Actually, despite the media buzz, there were about 20 morons with "white Europe" banner, quickly kicked away by organizers, but for some reason media loved presenting their photos, not the remaining 60k of people of all age (0 to 99) celebrating the Day of Independence in a rather peaceful atmosphere.

In reality there is nothing to be afraid, Poland is one of the safest countries in the World (there are multiple resources about that), people are traditionally hospitable, in bigger cities like Warsaw, Krakow, Wroclaw there is pretty a lot of people from many Western Europe countries, there are also a lot of (about 1 million) refugees and emigrants from Ukraine, emigrants from Belarus, quite big Vietnamese community. So far everyone live in peace together.

A fun fact - my daughter goes to a regular primary public school and in her class there is a boy from India, a boy from western Ukraine, a girl from Ukraine and a girl from Belarus and. They were assimilated very quickly, without particular teachers assistance (public school, so teachers don't have time for anything but teaching); boys soaked into the group immediately, as running around together and screaming plus playing soccer does not require much language skills.

I think that if you consider seriously moving/traveling to country X, relaying on media does not make much sense, as they are chasing something that would make a "news". So, surely, there are people in Poland who bite dogs, yet the reality is that, typically, dogs are biting people.

Luckily, these days it is easy to contact foreigners living in Poland (Facebook groups, native language speakers portals, etc.), so, just ask someone who lives here.

>a lot of (about 1 million) refugees and emigrants from Ukraine

Please don't mix labor migrants (99.99+% of the number you indicated) with refugees.

According to the fresh official Foreigners Office report[0], there were 7.5k applications and around 400(sic!) positive decisions for the "refugee" or "protection" status from the Ukrainian citizens in the last 15(!) years.

[0] https://udsc.gov.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/UKRAINA-01.09...

10x easier to just drive through the border or get a work visa than to apply for the asylum.

Its rather sad how close we are to a 1984-esque "believe everything you hear on the 'news'" society. I hope one day we can move past that, and better realize that nearly all news is founded on Outrage designed to get advertisement views.

Here's your litmus test: If you read a news story and it invokes some emotional state within you, immediately preempt that and use your head. Is it possible they could be exaggerating, or straight up lying? What are their motivations and biases? Are there corroborating "ground" reports from individuals with different biases?