Statement by Dominika Kulczyk

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The Day of Solidarity with Refugees is a sign of our collective sensitivity, which is why my Kulczyk Foundation – an assistance organization active throughout the world – has joined the initiative.

I am appealing to make 15 October the day when we start permanently quieting down about concerns associated with refugees. We Poles have been forced to leave our homeland numerous times, and we should take these familiar problems to heart.

It does not matter how we form political or social diagnoses or whether the European community reaches an understanding concerning refugees; the most important thing is always the human being. In this case, it is a human being who has been deprived of support and is uncertain about the future; a human being often afraid and cold, who remembers the deaths of family and friends. I have seen the dozens of rafts full of people arrive at the shores of Europe. They also carried enormous loads of hope because the refugees had reset their previous lives; they had no chance of continuing in their homelands. We can assess the value of their phones or whether they have been persecuted or not, but let me assure you that none of us would be willing to spend even a day where the current refugees had been living for the past few years.

I have met them and tried to help them in various parts of the world. A human being deprived of normality sometimes takes the face of a terrified Ethiopian woman, sometimes that of a small Nepalese child deprived of his home, sometimes that of the homeless living among us on the edge of the living standards we all know, and sometimes of Bengalese children blocked from happy childhoods and forced into working harder than they can. It is there that Kulczyk Foundation supports the wonderful social organizations fighting for a better reality. We are well aware that loneliness, confusion, uncertainty, fear, and lack of perspective have no national colors or geographical coordinates. We are all the same in the face of doubts and of the misfortunes which befall us. Over the past few days, Poles made a beautiful gesture towards those who should theoretically be strange and distant. But no: during the campaign to support starving Ukrainian seniors from the Donetsk Oblast, we were able to collect PLN 220,000 together with the Onet.pl Group and the Polish Rotary International Clubs, which was made possible because there were hundreds of people who gave their own money to save human beings they had never met and likely never will. This means that we have a universal community, which I hope will never be destroyed by any political blustering. We must keep in mind that there is a simple and beautiful rule about the stronger helping the weaker.
We already are.