HORODLO, Poland, 19 April 2004 — Come May Day, the edge of Europe will be a red-and-white, diagonally painted concrete column, with a white eagle and the word Polska on it; dug into the pine and birch woodland skirting the Bug River, it divides Poland from Ukraine, new West from new East.
The river rounds a bend at the little village of Horodlo, where the faithful flock to church for Monday evening Mass, and peasants bring carts of firewood home through the gray of late afternoon.
Here is the easternmost point of a new 3,860-km frontier of the European Union, which on May 1 admits 10 new members, seven of them countries that lived under Stalin’s repressive regime. The process that began with the rise of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in 1981 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 comes to fruition here.
Springtime is stirring in the little park in Horodlo and in the Sparrow pub, to which Darek and Monika have returned from Warsaw, hoping the frontier will mean new business. “They’re bringing in 40 extra policemen just for our little village,” says Monika, “to add to the two we have at the moment. And that’s in addition to the border guards.” “They’ve been chasing out the Ukrainians,” says Janusz, who keeps the minimarket, “because the Ukrainians bring in smuggled cigarettes to sell for two zlotys, while we have to sell them for five. Now people will have to come to us for a smoke.”
The border of the new EU is both porous and harsh. Upriver, what they call the new “Velvet Curtain” is being drawn, on Brussels’ insistence — a necklace of new guard posts manned by thousands of newly recruited armed men. But this is a border across which tens of thousands journey each day, and a smugglers’ terrain for anything from alcohol to people.
This is land where peasants farm fertile black soil, where storks nest atop telegraph poles and trees hang with clumps of mistletoe. It is also soaked in history, much of it epic and bloody. Armies have marched across these plains for centuries, to subjugate the Poles — Nazi and Soviet, Prussian and Russian.
Indeed, the demographic engineering of Horodlo puts it at some bitter kernel of twentieth-century history.It was in Horodlo, in 1413, that a great power was forged by treaty, not war, binding Poland and Lithuania to create the biggest country in medieval Europe. And it is peace that now brings this corner of Europe into a union. Or, as the mayor of the nearby county seat of Chelm puts it: “We do not see ourselves as the edge of something, but more as its gateway — to the East and its markets.”
Indeed, the quiet of evening in Horodlo belies the scene on the riverbank a little to the north, at Dorohusk: A hinge on a burgeoning trade corridor connecting Berlin to Moscow via Warsaw and Kiev. It is the busiest border crossing between Poland and Ukraine, a confusion of cafes, currency exchange booths, tatty old Ladas driven by leather-faced peasants and grinding trucks lined up for five km, waiting to cross in either direction. Every day 12,000 people cross here — where none did in Soviet times — one of 15 crossing points along Poland’s (and the EU’s longest) external border with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. They do so under the watchful eyes, weaponry and cameras of Lt. Col. Andrzej Wojcik’s border guardsmen.
