At a Polish train station, a mother and son find refuge from Putin’s war
Volodymyr leans over and squeezes his mother’s hand. “My husband’s parents didn’t want to come,” Liudmyla says, her face pale and drawn. “It is their home. They have refused to leave. My mother-in-law said to me: ‘What would we do with the chickens?’” She covers her mouth with her hand and her eyes fill with tears. “The hardest thing is to leave the two of them there.”
Like so many Ukrainians, Volodymyr and Liudmyla have found themselves in Przemyśl’s main train station, an elegant pastel-painted building with high ceilings and ornate neoclassical details, which has been transformed into a makeshift hotel and aid point for the influx of refugees fleeing the death and horror of Vladimir Putin’s war.
The station’s offices are stocked with essential supplies. Crates of sanitary products, toothpaste, sandwiches, brioche rolls, shampoo and kids’ fruit juice are stacked in mounds, and handed out by men and women in fluorescent jackets. One volunteer hands a crying three-year-old girl a fluffy bunny and a Kinder egg. At once the tears are gone and she shows her mother her new toy.
People sit, swiping on their phones, sipping coffee and eating snacks. Some snooze, snuggled up in blankets along tightly packed corridors.
Przemyśl is just eight miles from the Ukrainian border and on the main train line from Lviv, making it a waypoint for refugees travelling to somewhere else in Poland, or further still. The town of 60,000 people has welcomed more than 200,000 refugees in 12 days.
Hundreds of volunteers are helping to make sure the station’s guests are fed and watered. Ola has a day off from her job as a hotel receptionist but has volunteered for a 12-hour shift handing out soup and hot meals in polystyrene trays. “People are very grateful,” she says.
There’s an energetic atmosphere in the station, as Ukrainians – mostly women – squeeze past each other through the concourse and young children chat and play and nibble on food. There are pets, too. A huge black fluffy Newfoundland called Margot stands on her hind legs with her front paws on her owner’s chest. A tiny Chihuahua trembles at its owner’s feet, hemmed in by fast-moving legs. A woman in her 20s feeds a white rat through the bars of its portable cage.
It’s in the station’s corners, away from the practical bustle of the main hall, where the war’s toll is most obvious. One middle-aged woman in a fur-collared coat sits on her own, staring into space. In a side-room a mother in some distress with a sleeping child cradled on her shoulder talks through tears to four volunteers who reply with hushed understanding.
This is the bleak new reality for millions of Ukrainians whose homes, livelihoods, and in some cases family members and friends, are gone. They now have to rely on the generosity of strangers. “It’s amazing what they’re doing for us,” says Liudmyla.
Many of the women have brightly painted and well-manicured nails, a reminder of how close they still are to the lives they have left behind. Two weeks ago, Liudmyla, 39, had been an English teacher in the southern city of Mykolaiv on the Black Sea coast. After a week hiding in her basement, and with Russian tanks roaming through the streets, shelling houses, she made the awful decision to flee on a bus organised by the local municipality. Her husband, Viktor, also a teacher, has stayed behind to fight.
Now she is waiting for another bus to take her and her 16-year-old son to a friend’s house in the northern Polish city of Bydgoszcz. They are swept up in the fastest-moving refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War.
Liudmyla asks me if Britain is going to take any refugees. I say that complicated paperwork is delaying the thousands of Ukrainians who were promised shelter from entering the country. She gives a non-judgmental nod.
A tall young priest with long hair in a black buttoned smock walks around handing out tulips. Liudmyla takes one and fiddles with the leaves.
“We hope the war will be finished soon,” she says. “We don’t deserve this.”