Enduring Through Liminality: Across and Beyond the Borders of Eastern Europe in the Wartime

By Julia Buyskykh

Introduction

For decades, anthropologists have been studying borders and borderlands, concentrating on marginalised groups (whether minorities, migrants, or refugees), cross-border state relations, border shadow economies, and the multiple identities of populations settling along borders, whose silenced voices often contradict official state narratives of history, identities, and religion. Situating borderlands as contact zones, anthropologists have produced scholarship on marginality, displacement, forced resettlements, (post)colonial legacies, liminality and pluralism, rites of passage, and mobile meaning-making through and across borders, exploring the tragic semantics of being displaced and misplaced.

“I am a woman of the border,” writes Ruth Behar in her influential and eloquent book The Vulnerable Observer (1997, p. 162), reflecting on her Jewish Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Hispanic ancestries, her life between Cuba and the USA, and her writing between academia and fiction. Growing up bilingual in a Ukrainian family with Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Jewish, and Tatar ancestries, born in a now-defunct USSR state during the period prior to its collapse, a Ukrainian citizen experiencing a range of spatial and temporal boundary conditions, I feel the same. Having migrated to the EU for study, research, and to live, I have conducted fieldwork on both sides of the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, writing both academic and non-fiction contributions to scholarly and popular fields of interest. Yet, since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a new and constant state of living liminally amidst absurdity forces me to perennially ask myself, what and who are my home now? Within the borders of what, specifically, is “home” situated now, what inner or outer geographies can help me locate a point of origin or eventual destination wherein I may rest? Undeniably, our own biographies  –  mapped onto linguistic, religious, and ethnic diversities, transitions, and borders –  influence our perceptions of the worlds and texts we write. This reflection, then, is a biographic fragment, not of a life but of the effects of these boundary ‘epherema’ on a life experienced within and through the borders that produce living liminalities in mobile populations.

What is the Border?

Borders run through people’s lives, nurturing otherness, fostering alienation, and blurring existing identities — calling into being new types of belonging: being as being -with, an inescapable relationality of identity-formation. In her work on boundary identities, Nuit Banai draws attention to the fates of people living along and through borders, often displaced into refugee camps, facing liminality as their everyday, and enduring in a “state of suspended existence” (Banai 2021, 14). Banai proposes seeing people who carry liminal identities as alive, fluid borders themselves, existing at the centre of the contemporary world, not at its margins (Banai 2021, 13). As she suggests, being a border gives other perspectives, knowledges, and logics, those coming from those formerly colonised and deprived, to challenge the hegemony of so-called western ‘epistemologies’, too often a byword for professionalising modern anxiety into uncritical paternalism.

What is the border now, under the conditions of the Russian war in Ukraine? How have the EU’s external and internal borders been transformed in light of an unprecedented exodus of Ukrainian war refugees and two previously neutral states—Finland and Sweden—joining NATO? It is impossible to respond simply to the millstones of modern history that grind human destinies and reshape existing borders. In this regard, I find methodological ground in Étienne Balibar’s essay “What Is a Border?” (2002), where he asserts that borders no longer lie at the border. This seemingly paradoxical statement challenges our understanding of borders as fixed administrative markers at the politically established edges of sovereign states.

In this endeavour, I read borders and boundaries as ineluctable components of human experience. Establishing, shifting, redesigning, and protecting borders have always been inseparable activities from wars, deportations, relocations and population exchanges, imprisonment, ethnic cleansing, and religious conflicts. In such processes, the unsteady papering of lives with official rounds of their (mis)recognition results in a massive number of tragic human fates that do not fit into new projects of empire, disguised as nation-states. As a result, ethnic and national communities have been constructed around borders that divide the world into “us” and “them,” “ours” and “others’,” in evermore byzantine ways. Thus an imaginary space with imaginary boundaries is created, in which stereotypes, multiple memories, and inchoate stigmas are frozen in time, creating a minefield and which often still subtly dominate the actual experience of direct, in-person communication between groups. I felt this myself, sitting in an embassy of a European country, applying for permission to reside in ‘Europe’ as someone other than a person in need, as someone of ability. Despite professional skills and qualifications, my point-of-contact saw a Ukrainian woman asking for permission to conduct research fieldwork, imagining her in a field of strawberries, not in an archive.

After the collapse of communist regimes in Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which became a metonym for the other ephemeral borders that the totalitarian system had created, many new states and their borders were (re)designed with the implicit promise of lasting peace. However, the idea of peace from Soviet ruins was as fragile as the idea of democracy in an unfinished EU political project—perennially challenged from within and without. The Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, Russian ‘assistance’ in the Syrian war from 2015, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine since 2022 have caused another tectonic reconfiguration of borders in Europe, with various types of war migrants forced to move or to move again, migrants who experienced an unresolvable liminality because of their uncertain legal status when crossing internal EU state borders. They equally experience the loss of a legal status wherein the formerly uncomplicated standing of being a “person” becomes an existential field of power and conflict with real stakes. Consequently, anthropological interest in all types of borders—geopolitical, state (administrative, physical), imagined, phantom, and hybrid—has gained momentum due to the evidently continuing vitality of international borders as spaces and instruments of state control over human life-trajectories.

The Polish Borders: An Invisible Internal Border and the External EU Frontier

The Polish-Ukrainian border, described by Tetyana Zhurzhenko as “a border of a pain and a remedy” (Zhurzhenko 2014), can be read as a minefield of contradictory memories rooted in the interwar period, the Second World War, and its aftermath. In its postbellum iteration, this artificial Polish-Soviet (afterwards, Polish-Ukrainian) border thrust its sharp blade through rural dwellings, cemeteries, churches, local communities, and people’s lives; yet the border itself never rested, a living breathing manifestation of state power, a respiration that felt like a sacred destiny, a spirit claiming land and people, a dangerous power to be subject to and capricious to interact with.

The construction of the outer Soviet border with its satellites—European communist states—was followed by forcible resettlements in order to create an artificial homogeneity, which, as history shows, never took root. The border between post-war Poland and the Soviet Union was drawn along the Curzon Line, as demanded by Stalin at the Yalta Conference. As one of the consequences, there was a “population exchange” affecting close to 500,000 ethnic Ukrainians (including such ethnic groups as Lemkos, Boykos, and Rusyns), about 1.1 million Poles, and people of other nationalities. The first wave of resettlements took place in 1944-1946, when most Greek Catholic and Orthodox inhabitants of the post-war South-Eastern Poland (estimated 482,880) were classified as Ukrainians and resettled to the Soviet Ukraine. Those who remained (ca. 150,000) were resettled to the north-west of post-war Poland in 1947 under Operation “Vistula”. Further, both Greek Catholic and Orthodox Ukrainians became a ‘national’ minority, marginalised and stigmatised by authorities in communist Poland. Such an attitude derived from the application of collective responsibility to all people of Ukrainian origin for the activities of Ukrainian underground forces against Polish underground and civilians in Vohlynia and Eastern Galicia during WWII. The Polish-Soviet (afterwards, Polish-Ukrainian) border’s last change and related population shift occurred in 1951, and memories of this painful, imposed change linger in local communities on both sides of the border.

Since the end of the 1950s and into the 1960s, the region’s religious dynamics have been changing on account of population mobility, this time voluntary. Those Greek Catholics and some Orthodox expelled from Subcarpathia as part of Operation “Vistula” 1947 started to “come back”. This was the start of a long process of “returning”, not only for those who experienced resettlement but also for their children and grandchildren who were determined to engage with their ancestral, spatial, and denominational legacies. This movement continues today.

While conducting research on Polish-Ukrainian borderlands (2015-2018, 2023), I observed how palpable this past was in the everyday life of my interlocutors, regardless of their ethnic or religious identities, and how it shaped present-day imageries and relationships. I worked with people aged 25–80 of different genders, socio-economic and marital status, citizens of Ukraine and Poland, deriving from Greek Catholic and Orthodox families who were resettled from Subcarpathia during post-WWII population shifts. I investigated how pilgrimages linked people with their ancestry and specific sacred places—churches, pilgrimage sites, springs, wells—that had been abandoned or ruined during the communist era in which family memories became part of religious experience and where religion is now perceived as lived, folded more fully into the fabric of everyday life. This energy is nourished by the past and creates tension in local communities, making the Polish-Ukrainian border very sensitive to the political climate in both states, like a scar from an old wound that has never fully recovered.

Conversely, I crossed an invisible border between Poland and Germany once more in the fall of 2017 on an express train heading to Warsaw. It was the first time I had entered Poland from the western, Berlin, side, as a research fellow at a German academic institution. There were no border guards with dogs, no customs controls or document checks; the train simply passed the bridge and headed on to Poznań. My neighbours in the compartment, Polish women working in Germany, were quite talkative and happy that I shared their native language with them. They talked, heartbroken, about their children, staying with their grandparents in Poland, about the lack of decent pay for their labour at home, about the poverty of the Polish provinces, and about the fact that in Germany, they worked hard to earn money for their children’s “true European” education. It resonated with me, so painfully similar were their words to those of Ukrainian migrant workers in Poland. While conducting fieldwork on the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, I heard the same conversations many times, and each time, I never failed to feel their heartbreak, and my own.

During the first stop in Poland, in Poznań, the older woman stepped out onto the platform, returning quickly to the compartment with a sandwich. She clutched the sandwich excitedly, smelling it, eventually eating it slowly, openly savouring every bite, and said, “I’ve been working in Germany for ten years, and I’ve never tasted better sausage than our Polish one. I swear I haven’t. I’m finally home, and I can finally taste Poland.” The woman cried as she ate her sandwich.

Five years later, crossing the Ukrainian-Polish border in an evacuation train from L’viv in late March 2022, I would see another woman crying over her sandwich. She was from Zaporizhska oblast’, and her way to L’viv from the territory occupied by the Russian army was unimaginably hard. Volunteers at L’viv railway station gave her water and a sandwich. She was holding this sandwich in her trembling hands, laughing and crying nervously, smelling the bread, and repeating off-handedly, “I am at home; I am in Ukraine; I am at home…”. God alone knows what misery she experienced and what borders and checkpoints she had to cross to get from her occupied village in Southern Ukraine to L’viv. What was home for her then? The smell of bread, the kindness of local volunteers, the sense that she still is a citizen of an existing sovereign state…? I hugged her in an immediate, silent gesture of empathy, and we both cried, not knowing what might come next.

Back then, in late February 2022–April 2022, the Eastern Ukrainian border with Russia was a torn, bleeding wound through which the Russian army was invading my homeland, while the Western border with the EU and the Southern one with Moldova had become the gates of salvation. In that short period, millions of Ukrainian citizens crossed these borders without even possessing any identity documents or Ukrainian inner passports, taking their pets with them. That was a short period of unprecedented liberation and bureaucratic empathy. In 2022, at least at the earlier stages of the full-scale invasion, border guards at the external borders of “Fortress Europe” (Follis 2012) were not counting days or asking about visas or residential permits. It was uniquely hospitable, empathic, and very different from my previous experiences with the Ukrainian-Polish borders. At roughly the same time, during 2021–early 2022, for thousands of other refugees from the Middle East who were deceived by the Belarusian authoritarian regime and falsely promised easy entry into the European Union, the Polish, Lithuanian, and Latvian eastern borders became a foresty, riverine, and boggy purgatory of torture and death. “Fortress Europe”, imagined as a safe haven for many asylum seekers and all kinds of migrants, trapped them in fraught bureaucratic traps, turning their imagined safety into a long and mired liminality.

Crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border in 2014–2016 as a tourist, as a scholar and a pilgrim, included endless hours of exhausted (im)patience in line at a series of checkpoints, checking visas and invitations from my Polish colleagues to establish the legitimacy of myright to enter the EU, while enduring the rudeness of Polish border guards. At the same time, I suspected the ongoing small-scale smuggling of alcohol and cigarettes with bus drivers involved. Since the visa-liberation regime between Ukraine and the EU in the summer of 2017, however, Ukrainian citizens have been granted the right to enter the EU for ninety days within a 180-day period, giving us an incredible sense of freedom of movement. Without spending the extra effort of obtaining visas, more people began to travel. Attending a conference has become more accessible, one which I perceive as a luxury that allows to me gain new knowledge and satisfy my curiosity at a much lesser cost.

I crossed this border on foot a few times, studying pilgrimage anthropologically as a participant-observant pilgrim. Since 2017, visas have been unnecessary; however, official invitations from the Polish side are still required. Even though it looked awkward, it worked when each pilgrim – from a group of almost 400 people from Ukraine – had to show their official invitation from a particular Roman Catholic monastery in Poland to participate in a pilgrimage dedicated to the Assumption of Our Lady. It didn’t exclude the long lines at the Schehyni-Medyka border checkpoint crossing under the scorching sun. We had to stay on a narrow path without any place to sit or seek refreshment, surrounded by high iron bars, and to wait until our turn came. At one point, I observed how an older woman, patiently praying on her rosary, fainted on that pass. The other pilgrims helped her, trying to bring her back to consciousness, but to receive medical help, she had to stand on her own feet, go through passport control, have her bags checked, and meet the emergency doctor at the Polish side of the border. I thought back then: what if she had died in that liminality, at the border, unconscious and waiting on her turn to enter the EU? What if her pilgrimage had ended so fatally?

There is a bitter irony in the fluid nature of borders. Violations of human rights are replaced by hospitality and grace morphs back into cruelty. Walter Benjamin’s tragic decision to commit suicide in a little town at the French-Spanish border was enforced by the impossibility of crossing the Spanish-Portuguese border and leaving safely for the USA. If Benjamin had only known that the border for the refugees escaping Gestapo persecutions would be reopened the following day… The border changed its nature again (Jackson 2007).

In conclusion

I recount these stories to situate a human experience of borders, often emerging from particular social spaces and in circumstances of violence, always tied to specific relations of power and state suppression, so fluid, blurring, and contingent. The Janus-faced character of any border can be hostile and human simultaneously, as we witnessed recently with the Polish-Ukrainian border, subject to protests from Polish farmers against the import of Ukrainian grain, causing the spillage of precious grain in a hungry world onto the ground. At the same time, this border is a vital corridor for humanitarian aid and weapons delivered to Ukraine, peace and war flowing towards suffering civilians and soldiers, respectively, enduring and resisting the ongoing war with Russia. Despite all the restrictions on crossing EU borders having fully returned, this border remains one of the most crossed for those Ukrainian citizens who flee the war and seek shelter in the EU. It is a border of contradictions—historical, memorial, emotional, and economic—but also a space of hope for many. The question is whether it will become a boundary that connects, rather than divides, a line without the sense of a border, which I have experienced elsewhere too few times in my life.

---

Bibliography

Balibar, Étienne 2002. The Borders of Europe, in Politics and the Other Scene. London-New-York: Verso: 75 – 86.

Banai, Nuit 2021. Being a Border. Series Transmission Sites. Berlin/Dublin: Paper Visual Art.

Jackson, Michael. In the Footsteps of Walter Benjamin, in Excursions. Duke University Press. 2007: 1 – 21.

Follis S., Karolina 2012. Building Fortress Europe. The Polish-Ukrainian Frontier. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Zhurzhenko, Tatiana 2014. “The Border as Pain and Remedy: Commemorating the Polish–Ukrainian Conflict of 1918–1919 in Lviv and Przemyśl,” Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, Vol. 42, no. 2, March 2014: 242 – 268.

---

About the Author

Julia Buyskykh is an anthropologist and co-founder of an NGO, “The Centre for Applied Anthropology,” in Kyiv, Ukraine. She received her Ph.D. (candidate of sciences) in History and Ethnology from Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University. She was a Visegrad research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw, in 2015 – 2016. In 2017, she was a research fellow in the frames of the “Prisma-Ukraїna – Research Network Eastern Europe” scheme at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, Germany. She spent the academic year of 2019-2020 at Pennsylvania State University as a Fulbright visiting scholar. She was a Sanctuary Fellow at the University College Cork, Ireland (September 2022 – February 2023). Her research interests include lived religion (Orthodoxy and Catholicism) in Ukraine and Poland, inter-confessional relationships, pilgrimages, memories and borderlands studies, ethics, and empathy in qualitative research. She is writing her second Ph.D. thesis in Anthropology and Study of Religions at the University College Cork, Ireland. For a year (1 April 2024 – 1 April 2025), she is a guest researcher within the fellowship “Research Perspective Ukraine” at the German Historical Institute, Warsaw, and the Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences.

---

Other Recent Articles in the TRAFO Series Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval

Lidia Kuzemska, In Search of Stability and Purpose: Ukrainian (Displaced) Researchers in Germany, 29 July 2024

Illia Ilin, Decolonizing Family Metaphors in the Context of the Russian-Ukrainian War and Beyond, 20 June 2024

Juliane Prade-Weiss, Complicity, Past and Present: Portrayals of Involvement in Mass Violence and Terror in Documentary Fiction, 4 June 2024

---

Citation: Julia Buyskykh, Enduring Through Liminality: Across and Beyond the Borders of Eastern Europe in the Wartime, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 13.08.2024, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/52315

---

---