountains. But when a person grows attached to their forest… I wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world.

We used to carry it out in baskets—chanterelles and all kinds of mushrooms.

Now people are kind of different, strange. Maybe I don’t see it clearly, but sometimes when I come by on a Saturday, there are masses of cars—only that bar is standing there.

17:10

I myself was a witness. I lived on the ground floor; upstairs there was a married couple with two daughters. One of them started working after vocational school somewhere at Carrefour, at a checkout, before 10 p.m.—because that’s when it happened. And the hurricane caught her near the sawmill, next to Kronospan, on the bend there. She stopped and called the fire brigade. They told her to stay in the car—and it’s a good thing she didn’t, because they didn’t tell her to leave it. When the trees started falling, the girl began to force her way toward Mylof. She was fighting her way through. Trees were falling onto the road and she was pushing through. She lost consciousness at the forester’s lodge there in Mylof—she’s our neighbor from upstairs. Someone noticed her while the hurricane was still going on; nothing was visible. They pulled her into the lodge and then gave her medical help. It was a tragedy for her.

And that car later—I laughed bitterly, because we called it “disaster tourism.” People behaved terribly. Those who came to look afterward treated it like one big attraction. When the firefighters cleared the road by the Mylof lodge, trips started coming from all over Poland. The road was constantly jammed with cars from outside, because people came out of curiosity—to look. And that girl’s car was standing there, mangled. Two trees had fallen on it; it was completely wrecked. And imagine—people were dismantling it, taking parts as souvenirs. We transported that car to Mylof with a forklift; it was just the body left—no handles, no lights, no wheels, no mirrors, nothing. Just the shell. That’s how people behaved—terribly. They blocked our road; we couldn’t get home. Later, after two or three weeks, when the roads were cleared—people still behaved like that. Not everyone, of course; some knew how to respect it, stopped somewhere else, didn’t drive in. But many drove right up to Mylof, took photos in groups. We couldn’t get home. For residents it was a nuisance—you couldn’t drive to your own house, because it’s a narrow road and cars were parked on both sides. Disaster tourism. Later it passed. It calmed down. When they built that observation tower overlooking part of the devastation—the battlefield—that’s where people started going.

20:50

What I liked was the shared mobilization of people. (Saving fish from a fish farm.)

23:55–24:00

He shows how you walk through the fallen trees.There was one huge windthrow—one massive windthrow here. You couldn’t get out.

29:00

The beauty of the forest.

32:40

People of the Forest.

33:50

A change in social relations—they lost their relationships together with the forest.

Rafał – description of the storm (00:00–02:00)

For two or three months I asked people whether they remembered how old those spruces were—the ones that fell right in front of our doors. And one of the older people told me that when they moved in, his uncle or someone said they had been planted in 1910, when the forester’s lodge was built. They remembered it exactly. It was power, I’m telling you. Two of us had to hold the window so it wouldn’t blow the whole thing out. You couldn’t even hear thunder—there were just flashes. And when a flash lasted longer, it was lit up as if you’d turned on floodlights at a football stadium. And with every flash you could see that two or three of those huge spruces were gone. We were saving our apartments because they were flooded, the stairwell because it was flooded. From the moment it ended—around 11 p.m.—we fought the water in the building for three or four hours, every resident. Only when it got light, around 4 or 5 in the morning, when we saw it—it was like this mist rising over the devastation. You couldn’t see anything. Only when the mist lifted was there tragedy. There was simply nothing—nothing. Not a single tree. Not one. Around our apartment blocks, where there used to be trees, there wasn’t a single one left. Everything lay flattened, one on top of another. High-voltage lines, broken poles. Everything.

04:00

People who live in the forests—there are isolated houses there—said that a few hours earlier they had seen animals gathering in fields, in the middle of fields. They saw lots of deer, lots of roe deer. And we, for example, saw that our apartment block was completely covered with crickets. Completely covered. We didn’t take photos, because we didn’t know what was coming, that something like this would happen. We went out for a cigarette an hour before or after 10 p.m., and my Monika said, “Oh, there’s going to be a serious storm,” because from every side it started slowly knocking—thundering. And she says to me, “Look what’s on the building.” We turned on the light—the whole building was black. Crickets were crawling up the walls; the whole yellow wall was covered. We wondered why. Later someone said that animals sense things—they were trying to hide somehow, even crickets, looking for shelter somewhere up high, under the gutters. At the time we didn’t know what it meant. We thought: they came, so they came—maybe to the light, maybe for some other reason.

32:00 and on

You have to understand the People of the Forest—those who were born here, who taught me how to pick mushrooms, who lived in this forest from childhood. Look—even today there’s no public transport to Mylof. None. If you don’t have a car, you ride a bike to Chojnice. It’s an enclave. There’s some signpost saying “Zapora 5”—who even knows what Zapora 5 is? And those people grew out of that forest. They were there all the time, lived there. They knew everything about it and lived with it. And suddenly that forest is gone—and everything is different too. Life went on under those trees. People came out of those apartment blocks, met somewhere—because it was under the trees, there was a field there. And now when you drive by—there’s not a living soul. Now cars stand by that bar, as if people are no longer together. They lost their relationship with the forest and with each other. That’s how it seems to me. It’s somehow different.