Poczobut: Now my wife and I are only trying to learn to live together anew

— There are many people who went through imprisonment in Belarus and did not break, — reflects Andrzej Poczobut in an interview with polsatnews.pl (the conversation is retold by "Salidarnasts"). — In Belarusian prisons, conditions are created where a political prisoner might think that resistance is meaningless, that it only worsens the situation.

Political prisoners are tried to be convinced that they must surrender, compromise with the authorities and do what they are ordered to do. And if you resist, you are demonstratively punished.

The point is not only to punish a specific prisoner, but also to send a signal to other prisoners — everyone can be broken.

The benchmarks I relied on were the soldiers of the Home Army. I also knew people who were imprisoned in Stalin's camps. And Stalin's camps were a terrible place that cannot be compared even with all the horror of modern Belarusian prison.

And so I compared my situation with the situation of those people. I knew such people. Some of them fully served "Stalinist terms" of 25 years. They entered the camps at 40, and came out at 60 or 70, and lived under constant KGB surveillance until the end of their lives.

These people treated me with respect, I visited their homes. Almost none of them are still alive, but in my memory they are alive, and I recalled them in those conditions, and it gave me strength.

There were people who wrote a few comments on the internet, and then special forces burst into their homes, they were beaten, brought to the pre-trial detention center, and then sentenced to 2 years, and they don't even remember what they wrote there.

Of course, their degree of resilience was different from mine. Because for many years I lived under threat, I was repeatedly arrested, and I had been imprisoned before. Therefore, I could endure incomparably more than them.

That is, I was more prepared than those who suddenly found themselves in such a situation.

Poczobut says that for his steadfastness and resistance he paid a very high price, but he could not do otherwise.

— They took from me what no one will return. When on March 25, 2021 (the day of Andrzej Poczobut's detention) I saw my son off to school, of course, I did not realize that I would see him so many years later.

Then he was about 1.40 m tall, and today he is taller than me — 1.90 m. So I lost a lot, that's true. The price I paid is great. And the price my family paid is also great.

Now my wife and I are only trying to learn to live together anew. Because for 5 years we were separated, and now it's hard.

But I saw people (in prison) who lived quite well in those conditions, had maximum comfort, looked completely well-fed and certainly did not lose as much health as I did.

However, if you looked into their eyes, they were, forgive me, the eyes of a beaten dog.

I could look everyone in the eye calmly — both the prison authorities and the KGB, when they took me away, I also looked them calmly in the eye and was not afraid.

And for me, that's important. I can integrate into reality today, I'm coping. These weeks have shown that I am quite active, that I can discuss, talk, despite the fact that for the last 7 months I was alone in my cell, I had no one to even talk to.

I think that it was precisely this resistance of mine that allowed me to preserve my personality. My son said: "Well, dad hasn't changed at all." That's a good assessment, in my opinion.

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