In Poland, refugees from Ukraine escape the danger, but not the war

Iryna Lvovych takes out her phone and pulls up photos of her young, smiling family and of a garden where she grew tomatoes and berries in and around Irpin, Ukraine, which she called home for the past 10 years. Then she shows a photo of what remains of her family’s apartment building today.

“We will not return to Irpin. It’s dangerous,” says the mother of two. “Our apartment that we bought, the roof burnt off and it’s not livable.”

Ms. Lvovych is one of more than 3 million Ukrainians who have sought refuge in Poland from Russia’s full-scale invasion, and now find themselves in limbo. Uncertain how long they will stay in Poland and when it will be safe to return home, they find themselves faced with questions and choices over finding long-term housing, jobs, and schools for their children.

“The people who are here, most of them will stay here for the foreseeable future,” says Katia Roman-Trzaska, the founder of SOK Foundation, a nonprofit focused on helping foster care and underprivileged children. “Both Poles and Ukrainians need a lot of assistance. Tools to rebuild their life, either to stay or to go back home.”

“No one believed this would be a big war”

Russia’s war against Ukraine has created the largest refugee crisis seen in Europe since World War II. Over 5 million Ukrainians have fled, and Poland has taken in the highest number at over 3 million people, according to United Nations figures. Those Ukrainians join over 1 million who were already living and working in Poland prior to Feb. 24, when the war began.

This refugee situation has unique characteristics. It’s primarily women and children fleeing, since men 18 to 60 years old are not permitted to leave Ukraine. And Poles are taking Ukrainians into their own homes, not setting up camps like in other recent global crises.

Also, while Poland has been criticized for its response to refugees fleeing the Middle East and Africa, it has been widely sympathetic to Ukrainians fleeing the war on its border, a response partially rooted in a shared Soviet history with Ukraine and cultural similarities.

Polish cities, which are decked out in blue and yellow Ukrainian flags in a sign of solidarity, have seen their populations swell. Warsaw’s population has grown by over 17% and Krakow’s by 20%. Ukrainian is now commonly heard spoken on streets.

But few expected this, says Ms. Lvovych. “So many families thought this would be over in one, two, three days and they would return back,” she says. “And so many didn’t leave because of that. No one believed this would be a big war with a lot of losses.”

On the morning the war started, her family’s car was in a repair shop in Kyiv and her son’s passport was in an office being renewed – that building would later be bombed. Her husband, Yaroslav, managed to retrieve both their car and the passport while she started preparing to leave the next morning. That evening, they spent part of the night in the basement and could hear military activity in nearby Hostomel.

The next morning, Ms. Lvovych along with six other people piled into a Volkswagen Jetta, knowing they were heading for Poland with the goal of making it to Warsaw. After an arduous journey, Ms. Lvovych crossed into Poland on Feb. 28 with her 7-year-old and 1-year-old sons, Sviatoslav and Myroslav. Her husband stayed behind in the western Ukrainian city of Lutsk, where he is volunteering and continuing to work a remote IT job that now supports an extended family.

Ms. Lvovych, who works as an architect and interior designer, spent three weeks looking for an apartment in Warsaw and received help from a Polish family at the school where her sons are now students. The Polish family decided to help Ms. Lvovych in memory of their recently deceased grandmother, who was sent to Siberia as a child by the Soviets. “The Poles remember what the Soviets did to them,” Ms. Lvovych says.

Ms. Lvovych, who understands Polish but does not yet speak it, is grateful for all the help Poland has offered and says she feels bad about the stress so many Poles are living under, themselves wondering if their country could be attacked by Russia.

For now, Ms. Lvovych and her sons are trying to socialize with Poles in Warsaw. She has the apartment rent-free until the end of spring. She’s planning to return to Ukraine in late May on her son’s birthday and join her husband. “We’ll return and see what to do next,” she says.

History and trauma

Relations between Poland and Ukraine haven’t always been as strong as they are in the current moment. Painful historical events of the 1940s – including the Volhynia massacre of Poles, committed by Ukrainian nationalist groups, and Operation Vistula, the forced resettlement of Ukrainians under the Soviet-backed Polish communists – remain charged topics.

But right now, as the war enters its third month, Poles are continuing to help Ukrainians while also steeling themselves for what could be a much longer haul.

“Pretty much the whole country has pivoted to helping Ukrainians,” says Ms. Roman-Trzaska of SOK Foundation, who also founded Little Chef, a cooking school for kids. “Very quickly we realized that this is not a sprint. This is a marathon.”

Ms. Roman-Trzaska pivoted her foundation’s work and started making sandwiches for Ukrainians arriving at Warsaw’s Ukrainian House and building welcome packs containing basic hygiene products. Her group is now working with Ukrainian orphans in Poland running programs involving sports, singing, painting, and cooking. She is working on plans for Polish-language immersion classes for Ukrainian children this summer.

“We want to help them with integrating into Polish society and Polish schools, and we want them to learn the language,” she said. “Not to assimilate, which is the loss of your own culture, but to blend culturally. And this needs to happen for both sides.”

But she fears the war has entered a “precarious” period with online fake news and trolling having the potential to divide Poles. “This will take decades to heal,” she says. “We need the world to help us here.”

For Ukrainians and Poles, emotions are right beneath the surface. Hanna Hromova, a psychologist who fled Kyiv, is now in Warsaw working with patients online, through a psychological hotline, and at refugee centers.

Ukrainians who fled are dealing with feelings of guilt and sorrow as well as divided families with husbands and older relatives staying behind, while those in Ukraine are struggling with safety concerns and survival, enormous stress, and death, Ms. Hromova says.

“There is an intense desire for people to return [home],” she says. And Polish volunteers are also dealing with trauma, she adds.

In the countryside

Poles are encouraging Ukrainians to head for smaller cities. A large poster in Warsaw’s central train station in English and Ukrainian declares, “Big cities in Poland are already overcrowded. Don’t be afraid to go to smaller towns: they are peaceful, have good infrastructure, and are well-adapted.”

Svitlana Shevchenko took that advice, after she fled Zaporizhzhia with her teenage daughter Yliia, and Ms. Shevchenko’s friend Valentyna Kozlova and her 6-year-old son Maksim.

“The war started for me not from the moment they started to bomb us, but when I understood that” – she starts crying and Yliia finishes her sentence – “we had to leave.”

Their long journey involved waiting in the cold and taking bruising rides on packed trains. “This whole journey, it felt like it wasn’t happening to us. It felt like a retrospective of films about World War II. You don’t believe that this is happening in your lifetime,” Ms. Shevchenko says.

They crossed into Poland on March 6. At a refugee center, a Polish volunteer who spoke Ukrainian told them a priest in a small village near Rzeszów in southeastern Poland had offered to host four people in a building close to the church. They accepted.

“We are immeasurably thankful to the Polish people. We are pleasantly shocked by these people. I never even thought that people could feel another’s pain like this,” Ms. Shevchenko says. “War is terrible, but it has shown in the world that there are extraordinary, good, sincere people.”

Slowly the women and their children are settling into life. Yliia and Maksim are attending Polish school, and Yliia is also continuing Ukrainian school online. Not too long after they arrived, another friend of theirs with her daughter also came to the village – giving the women a small Ukrainian community.

But Ms. Shevchenko, who worked as a journalist in Ukraine, admits to feeling lost and experiencing some depression. “We arrived in a foreign country without a home, job, a perspective; we don’t have a future,” she says. “In February the war began, time goes on, the seasons are changing, but we are stuck in February, all of us. Time isn’t moving forward.”

She is focusing on learning Polish, which will open up job opportunities, and hopes to be able to communicate what she’s feeling and thinking to Poles soon. While in recent weeks some Ukrainians have started to return home, the women think it’s still too dangerous in their city. For now, they are thankful to be safe and constantly monitor their phones for news from home.

“We all have one wish,” Ms. Shevchenko says. “We don’t even say it out loud to each other – we want the war to end. There are a million questions; we all understand that tough times are ahead. We don’t know if the war will end, how long it will last. We don’t know if our cities will survive or if occupied territories will again be freed. But we understand that even if it’s like that, we will need to renew and rebuild our country, and it will be tough.”

Emily Johnson contributed reporting.