'Everything we can': Polish border city throws its doors open to desperate Ukrainians fleeing war
CHELM, Poland – According to Jewish folklore, this hardscrabble town 15 miles from the Ukraine border was created after God entrusted an angel with a sack full of unwise souls. The angel tripped, and they all tumbled out in one place: Chelm.
True or not, the convoys of buses and trains that steadily arrive with refugees from war-torn Ukraine prove that Chelm is anything but a place full of fools.
"It's amazing, it's just amazing," beams Olea Khomenok, 37, from Lutsk, in Ukraine's northwest, as she describes how her son was welcomed in a Chelm school on his eighth birthday with more toys, sweets and companionship than he knew what to do with.
Khomenok, an assistant dean at a university before the war, arrived here several days after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. She straightaway volunteered as a translator for the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians following in her footsteps, crossing into Poland and farther into the European Union via Chelm, which sits on the banks of the Ochrza River near Lublin.
At least 2.8 million Ukrainians have fled the country since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, according to the United Nations' refugee agency. More than 1.7 million have crossed into Poland, streaming into border towns such as Chelm to a fulsome welcome that includes everything from hot meals to warm beds.
In Poland's largest cities, officials plead for international help to deal with the refugee crisis, warning that resources are stretched too thin. It's not clear when Chelm will reach a tipping point, but for now at least, the town's residents have been overwhelmingly generous in their response, transforming hotels into refugee havens and cellphone stores into free charging stations.
Khomenok's son is the only Ukrainian speaker in his new, temporary class. He's been consumed by dark thoughts about what might happen to his country and his father, who like all Ukrainian men ages 18 to 60 was ordered by Ukraine's government to stay behind to help with the war effort.
"He's destroyed inside," Khomenok says of her son. "But today, I saw a smile."
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A train station filled with anxious refugees, caring volunteers
On March 8, a train from Lviv, in western Ukraine, pulls into Chelm station at 10:44 a.m.
As the carriages creep along the platform, several hundred different stories and circumstances of escape, disquiet and confusion eagerly prepare to disembark.
Children press their hands against the train's windows or stand on seats to get a better look at what awaits them in Poland and beyond. Mothers gather up small bags and backpacks, stick woolen hats on teenagers and gently rock crying babies.
Everyone keeps one watchful eye on elderly relatives, particularly vulnerable to the hardships of forced displacement because of physical decline, limited foreign language skills and little experience of life on the move compared with younger generations.
"Everyone needs to help in a situation like this. It's what makes a good person," says Andrzej Wencka, managing a group of trainee firefighters at Chelm station. They prepare to offload everything from prams to plastic bags filled with potato chips, socks and toothpaste.
"It's really hard to see the old people disoriented and not knowing what's happening," he says.
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About an hour later, the train's automatic doors open for the first few carriages, and Wencka and his team, along with a few police officers, escort passengers to an adjacent makeshift border control office. Among them are Svetlana Komarnytska, 35, her son, Maksym, 12, and their tiny dog. They traveled 12 hours from Kyiv, then waited 11 hours in Lviv before a final five-hour ride brought them to Chelm.
Komarnytska is trying to get to Spain. She has no idea how they'll get there or whether Spanish authorities will let them into the country – or permit them to remain. In Kyiv, Komarnytska worked in a hair salon. Her son is shy about speaking English. After a few minutes, he says he likes swimming.
"We want to go to a safe country," his mother says before being swallowed up by a passport line.
Inside the station, chairs line the walls, cardboard boxes stuffed with food and toys are collected in corners, volunteers hand out hot drinks, bowls of soup and sandwiches.
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Volunteer paramedics and nurses from France and Germany, who came to this small Polish city after seeing photos on the news about the flood of refugees, staff a temporary medical stand. Boxes of aspirin, ibuprofen and bandages are neatly stacked on a long table. A storage closet behind it was turned into a private examination room with two cots.
"The people coming off these trains have all kinds of health problems," says Mikael Netivi, a volunteer medic from Heidelberg in southwestern Germany. "Cardiac problems, dehydration, they haven't eaten enough, elderly people who have fallen."
Netivi says he and another German medic treated 300 of about 9,000 people who passed through Chelm station the previous night.
Outside the train station, it’s cold. Vans, coach buses and cars line up for passengers. Families wait in groups, clutching cardboard coffee cups and talking on their phones. People hold signs with the names of those they’re expecting.
A busy mayor and welcoming businesses
A mile down the road, Jakub Banaszek, Chelm’s mayor, flits between meetings and calls, coordinating his city’s response to the refugees.
The 30-year-old leader, one of the youngest in Poland, rushes through the hallway of his office building near the center of town flanked by two assistants handing him notes. He is ushered out of one room and into another for meetings about the refugee situation. The receptionist takes one call after another as the phone continually rings.
“We’re trying to do everything we can,” he says in an interview with Paste BN in his office. “But without coordination, our help won’t be effective.”
That requires a lot of communication about how to best receive the thousands of refugees who pass daily through Chelm, how to feed, shelter and refer them to housing or transportation to other cities.
Banaszek talks with city leaders throughout Poland and in other small towns along the Ukrainian border each day, he says. The town is staying on top of it, but it’s a difficult situation for both the residents and the refugees.
The town has a population of 64,000 people and more than 3,000 places for refugees to sleep, Banaszek says, including hotels, shelters, apartments and private homes.
The majority of Chelm residents help in some way, whether it is making food, donating supplies or giving money. One property owner who rents apartments on Airbnb says he reserved all his properties for refugees, turning away tourists or other visitors. Utility companies cover electricity and water for refugee residences. Cellphone stores in Chelm offer free power banks for charging devices, along with Polish SIM cards with free data and calling minutes.
"I am not sure how long we can, as a business, keep doing this, but we want to help," says Alicja Brzozowska, the owner of Hotel Duet, which has given all 45 of its rooms to refugees for free. Brzozowska feeds them and made her hotel a collection center for donations. One back room is filled with diapers.
Brzozowska and the hotel's manager, Agata Holub Vel Golab, whose idea it was to house the refugees free of charge, wear stickers on their shirts with the blue and yellow colors of Ukraine's flag in the shape of an angel. They say they can keep going until the beginning of April, when the hotel is booked for wedding season.
"The food here has been so delicious," says Ann Belichenko, 16, the sole English speaker in her family, as she sits at a table in the hotel's restaurant with her mother, aunt and 3-month-old cousin.
Belichenko's voice trembles as she recounts their escape from near the eastern city of Kharkiv. When tanks rolled into their village, there wasn't enough time to say goodbye to her grandmother. The uncle who drove them to the border – the father of the baby, Veronika – was crying when he dropped them off because he wasn't sure if he'd ever see them again. Belichenko says they crack jokes to keep their spirits up.
"Books and sci-fi movies – these are my big loves," she says. "I want to finish reading Harry Potter. I have read only the first three books."
A pastor offers hot meals and a place to sleep
Not far from the town’s center, Chelm Baptist Church is a bustling hub for Ukrainians looking for a hot meal, a place to sleep and to figure out their next steps.
Buses come and go throughout the day, some dropping refugees off, others loading them up to head to other European countries.
One man from Latvia has been making trips back and forth for more than a week, bringing supplies from home to Chelm, emptying his van and filling it back up with people to transport to new homes in the Baltic country.
The church, which has about 150 members and is part of a nationwide network of churches with 6,000 members in 100 congregations throughout Poland, turned its sanctuary, pulpit and balcony into a large sleeping room. More than 200 cots in tidy rows fill the room, each neatly made with brightly colored blankets and pillows.
“We want to give them bed, food and the rest and the hope,” says Henrik Skrzypkowski, Chelm Baptist’s animated pastor. “Hope because we try to find and send them to safe places in our country or another European country.”
Skrzypkowski opened the church's doors after seeing the war begin in Ukraine on TV while on a skiing vacation. He returned to Chelm early, knowing it would probably be an entry point for Ukrainians coming to the country by train.
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The leaders of Poland’s two largest cities, Warsaw and Krakow, said Friday that they cannot take in Ukrainian refugees much longer. In statements on Twitter and Facebook, the mayors of both cities said the surge of people – 300,000 to Warsaw and 100,000 to Krakow over the past two weeks – stressed their resources and infrastructure. They asked the European Union to help and said they are looking to send newly arriving refugees to smaller Polish cities.
Poland's immense welcome of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians trudging though freezing temperatures to reach its territory is a dramatic reversal from how the country's government reacted to Europe's refugee crisis in 2016, when it largely refused entry to Syrians and other people fleeting conflicts in the Middle East.
Over the past decade, Poland's government has lurched to the right as President Andrzej Duda tightened the government's grip on state institutions, including the judiciary and media, and supported socially conservative, Catholic Church-friendly policies such as making it illegal to get an abortion in most circumstances.
"Now because there is a war on our border and Polish people feel more close culturally to Ukrainians, there is more acceptance of these refugees," says Mateusz Klinowksi, the former mayor of a town near Krakow and a law professor who has lobbied for years for Poland to take in more asylum seekers. He says "Islamophobia" informs Poland's policies on the issue.
'Dreaming about the end of the war'
Skrzypkowski's church is filled by refugees. He says Poles have been inspired to help with this crisis because they remember what it is like to be invaded, as they were by the Germans in World War II, despite the fact that Poles and Ukrainians fought each other during the second half of the war.
The war has taken so much from Ukrainians – homes, jobs, lives – but it hasn't been able to stamp out the normal giggles and playful shrieks from children in Skrzypkowski's church.
The play area feels like a normal day care. There is a large carpet, tables and crayons for coloring. Mothers sit on couches and watch their kids zoom around and burn off pent-up energy. A 4-year-old in a felt dinosaur suit wanders in and out and around a bunch of 8-year-olds sweatily playing tag and throwing a ball around.
"The Russians are attacking us, and houses are collapsing," says Eva Terasenko, 8, taking a break from drawing on a plastic My Little Pony doll to talk with Paste BN.
On the wall behind her, drawings by refugee children who passed through the church tell the story in crayon: The Polish and Ukrainian flags sit side-by-side in idealized skies or on desert islands. In one, stick figures march toward a horizon filled with swirling dark clouds. "Boom, fire, beyond" is written on another.
"I am always dreaming about the end of the war and everything will be OK like it was before," Terasenko says.