The colourful and tolerant Poland is slipping away, Krakow, Poland, May 2025

There’s a particular kind of silence that falls when something important begins to slip away — not suddenly, but gradually, almost politely, as if hoping we won’t notice. It’s the silence I’ve been feeling lately when thinking about Poland, and the growing fear that the liberal democracy we thought we were building may be quietly unravelling.

It’s not easy to put this into words. Not because the signs are hard to read — they’re not — but because once you name it, it becomes real. And what’s real, lately, is frightening.

The fear isn’t only about those in power. It’s not just politicians — they didn’t arrive from nowhere. We choose them. Or at least, enough of us do. And that’s what troubles me most. The crowds who cheer when the courts are weakened. The shrugs when media independence is eroded. The sighs of relief when borders close to the desperate. The language of suspicion, repeated enough times to become normal.

Somehow, we are doing this to ourselves.

It’s easy to blame leaders. It’s harder to face the truth that large parts of the public seem ready — perhaps even eager — to trade freedom for certainty, complexity for slogans, solidarity for safety behind fences. Maybe they believe this is what strength looks like. Maybe they’ve never known what it’s like to lose the right to choose.

That’s the part that haunts me. That we may not realise how little choice we’ll have left — until the moment comes when we no longer have any at all.

I don’t write this from a place of detachment. I write it with sadness, as someone who remembers the taste of hope when Poland opened itself up to a broader, more open world. When joining Europe wasn’t just about economics or borders — it was about a promise. That we would belong to something rooted in human dignity, justice, truth.

Now, I find myself grasping at smaller, quieter things to hold onto: a photograph from the countryside. A stubborn conversation with someone who disagrees. The smell of forests in September. The belief — fragile, but still there — that maybe this isn’t the end of the story.

Because even if democracy weakens, even if the noise of indifference grows louder, we still have choices. Perhaps not political ones, not for long — but moral ones. Personal ones. The choice to remember. To care. To stay awake. To speak, even softly, when the pressure is to stay silent.

I don’t know how deep the darkness will go. But I know that once we stop feeling sadness, once we stop being afraid — then the danger has truly won. Until then, maybe grief itself is a form of resistance. Maybe the fact that we still ache means there’s still something left to fight for.

Maybe, even now, the most radical thing we can do is to feel. And not to turn away.