I'm Monica Prandtuk. I cover the European Union for the times and I'm usually

based in Brussels but for the past couple of days I've been reporting from the

Polish Belarusian border where thousands of asylum seekers from the Middle East

are stuck.

This is a very very difficult environment. This is one of Europe's oldest and

densest forests and in the night the temperatures drop below 32 degrees Fahrenheit

and actually I just came back from being outside for two or three hours and I'm

literally shaking it so cold.

So every day I've been going out with activists that are walking around the

forest here looking for people that do make it through and need help.

So we are a couple of hundred meters from the main road and there is a boarding pass

but sometimes you only find sort of ghosts of migrants that are no longer there.

I cannot see the date. Oh no it's here it's 19 of October. So there are boarding

passes. Fresh dates from Iran. Winter shoes and backpack. Sleeping bag. Empty

medicine packages. Baby diapers, hygienic pads. We even found a box of eyeshadow.

Yeah it's a weird weird sight in this forest. So we've been finding all those

objects that were signs that there were people there recently but we have not

seen actual people crossing until Sunday nights when the activists alerted us

that they were going to rescue to Syrian men.

We walked through the forest and we arrived and there are two men wrapped in

those thermal blankets you know the ones that look like tin foil used for

marathons and they're basically completely pale. They were incapable of

...