Анна Папай. Фото: Politzek.me
A fundraising campaign has been launched on the BYSOL platform to support Hanna Papai, who in Belarus was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for making donations to solidarity funds.
Hanna is 46 years old and has three children. Before her arrest, she worked in the banking sector and lived in Minsk. She was held in pretrial detention and later served her sentence in Correctional Colony No. 4 in Homiel. In December 2025, Hanna was among a group of political prisoners who, following a visit by a U.S. delegation to Minsk, were deported via Ukraine to Poland.
The Politzek.me project has published a feature about her life after her release.
Hanna now lives in Warsaw and works at a bakery, where she bakes croissants and also makes custom cakes. Baking had been her hobby even before her arrest. While in prison, where she received no money transfers as a political prisoner, she made desserts from whatever ingredients were available. However, even when she did receive money, doing so was difficult. Her first wages for 20 days of work in the prison sewing workshop amounted to about 4 Belarusian rubles.
After her release, Hanna is rebuilding her life from scratch. Her children remain in Belarus, and she is waiting for the day she can see them again.
“People often ask: ‘How are you coping without your children? Do you miss them?’ I don’t understand why people ask such questions. It is incredibly hard for me to be here without them. My heart literally bleeds. Whenever I walk past a school or a kindergarten, I think about how my sons could be going to that school too, coming home every day. But I have been deprived of that. They are growing up without me.
That is the worst thing — being separated from your children. So please, don’t ask mothers in exile what it’s like without their children. It is so unbearably hard for them that you do not need to know,” she said.
According to Hanna, working at the bakery is the first time in a long while that she has felt she is where she belongs. She hopes to become a partner in the business where she works and, eventually, open her own bakery in either Poland or Belarus.
The fundraising goal is €3,000. Of that amount, €1,200 is intended for two months’ rent, €950 for equipment and tools needed to make cakes and desserts, €550 for ingredients and supplies, and €300 as a reserve fund and to help develop her private orders.
The former political prisoner can be supported via this link.