New lives, foreign cities: After escaping war, hardships for Ukraine refugees are just beginning

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ON A BUS FROM POLAND TO GERMANY WITH UKRAINIAN REFUGEES – He likes painting, skateboarding and playing Call of Duty, the first-person shooter video game.

At school, he is polite, works hard and excels in math and physics. At home, he helps around the house and is devoted to his pet turtles, Tor and Tila. 

But right now, Matviy Terenia just wants to sleep. "Excuse me," he says. "I am so tired."

The 12-year-old from Lubny in central Ukraine barely gets his words out before he wriggles his neck into the hood of his sweatshirt, settles back and lets his stocky frame slide down into his uncomfortable seat. Seconds later, his head flops to one side and finds a shoulder for a pillow. His water bottle drops to the floor with a thud. 

Matviy is dozing on a small, minivan-type bus – one of three in a convoy organized by German humanitarian volunteers – that will take him, his mother and about two dozen other Ukrainian refugees to new lives in Western Europe. They dream, a little too nervously, of stable jobs, well-kept classrooms and reunions with family and friends. 

They have successfully navigated a way out of Russian President Vladimir Putin's ferocious, unprovoked war on Ukraine, which, according to the United Nations, has displaced upward of 10 million people, killed at least 1,100 civilians and threatened the lives of tens of thousands more. 

They don't carry any obvious physical scars of war with them.

But leaving everything behind from one life and beginning another in a different country brings its own hardships. For many, the relief at finding a save haven is tinged with trepidation over what comes next.

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Even once they are out of Ukraine, these journeys are far from simple. Over the next two days, they will fret about where they are headed and who will be there to meet them. 

Matviy and his mother, Olena, boarded the refugee bus bound for southwestern Germany after arriving at a large makeshift refugee reception center in late March near Korczowa, Poland, a village close to the Ukraine border. "Hala Kijowska," which aptly translates as "Kyiv Hall," is a giant converted food warehouse.

Last month, President Joe Biden gave a speech about 60 miles away, where he sought to signal Western resolve against Russia's invasion and draw attention to the humanitarian crisis it has unleashed. Ukrainian and American officials have expressed skepticism over Moscow’s announcement that it would reduce its attacks on Kyiv and other cities. NATO said Russia's forces are regrouping to double down on attacks in Ukraine's eastern regions.

Matviy and Olena fled their home as Russian missiles skirted the roof of their apartment building in Lubny. In Germany, they expect to be met by Matviy's father – Olena's husband. He left Ukraine a few months before the war for a job in Mannheim installing solar panels. They last saw him in January. 

"He is calm now, but he was very afraid," Olena, 37, says of her son, speaking softly from a back row in the bus, as Matviy alternates between sleep and trying to rouse himself awake so he can listen to what his mother says about him. 

"He thought he was going to die. He thought I was going to die," she says. 

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For the past month, Hala Kijowska has overflowed with the disorderly business of feeding, sheltering and moving refugees from one location to another. 

Its hallways are lined with folding, military-style camp beds on which children gather or slumber. Aid workers, police and Polish soldiers swirl around voluminous rooms the size of basketball courts. They drop off cases of apple juice and medicines and bags packed full with winter coats. They keep watch for predators who might try to steal children and sell them to gangs or take advantage of desperate women, most of whom have left their partners in Ukraine.  

Outside, volunteers staff pop-up kitchens serving free ham and cheese sandwiches and coffee, hand out toothbrushes or help to unload vehicles full of donations that turn up every few minutes from all over Europe – mountains of clothes, prams, pet food.

"I donated some money, flew over and figured I'd find a place to plug in," says Alexander Renzi, an American who is helping move goods off trucks in the parking lot of Hala Kijowska. Renzi runs a strategy department for a private equity fund from his home in Naples, Florida. He's been in the area for two weeks and is preparing to fly home the next day.

"I've got no connection to Ukraine. I'm half Greek, half Italian. Someone commented about this place on Reddit. I just showed up," he says of his decision to drop everything in his own life and self-fund a trip to help complete strangers.

When Matviy and Olena showed up at Hala Kijowska, they quickly gravitated to a central concourse where aid workers from half a dozen European countries had erected signs offering rides to Italy, Scandinavia and other destinations in continental Europe.

As the war grinds on, the United Nations warns of increased risks of people trafficking, sexual exploitation and abuse for the women and children fleeing Ukraine.

Matviy and Olena peered around, wondering what would happen to them. A loud speaker periodically blared, "Espania, Valencia, Praha, Berlin" in a mixture of languages and name derivations, giving the area the feel of a U.N.-type setting. They stood next to a table that had a socket where they charged their cellphones. Nearby, another refugee slowly parceled out bits of hay to a pet rabbit in a cage on her lap. 

It wasn't long before the pair from Lubny ran into Andreas and Sabine Schweizer, from Germany's mountainous Black Forest region. The husband-and-wife team, along with a few of their friends, had made the 20-hour drive to the Polish border from their small village south of Freiburg. Their aim was to drop off aid at Hala Kijowska, then return with as many Ukrainian refugees as they could find who wanted to go to southwestern Germany. They secured three small buses for this effort.

The Schweizers raised about $30,000 in their community for their ad hoc resettlement effort and intended to do as many trips back and forth as they could. This was their second trip. They were not completely new to humanitarian work, having helped drive medical supplies from Germany to a hospital in Gambia, the small country in western Africa. 

Still, they found the sight of so many disoriented, apprehensive and vulnerable families wandering around Hala Kijowska somewhat unsettling.

"When I shook his hand, I could feel the trust he put in me," Andreas Schweizer, 49, confides as he describes a Ukrainian father handing over his 16-year-old son named Vladislav Belmak. Schweizer had met the father only moments earlier.

Belmak's sister lives in Freiburg, and the Schweizers had suddenly been entrusted with delivering the teenager to her. The father had briefly crossed into Poland to find someone who could help deliver him. He then returned to Ukraine to join the war effort. 

"I'm not sure how this man had the courage to do this," says Schweizer, who has three sons and combines life as a "house husband" with being a mechanic and carpenter.  

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'I am never going back to Ukraine'

After half a day at Hala Kijowska, 17 Ukrainian refugees, four German aid workers, two translators and two Paste BN journalists pile into three nine-seater minibuses along with an ample supply of chocolate bars, Bavarian sausages, a temporary sense of accomplishment and several fledgling and confusing rendezvous plans. 

The Schweizers keep in touch with the drivers of the other buses by walkie-talkie. They use them to make sure all three buses stay in view of one another and to synchronize refueling. "Pee breaks" are highly coordinated.

The refugees include an elderly couple, one single man, five women (one of whom is pregnant) with a combined eight children, plus Belmak, the 16-year-old boy. 

All, except for one woman and her kids who want to travel on to France, are destined for Germany. Few know exactly how and where to meet with contacts they hastily procured through oblique familial connections, friends and friends of friends.

In the bus with Matviy and Olena is Yurij Diomih, 62, a divorced mechanical engineer from Kharkiv, a major city near the border with Russia that has been heavily bombed; and Tatiana and Anastasia Kopach, a mother and daughter from Shostka, a town in Ukraine's northeast known for making cheese found in many Ukrainian supermarkets. 

Diomih is quiet and withdrawn, staring out the window for much of the two-day drive to Germany. During one of several stops by the convoy to refuel, stretch legs and load up on snacks, he says his adult children fled Ukraine for Spain and Italy, and he intends to meet a long-lost school friend who emigrated to Frankfurt, Germany's financial center, years ago. 

"I am never going back to Ukraine. Never," he says, a tone of rising anger in his voice that he never explained.

When Diomih gets back on the bus, he goes back to looking out the window as Poland's low-lying plains, punctuated by occasional lakes and woodlands, stream by. He puts his cellphone on speaker and plays a melancholy song that sounds like classical piano. He offers no explanation for this as the music fills the bus's cab.

That night, everyone stays in a hotel a short distance from the German border. 

"I want to see Germany, and I also want to see my dad," Matviy says as his mother gets ready to put him to bed on a fold-out sofa in their hotel room. He just finished his favorite meal – roasted potatoes and chicken. 

Next to his pillow, Matviy dumped a pile of candy. 

"Yes, that's for later," he says, chuckling and casting a sideways look at his mother. 

He asked his grandfather, who was still in Ukraine, to take care of Tor and Tila, his pet turtles. He hopes they, too, might be able to escape the war.

"I hope we will live in Germany with the whole family," he says.

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According to the U.N. Children's Fund, or UNICEF, half of Ukrainian children – one in two – have had to flee their homes since the war's start Feb. 24.

Almost 2 million have crossed into neighboring countries as refugees. They have battled chaos and crowds, exhaustion and fear, frigid temperatures, hasty and distressing goodbyes. 

Matviy and the other children in the Schweizers' convoy represent a small fraction of those young, uprooted lives. 

At the start of the second day of their trip, Andreas Schweizer gathers everyone in the hotel's breakfast room and tries to give a sense of what the day will look like. Much like the previous one, he concludes, only hopefully it will end with them meeting their connections in Germany. 

The first stop will be near Frankfurt, the second outside Mannheim, then Freiburg.

"It's so wonderful to see their smiling faces, after they had a good rest and are relaxed and have had some privacy and are ready to meet the day ahead," he says.

Back on the road, as the German landscape brings forth scenes of green fields and terrain undulating with valleys, Anastasia Kopach, 11, stares at her cellphone as she plays Minecraft, the video game in which users build three-dimensional worlds made of blocks. By her side lies a stuffed animal duck she refers to as "Ducky." 

Her mother, Tatiana, 39, an anesthetist in Ukraine, is also glued to her phone, looking for information about how she could apply to travel from Germany to the United Kingdom, where her husband – Anastasia's father – has worked for the past six weeks picking vegetables on a farm near Cambridge in eastern England. 

Her husband has only a temporary visa, which precludes him as a "family link" to bring his wife and daughter to join him in England. 

Tatiana plans to get to Germany, stay with the family of Anastasia's former classmate, then see what could be done about changing her husband's visa status or finding some other path to Cambridge and a restored family unit. 

She is confused about the process and getting conflicting information. Neither the Polish nor German border authorities required elaborate paperwork, just passports. The British authorities have all kinds of conditions she doesn't understand. 

As Tatiana attempts to decipher the British rules, Anastasia calls up an image on her phone: another "Ducky," this one held in her father's hand. The last time they saw each other in Ukraine, they bought the two stuffed animals. They had vowed to reunite them. 

"She misses him," Tatiana says, leaning over. 

A short while later, the entire convoy parks at a truck stop a few miles outside Frankfurt. Diomih, the withdrawn 62-year-old, suddenly perks up and hugs as many fellow travelers as he can find before disappearing into a ride-share taxi. Tatiana and Anastasia quickly vanish into the back of a car, having spotted the family of her daughter's classmate. An hour later, near Mannheim, Matviy and Olena bundle into the back seat of a vehicle driven by a colleague of Matviy's dad, who had to stay at work.

Around 10 p.m. that night, Belmak arrives at his sister's house. 

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