Poland: Get Ready! Guide for Crisis and War (RCB, 2022)

GET READY! Guide for Crisis and War is the English edition of Poland’s household preparedness manual, published as Edition I in Warsaw in 2022 by the Government Center for Security. It runs to 34 printed pages in two parts, the first on preparing and the second on conduct during an emergency, and roughly half of it addresses armed conflict directly, including gunfire, explosions, chemical, biological and radiological attack, temporary occupation by foreign troops and hostage situations. The Resistance Hub hosts the English edition in full.

What this document is

The guide opens by defining its own two subjects. A crisis is “a fast-onset event that can threaten health, life, or society” requiring higher than typical resources. War is “an armed conflict between states, nations, ethnic or religious groups”, and the guide immediately qualifies its own definition: there is no universally accepted one, and contemporary definitions treat war not as a purely military phenomenon but as an interplay of domestic and foreign policy, economic, military and information-related actions. Starting a household leaflet with a definitional caveat is unusual, and it signals the register of what follows.

Part one is preparation, built outward from the family. Talk to the people you live with, children included. Identify the safest places in the house, usually the basement, away from windows. Agree a contact point for accidental separation. Prepare an evacuation backpack and home supplies sufficient for a minimum of seven days without water, electricity or food, with fourteen litres of water stored per inhabitant. The backpack rules are specific: one per household member, a name and address card attached to each, and separate sets kept at home, at work and in the car, with every family member told where they are.

Disinformation gets a full page before any of the physical hazards. The guide prints the line “Remember that information can be a weapon and you are the target!” and then supplies a five question test for any claim: is the author known, could the information influence your decisions, is the source reliable and available from at least two independent trusted sources, is it carried in nationwide media, and does it appear in the official channels of state administration, services or security agencies. The instruction is not to trust official channels blindly but to use their presence or absence as one of five signals.

Part two is conduct, and it is the operational half. Be careful who you talk to, and watch for people trying to establish where you work or who is responsible for security in your area. Under gunfire: move out of the line of fire, run, hide behind walls or metal structures, mute your phone, barricade, avoid hiding in large groups, and if neither escape nor concealment is possible, fight. Under explosion: identify a thick-walled windowless space with air access in advance, drop and cover, do not leave shelter immediately, use stairs rather than lifts. Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear exposure each get their own procedure, with the radiological instruction to remain sealed indoors for at least 24 hours unless told otherwise.

The occupation section is the part that distinguishes this document from an ordinary emergency leaflet. It tells the reader what to do on encountering an armed group that does not look like the Polish Army or allied forces: change direction, do not approach military vehicles, do not look at equipment or you may be taken for a spy, do not photograph or film, keep hands out of pockets, make no sudden movements, never argue with an armed person, present documents when asked and stand still. Under temporary occupation it advises filling every vessel including the bathtub with water, using stored or humanitarian food, searching damaged shops, staying in after dusk, wearing neutral colours without symbols or emblems, and finding companions. Earlier, in the evacuation section, it tells readers to avoid brown, green and camouflage clothing because “you can be considered a soldier”.

The guide closes with hostage conduct, in which the first 45 minutes are named as critical, a first aid sequence covering assessment, the recovery position and cardiopulmonary resuscitation at thirty compressions to two rescue breaths, a repeat of the evacuation backpack checklist in tick-box form, and a page for the reader to write in local emergency numbers.

Alarm signals, as printed

Contents

Provenance and lineage

The title page prints three things and no more: the title, “Prepared by GOVERNMENT CENTER FOR SECURITY”, and “Edition I, Warsaw, 2022”. No individual authors, editors or illustrators are credited, no ISBN is printed, and there is no imprint page. The publisher is the Rządowe Centrum Bezpieczeństwa, the government body responsible for crisis management coordination, and the guide directs readers to its own pages at gov.pl/rcb and to its social media channels for event-specific detail.

This is the English edition of the Polish original Bądź gotowy! Poradnik na czas kryzysu i wojny, dated 5 April 2022 on the publisher’s own page, which distributes the Polish guide, this English adaptation, a print version and a presentation deck. The file size of the English PDF held by the publisher matches the file hosted here, which confirms that what we host is the publisher’s own English edition rather than a third-party copy.

The translation is incomplete in places, and readers quoting from it should know that. Several checklists carry the Polish text alongside or instead of the English, the running header remains in Polish throughout, and page footers alternate between the English “p.” and the Polish “str.” abbreviations. The substance is unaffected but the artefacts are visible, and they are in the publisher’s own file, not introduced by hosting.

One title correction applies. This file has been listed elsewhere as an “Emergency Preparedness Guide”, a title that drops the words “and War” and misrepresents roughly half of the contents. The printed title is GET READY! Guide for Crisis and War and the second part of the document is armed-conflict conduct.

No rights notice is printed anywhere in the file. That is an observation about the document’s own pages and nothing more. It is not a claim of public domain and it grants no permission to reproduce it.

How The Resistance Hub uses it

Poland’s guide is the most operational of the European household documents indexed on National Preparedness Guides, and the one that spends most of its page count on conduct rather than on stockpiling. Its seven day standard and fourteen litre water figure are the European upper bound we cite in Scenario Planning for Emergencies and in the supply work on Physical Resilience Preparedness.

Its section on caring for neighbours, on checking that the elderly and unwell have received a warning and on offering transport and shelter space to evacuees, is the clearest official statement of the point made in Social Resilience: Community Networks. The occupation and identification passages should be read alongside Lithuania’s equivalent and against the analysis in Small States’ Total Defense Strategy, while the five question disinformation test belongs with Psychological Resilience: Small Nations.

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