Where is Man, Love? / letter to love no.6

Dear Love, 

Last year, while I was in Oxford, I booked a flight to Krakow. It was last minute, mostly unplanned,  and I had little money at the time, but I said whatever, go. I wanted to see Auschwitz.  I had to visit Auschwitz. I was reading about trauma, resilience, and representations, and I wanted to know the extent a human can go to inflict pain on another, to be precise.  

 I called Vasiliki. 

 “Shall we go to Pournara?”

“ Yes, Wednesday.”  

Subconsciously, there is a reason I wanted to go with her, I believe. We share a special bond, and despite the age difference, she is a friend that I can go to and discuss all the things that make me sick in my stomach. 

 Few people know that such a camp exists a few kilometers outside the capital. I did a piece “Where is Man: Pournara, Cyprus 2020”, based on a photograph I saw on social media, and months after, we went out for a drink with Vasiliki, and I showed the painting to her, coincidentally she told me that it was a photo she has taken herself in a protest outside the camp. I didn’t know. 

When I did the painting, my only experience with a refugee camp was not based on real-life encounters. They were rather peculiar interactions I had with photographs and writings, now and then. But that photograph gave me shivers. 

I drove there with Vasiliki, and I had my camera with me. I started recording as soon as I saw the sign. A HUGE sign indicates that a few kilometers away, there is the First Reception Centre for Refugees, Pournara. As we approached, there were long fences that looked more like open-air prisons rather than reception centers, and I am not joking. I mean, language is imperative indeed, always has been, I think, that was neither a center nor a reception. It was a concentration camp. 

As I was enjoying the comfort of my car and the heated seats, I drove further down. I am not sure whether I felt cold because it is winter (it is January after all) or because every fiber of my being felt frigid because of what my eyes were seeing. I could tell that chances are, the people in those camps wouldn’t even possess a blanket for a cold winter night. And I was right. We approached a group of people outside the camp, there were tents there, and it felt odd that they were standing outside the fences. I pulled over. 

One man, tall, with his mask on in his mid-30s, approached the car.  He told us that they are here because the camp is full and there is no space for them. That the center can no longer accept any more people. He was a newbie there; he arrived in Pournara three days ago. Maybe it was four. I am not sure. I froze. I am sure that there are far worse conditions that he did not describe to me, perhaps out of fear or concern that confessing the atrocities might compromise his protection.  He kept saying that there are no blankets, that they sleep on the floor, that they won’t let them shower, that the only thing they get for breakfast is a piece of bread. In Auschwitz, they would get a cup of coffee too, but the government perhaps thinks that they shouldn’t treat them like that, so they wouldn’t get too excited and stay. In Cyprus. In a no-man’s corrupt land where incompetent is again, to say the least, the best thing one can ever be to run this country.

I could not record much, I was horrified, stunned, and my mechanism was to show zero emotion in the eyes that came before me. I was terrified that I could not give comfort, that I couldn’t tell them that what you are experiencing now is not a reflection of the broader community once you get your papers sorted because I am not sure for that myself anymore. 

Pournara is no less than a concentration camp. Pournara looked like Auschwitz. It felt like Auschwitz to me. It felt like that because I know that this country has failed to protect its people, let alone an “unappropriated other,” an asylum-seeker, a refugee.  During my visit, the icing on the cake was when I saw a church placed within the concentration camp. A cross indicates a subtle irony of an a la carte humanism people tend to carry as they navigate their exhibitionist lives. What is that cross for at the back? An old church, I suppose, or a reminder, that indeed the construct of the God they (when I say they, you know who you are) worship is not for all. 

If this exposes you or harasses you in any way, please do send the police to confiscate my belongings.  That is who you are, anyway. This is what you have a slight competence in doing. 

 I will dream of Pournara tonight, and if what you are seeing is bothering, as it should, then speak up.

 Yours (perhaps not forever if I get arrested), 

Vasileia