Fresh bread symbolizes home, warmth, and security. Such things help repair and heal humanity.
Since the Russian troops left the area of Bucha and the true extent of the atrocities committed there have come to light, the city has become tragically known as one of the bloodiest sites of the war in Ukraine. The city is now reckoning with destruction, survivors' trauma, and a grim body count.
Jacek Polewski is a Polish baker who was struck by what he saw on the news. He made a bold decision: to leave his bakery in Poznan (Poland) and set off for Bucha, to set about making bread to distribute to survivors. He told Polskie Radio:
Polewski decided to make his contribution starting from something simple, providing a concrete comfort, which is also more than food. How do you survive in an open-air cemetery? How do you meet basic needs? One essential is bread, one of the simplest and most traditional foods.
While the Russian army was in town, one of Bucha's bakeries had been used by the invaders as a logistical base. Upon departure, the Russians left it stripped of everything—baking pans, molds, kitchen tools. Getting the bakery back on its feet took days of cleaning and rearranging.
It might seem a laughable business to deal with bowls, yeast and scales against the backdrop of the specter of nuclear weapons and other sophisticated weapons, but this is the industrious and constructive face of humanity, the very opposite of the war mentality.
Fresh bread speaks of domestic warmth and safety
From Poznan in Poland to Bucha is about an 11-hour drive in a nearly straight line. Polewski decided to travel with his son and a friend, loading 500 kg (1,100 pounds) of flour aboard their vehicle. Along the way they bought another 600 kg.
They knew that getting to Bucha would be difficult if not impossible, so the first stop was Kyiv. From the capital, after April 14, it was possible to reach Bucha as well. The first step was to go there bringing the bread already kneaded and baked in Kyiv. The second step—an ongoing process—is now to restart the bakeries of the city of Bucha and create a network of collaboration between bakeries in the area.
"The Russians have left the area; it's getting safer there. Hence the idea that we will go there for a week, help as much as we can, bake bread. We estimated that we can bake about 1.5 thousand loaves and then distribute them. It's worth supporting each other. There has never been such a communal feeling in our Polish-Ukrainian history before," Jacek Polewski tells Wyborcza.pl .
And the meaning of this gesture goes beyond necessary subsistence. Fresh bread is food, but not only that. It speaks of the kind of care and thoughtfulness that each of us associates with domestic comfort and family. One can, then, suggest the possibility of helping people rediscover hope through a warm loaf of bread, which requires the commitment of human hands, the slow work of the yeast, and the heat of the oven. Polskie Radio reports:
Peacemakers notice what is indispensable within what is urgent. Medicines, absolutely yes; humanitarian corridors, of course. But also and above all, bread, just water and flour. War undermines the definition of humanity at its roots. Rebuilding a bakery where there are mass graves and rubble is not a Don Quixote-style stunt. It means starting again from the kind of sharing that Jesus chose as his last gesture with his friends before the Passion.
