The Polish Army
'The Polish people showed up. They know what tyranny is. They know what that feels and tastes like, and they weren't gonna have it again.'
Part 1: There Was Room at the Inn
After Ottawa’s Bikers’ Church made the decision to offer assistance to Freedom Convoy truckers, no one knew what to expect. In Melissa McKee’s words, "Would trucks show up, park downtown, beep beep we're unhappy with you, and then go home? Cuz there was a convoy in 2019" that did precisely that.
Hundreds of trucks and other vehicles drove across the country to support oil pipelines and protest carbon taxes. But "nobody even knows about it," says Melissa. Which makes it difficult to conclude it was an effective strategy.
Farmers began donating food to the church, and the freezers started to fill up. Parishioners signed up for portions of those twelve-hour days. "I had more volunteers than I knew what to do with," Melissa told an interviewer a couple months later. "Everybody wanted in. People were calling me and texting me, ‘I want a trucker. Send me a trucker.’"
As it turned out, most opted to remain with their vehicles rather than be hosted in private homes. "So things were shifting all the time," Melissa remembers, "We were rolling with it." She remembers receiving a phone call. "Somebody had told somebody, that told somebody. There's this Red Seal chef, a Polish guy from Mississauga. He wants to feed the truckers, to make sure the food is prepared in a safe, clean manner, healthy. He just needs a kitchen."
Recalling her initial hesitation, Melissa laughs, "Then we had our first day of trying to feed people. I was like, 'Bring the Red Seal chef!'" She sent Piotr (Peter) Zajac photos of the church kitchen. "He said, 'Perfect,' and picked up a Polish lady he didn't even know on his way here, who was a sous chef." Her name was Urzula, Ula for short.
"So the Red Seal chef comes," Melissa remembers,
and, I mean, we don't have room in our freezers. It's a good thing it was cold out, because we had a sea container outside that was like our extra freezer. The Polish people brought so much food. We hand-bombed three hundred loaves of bread in here, that first day. There was Polish sausage in almost everything. It was delicious.
He had four crockpots going at all times. A soup, pierogies, a goulash. And then he developed this whole system of delivery. They made these boxes to hold all the Styrofoam containers of soup and food. Lined them with styrofoam to keep things hot, made lids, carrying handles. He had this whole team of people delivering food out of here, driving it downtown.
In addition to nourishing those onsite, Bikers' Church provided thousands of hot meals to truckers parked near Parliament. "I just called them the Polish army," says Melissa,
The Polish people showed up. They know what tyranny is. They know what that feels and tastes like, and they weren't gonna have it again.
They just backed trucks up here and loaded food in. We were getting deliveries constantly. Bread, doughnuts, meat, cheese. Chicken bouillon, noodles, vegetables. Oh my gosh, I walked in the kitchen one day and there were fifty-pound bags of onions that they were chopping. Carrots and celery.
It kept growing. They were making shifts of people. Some of the people that came to help him didn't even speak English. That's how Polish they were. It was incredible to me, how they made that happen. In the end, I was very thankful I didn't have to manage that.
Non-food donations were also flooding in. "People would say, 'I stopped and got a couple bags of throat lozenges. Or lip balm, Tylenol, socks, hats, blankets. We had toothbrushes, toothpaste, lotions, deodorant." And "big, huge Costco packs of toilet paper. Five and six at a time."
At the back of the church there were tables of donated items, with bins underneath for the overflow. Take what you need. "There was so much stuff," remembers Melissa. "Honestly, there was no lack. We didn't have to work hard for it. It just showed up."
next installment: Rejoice and Be Glad
An Ontario-based Polish-language weekly published an interview with Peter on February 17, 2022. Read the Google-translated version here: Piotr Zajac - the man who feeds the Convoy. In that interview, he says: “thanks to our prime minister I have not worked for practically two years, so I am sitting at home, doing nothing.”
He talks about martial law in Poland when he was 15, and says “I have been in Canada for over thirty-three years, and I remember the times when it was beautiful…”
the care and feeding of the truckers is what helped them stay for more than a couple days right? Not to mention the emotional support that they were doing the right thing.
Another heartwarming and absolutely amazing story - superb organization! So many came to help!