“I take my girlfriend’s hand when we walk in the street, without thinking.” She added: “Back in Poland, there was always this fear inside me.
“The first thing I saw was a giant rainbow flag hanging across the street from our flat,” she said. The final straw came when a close friend was assaulted because of her sexual orientation, she said.Īrriving in Berlin, she knew she had made the right choice. “Last year the situation became too much for me,” Malachowska said, adding that she had suffered a nervous breakdown during the country’s presidential election last summer when anti-LGBTQ rhetoric engaged in by the governing party became especially shrill in an effort to appeal to socially conservative voters. Trucks blasted anti-gay hate messages from loudspeakers on the streets of Poland’s cities.įinally fed up with an increasingly hostile environment for gay people in Poland under the governing Law and Justice party, Marta Malachowska, a 31-year-old who works in social media, decided to move to Berlin with her girlfriend in December. For months, government ministers spewed vicious rhetoric about gay people.
