“The Russian planes passed over our heads, the sky turned black, we ran away”
FROM THE ENCOUNTER IN MEDYKA (POLAND). “We spent three days and three nights on the street in single file. My husband hardly slept to keep the seat for us. Every quarter of an hour he advanced two or three steps. Then maybe he would doze on his feet, resting his head on my shoulder. So for fifteen kilometers: he also snowed. I greeted him two hours ago with a kiss. I tried to hold back the tears for him, but I couldn’t. And basically I was lucky: next to me it was full of lonely women with their children tied to their bodies with scarves, in order to warm them and to have their hands free to carry the luggage ». Katerina Halchuk, 29, in her fourth month of pregnancy, has just crossed the Polish border in Medyka, a tiny village of low-lying houses and whitewashed fruit trees. She is looking for a ride to Przemyśl, the nearest town to her, but she hardly has the strength. She moved away from her Ivano-Frankivs’k home, 150 km south-east of Lviv, on February 25, after a sleepless night on TV. Like you, over 280,000 people have already left Ukraine (100,000 on Sunday alone), even if the UN estimates that in a few months they could exceed 4 million. “When we saw the first two Russian military planes pass over our heads, we covered the windows with adhesive tape, to prevent the glass from hurting us in the event of an explosion – he says in English, learned during his years of study in Cyprus and Warsaw -. But when we heard the roars coming from the airport, with the sky turning black in a few moments, we decided to leave ». With her there are two other women, an aunt named Petrovna and a lady over eighty. «I call her grandmother Evelina even though she is not a relative of mine, but I promised that I would take care of her – he continues -. In reality it is more I who need her: she is calm and impassive, while I am emotionally under stress ». Katerina’s husband was unable to follow her because like all other Ukrainian men between 18 and 60 he cannot leave the country and could soon be called to fight. “I have lived these days surrounded by the most terrible things but also by the kindness of her people – she continues, showing on her cell phone the photo of her little dog that her parents who remained at home have just sent her -. Everyone tried to help us, some with a coffee, some with a piece of chocolate. The most heartbreaking thing was seeing the children abandoning their dogs and cats in the woods ».
Not far from her, in front of the entrance to the Biedronka market, the drivers offer to accompany those who fled from Kiev, Kharkiv and other Ukrainian cities to Lublin. Someone asks for 400 zloty (about 85 euros) per seat, but the price is mainly due to exhaustion and the lack of alternatives, also because many distributors have run out of fuel along the way to Krakow.
People gather around makeshift bonfires that stink of burnt rubber or flock to the piles of clothes, shoes and soft toys sent here by some good Christ and thrown directly on the mud. Ruslana Laknovski and her sister-in-law Mariana are among the lucky ones: they crossed the border with a 13-year-old girl and three younger children, but now they just have to wait for their husbands to pick them up and take them to Belgium.
“Since yesterday, only Ukrainian women have arrived,” the volunteers in yellow bibs explain, as they try to put order in the chaos that is created around the free shuttle buses that take refugees from the border to neighboring cities. Thousands of non-European students are showing up in Medyka and in the other border posts between Poland and Ukraine, mainly from Africa and Asia (for years they have chosen Ukrainian universities to graduate at lower costs than in EU countries or the United States), and also many other young people from Syria, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Many, despite the reassurances of the authorities, told on social media that they had suffered racist beatings and humiliations during the escape. The African Union officially intervened recalling that “all people have the same rights to cross international borders during a conflict”.
In Przemyśl the meeting points are the refugee center opened in the primary school on Stanislawa Konarskiego Street, the railway yard and the supermarket parking lots. The station concourse, with its glass chandeliers and frescoes that appear to have remained intact from the time of Emperor Franz Joseph and Joseph Roth, is a dormitory with people reclining everywhere. “We are trying to go back to Morocco, can someone help us?” ask Aya Nassiri and her boyfriend, both enrolled in the medical school in Zaporizhzhia, in southern Ukraine. Those waiting for someone go back and forth from platform 5, where the trains from Lviv stop. «They are all 24 hours late – explains the Polish journalist Kasia Piasecka -. There is talk of two thousand people on each train but no one knows exactly ».
Katerina, Petrovna and “grandmother” Evelina, on the other hand, after a few hours of waiting, managed to contact a relative who can pick them up in front of a McDonald’s. “I was six when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, I lived for months in a cellar – says Evelina before getting into the car, headed for France -. I never imagined I would relive something like this at 87. The only good thing is that I will see my great-grandson for the first time. A crumb of light in the midst of this disasteror”.
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