Białowieża

In 2024, I decided to visit the Białowieża Forest for the first time. I was guided by Katarzyna Hertz, an artist living in the strict forest and the founder of the Kraina Kresu Foundation. For several years, she ran an artistic project called Forest Map of Memory.

After a walk, we sat down to talk. I said that the next day I would visit the Szast Protected Forest, which had been destroyed by a hurricane thirty years earlier. It is located in Masuria, near Pisz. Only when I mentioned the village name did Katarzyna come alive and admit: “I was there then.” “How so?” I asked. “You survived? That wind?”

Katarzyna had never spoken about her experience in Pisz before, and she didn’t know that today there is a protected forest on the site where she camped as an eight-year-old. During our conversation, that memory returned to her; it turned out that memory is alive, and the experience was so remarkably similar.

Katarzyna

I was nine, eight years old. It was a terrible experience, truly dramatic. I arrived there that very day for an organised canoe-and-bicycle hiking camp in Masuria. We were supposed to float toward the centre of Poland. We pitched our tents, ate lunch, and decided we wanted to buy something sweet, so we all went to the shop. And while we were buying chocolate in the shop, a tornado started. I saw cars and trees flying; suddenly, everything was lifted up. And when we came out of the shop, there was nothing. Yes, there was no forest. There were no roofs on the buildings, and there were no tents to return to. We crawled under cables, under rubbish and trees. The whole camp was collapsed under trees. If we had stayed there, we probably wouldn’t have been alive. We had to stay in some hostels where camp beds were arranged for us, and then we moved on with the camp. I didn’t realise the scale of this event, but in fact, my parents were shocked that they hadn’t sent us back. It was the 1990s, when nobody thought about safety on the scale we do today. Trauma, injury – there were no such categories. Only: “shake it off, we’re moving on. It’s just a tornado.” – that’s how they explained it.

It turns out that there are more hurricane experiences, but their stories are lacking. The wind passes quickly, the forest grows slowly. I ask Katarzyna why she uses the word “tornado” to describe the storm. “Because I really remember that the movement of those objects and trees was circular. It starts at the bottom, spins, spins, and starts to escape upward. It looked basically the same, only you couldn’t see that funnel, or whatever it’s called. I think we were inside, simply.” “In the eye,” I correct her with the technical term. “Yes. You know, memory gets a bit blurred too, but I remember those images from behind the shop window, so swift and round. Because the speed of that event was incredible too, everything lasted only about twenty minutes.” “It was the same in the Bory,” I concluded.