WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
russia invades ukrainePHOTOS BY KASIA STREK FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTThe new sports center at a high school in Przemysl, Poland, in a centuries-old building that has survived numerous wars, has been transformed into a reception center for refugees from Ukraine.
leave it there.
Across town, in a centuries-oldbuilding that has survived nu-
merous wars, more refugees gath-ered in the gymnasium of what is
now a public high school.“He says today the Russians are
focusing on Kharkiv, and that
every day the bombing continues,
the longer the war will be, the
more Ukrainians will wish for
revenge,” she said. “He says, ‘Get
as far away from the border as you
can. Poland is helping Ukraine
and Putin won’t like that.’ ”
“We thought this would just be
a few days, a few weeks,” she said,
as her and friend Snezhana Kaz-
penko’s sons cartwheeled about,
asking for their phones to play
games, for markers to continue
making drawings of knives and
missiles on scrap paper.
The reality is dawning on many
Ukrainian refugees, as well as
their hosts in Poland and four
other countries to Ukraine’s west,
that it will be much longer.
The European Union commis-
sioner for home affairs, Ylva Jo-
hansson, said Sunday that the
27-nation bloc may grant tempo-
rary asylum to Ukrainians for up
to three years. The plan could
move ahead this week.
In Poland, an initial wave of
Ukrainians with connections
here — the two countries share a
deeply intertwined history —
quickly found spots in family
homes stretching from the border
to Warsaw. But now many with-
out connections are arriving.
Siemiechkina and Kazpenko
have no friends or family in Po-
land, and no idea where they’ll go
next.
“Ukrainians from all over the
country are making their way to
Poland right now,” said Katarzyna
Komar-Macynska, a coordinator
of relief efforts at the Ukrainian
Association of Poland in Prze-
mysl, the closest city to the main
border crossing between the two
countries. “We are overwhelmed
with support from local people
right now, but the numbers are
about to grow by a lot.”
Unlike other refugee crises,
this one has seen little presence of
international aid organizations
or even federal governments,
which are focused on the immedi-
ate crisis at border posts. Instead,
local governments and communi-
ties have taken charge of welcom-
ing, housing and feeding new
arrivals.
Komar-Macynska’s organiza-
tion has 300 bilingual volunteers
working round-the-clock in shifts
to help refugees find places to
sleep. Those arriving are often
out of energy — feet frozen, eyes
blank, children crying, phones
dead. Komar-Macynska’s phone
doesn’t stop ringing and buzzing.
To talk to a reporter without
being distracted, she had to take
her phone to another room and
REFUGEES FROM A
“The government says we
might expect 3 or even 4 million
more Ukrainians to come to Po-
land,” said the school’s principal,
Tomasz Dziumak. “The question
is quickly becoming: How many
will stay and for how long? Is this
our new reality?”
Dziumak said that in Poland,
the phrase “before the war” had
been specifically connected to
World War II but that the same
phrase is now being used to de-
scribe a beforetime that feels like
eons ago, but was actually just
last week.
In his office hung a portrait of
the graduating class of 1938,
many of whom perished fighting
for Poland’s army or in the Holo-
caust. “It is a great tragedy that
we have not been able to prevent
another war,” he said.
Not only Ukrainians are flee-
ing their country. Thousands of
people from elsewhere, mostly
students, are in escape mode, too.
They tend to be facing the
longest waits at the border and
some of the least certain futures
in Europe, because asylum rules
extended to Ukrainians will prob-
ably not be applied to them.
Ukrainian border authorities
have said that they are prioritiz-ing women, children and the el-
derly at border crossings. Be-
cause most of the third-country
refugees are in their 20s, they
have been pushed to the back of
lines — and kept there as the
flood of Ukrainians has been un-
relenting.
Eventually, however, most are
making it across.
Victoria Funke, 25, had been
studying business management
in Kyiv and had become pregnant
in the three months she was
there. She and three other Niger-
ians, including her husband, had
first tried the Slovakian border
and gave up because the line
seemed to be barely moving. At
the Polish border, they waited,
standing, for 20 hours. They were
allowed to cross during a brief lull
in Ukrainian arrivals.
Funke said no one at the border
told her what kind of legal status
she would have in Poland, and she
and dozens of other non -
Ukrainians interviewed by The
Washington Post said embassies
for their countries had been non-
responsive. No embassy officials
from any country were present at
one border crossing visited by
The Post on Sunday and Monday.
At a loss for what to do, Funke and
the three others hitched a ride to
Przemysl in the back of a van.
“In Lagos, where I am from, we
are rich. I have a car; I’ve never
even sat in a danfo,” Funke said,
referring to the Nigerian city’s
dingy collective taxi vans. “We are
now refugees, I guess.”
Ukrainian families were also
confused about their legal status.
In the gym of the school in Prze-
mysl, three generations of a fam-
ily that had never even had a
passing thought of leaving
Ukraine mulled their future.
They had heard that the Ukraini-
an Consulate in Krakow, Poland,
was helping refugees without
passports to get documents. For
now, the plan was to go there.
“People are saying to expect to
stay away from Ukraine maybe
for years because now we are
seeing that Putin is truly a mad-
man,” said Lyudmila, 72, a grand-
mother with two gold front teeth
and a jar of preserved boiled pork
in broth with garlic, who declined
to give her last name. She, her
daughter, her daughter-in-law,
their two sons, and their dog
Archie and cat Pushka had ar-
rived in Przemysl on Monday on
the same train as Siemiechkina
and Kazpenko and their children.
Asked whether she expected to
see Ukraine again, Lyudmila
trembled and began to cry, and
her grandchildren looked away.
“I hope,” she said, haltingly,
“that you never experience what I
have.”As Poland o≠ers safety, m any Ukrainians have nowhere to go
Lyudmila, 72, left, with daughter Lyudmila, 45, and grandsons Maksym, 11, and Misha, 11, at the reception center in Przemysl.A ngela, 36, came to Przemysl f rom Melitopol with her year-old son Max, above, and her 10-year-old
daughter Eva. For now, they are staying at the reception center.