In brief: Journalist Lesia Dubenko describes hearing gunfire in central Krakow and witnessing the aftermath. Beyond the attacker’s motives, she argues, the response of police, medical workers and ordinary residents deserves attention.
It is, admittedly, not an everyday occurrence that I find myself in the middle of a mass shooting. Especially in Krakow, a city I associate with safety, clean streets and the reassuring predictability of everyday life.
But it is an experience that teaches you something about people. Some of it is horrifying. But it also gives you a reason to keep believing in them.
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On Saturday, Nov. 7, a gunman killed six people in central Krakow. Police subsequently found three bodies at his home. Authorities identified the suspect as a 24-year-old Polish man, Michał O.
Among Ukrainians, there was an immediate fear that the attacker might turn out to be a Ukrainian recruited by Russia. That fear says something about the times we live in, when even the first moments of a tragedy are accompanied by dread about how it might be used against us.
That fear did not come from nowhere. Over the past few years, Russian handlers have recruited Ukrainians in Poland, often over Telegram and for small sums, to spy, set fires and sabotage railways. After last November’s rail attack, Donald Tusk said Moscow chose Ukrainian perpetrators on purpose, to make Poles distrust the Ukrainians living among them. So when shots ring out in a Polish city, many of us brace for two things at once: the news of the dead, and the nationality of the killer.
The information that emerged pointed to a Polish suspect. Investigators are still working to establish his motives.
Whatever Michał O.’s ideological views were, they cannot explain away what he did. Communist, Nazi, anarchist, fascist: no label makes the murder of strangers minding their own business any easier to comprehend. Police also confirmed that the three people found dead at his home were his parents and sister. Authorities suspect he killed them before the attack.
He has now died. Regrettably. He should have stood trial for crimes of this magnitude.
But I do not want him to occupy every paragraph of this story. I want to focus on the response of the regular people.
I had never heard rifle shots in person. When I heard them in Krakow, they sounded hollow. A bit like firecrackers.
At first, I thought it might be football fans. I understood there had been a derby the night before, and that seemed a plausible explanation. The people running from the square did not appear to be panicking, which made it harder to understand what was happening.
Only later, speaking to two older women, did I learn that someone had been firing indiscriminately. They told me shots had been fired at a passing tram.
I did not go home. I took a tram to another part of the city and unexpectedly found myself at the scene where, I learned, two officers had confronted and shot the attacker.
There were police everywhere. Movement was being directed. What I saw was an emergency response that appeared organized and controlled, even while the city was trying to understand what had happened.
I don’t know how it would have played out elsewhere. Yet, I can say what I saw in Krakow impressed me.
The most obvious heroes are the police officers who confronted the gunman and the medical workers who treated those he had wounded.
Two officers stopped a heavily armed attacker within minutes. Both were wounded in the confrontation. He was wearing a helmet and body armor. They faced him anyway.
Their courage deserves every word being written about it. But I also think something should be said about the ordinary people around me.
The composure I witnessed was striking. People were moving away. They spoke to one another. The two women who told me what had happened helped me make sense of sounds I had initially mistaken for something harmless.
Most importantly, no one added to the confusion or got in the way of police, who had to pursue the gunman through narrow, tourist-filled streets before ambulances could reach the wounded and the dead
And yet even in that tragedy, there was a moment when dry humor took over the situation. When the first shots were fired, I asked the man standing near me and looking toward the square if he knew what was going on, to which he replied with a bleak smile on his face: “I don’t, but I’d rather not go and find out.”
And maybe that was the most human thing anyone could have said or done.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
Lesia Dubenko is a Ukrainian political scientist and analyst. A graduate of Lund University (MSc in European Affairs), she covers issues relating to international affairs, migration, and disinformation.