Many arrive at the border completely exhausted after days of fleeing bombs and fighting, like young Alina. In her arms she carries a six-month-old baby in a snowsuit. She and her 15-year-old daughter fled bombings in the Dnipropetrovsk region in eastern Ukraine. She was on the run for three days, she says. She spent last night in a Lviv hospital after collapsing from exhaustion. Her baby is also sick, she says. In the morning she was brought to the border by helpers from the hospital in a car.
A mood picture of the situation at the border.
Christian Wehrschütz reports what escape options the population still has.
Now she is waiting with thousands of others in front of the Ukrainian exit control. She wants to go to Germany because she has friends there. The young woman does not know how to get there. Some other women and children are accompanied by their husbands on the kilometer-long walk to the border. “I’m taking my son, wife and mother-in-law to the border,” from where they want to go to Italy, says a young man. He carries her only holdall and supports the old woman, who has difficulty walking. He himself will turn back at the border to go into battle, says the man.
As the day progresses, the queue at the border gets longer and longer. Around 100,000 people come to Poland every day across the approximately 500-kilometer-long border, most of them via the largest border crossing, Medyka. According to the Polish authorities, by Saturday there were a total of more than 827,000. Millions more are expected in the coming days and weeks. The refugees are almost exclusively women and children. The mood is calm, people wait patiently for their turn. Some seem relaxed and relieved when they have passed the border post. Fear is still written all over their faces. Many children appear exhausted and frightened. Many also took dogs and cats in carrier boxes with them, otherwise they hardly have any luggage.
On the Polish side, the refugees are welcomed by dozens of volunteers. You will receive warm food and coffee, and hygiene items and clothes will also be distributed. Fire brigade buses and private individuals who offer rides in their cars take people in groups to nearby makeshift reception centers.
Most helpers are volunteers from Poland, but many also international NGOs and spontaneous aid activists. At the small Hrebenne border crossing a little further north, Wadim is waiting for a group of women and children. Born in Ukraine, he has been living in Hagen Germany for 30 years. “After the war broke out, I couldn’t sleep for three nights,” he says. Then he decided to help, organized a bus with a driver together with a German friend and drove to the Polish-Ukrainian border without further ado. He is in contact with an acquaintance in Ukraine who organizes transports of refugees to the border. His employer released the worker in a steel mill for this.
For hours Vadim has been waiting at the border in the freezing cold for the 25 to 30 women and children who are wandering around on foot on the other side. The Ukrainian bus driver was not allowed to cross the border because men are not allowed to leave Ukraine during the war.
Did he also think about fighting in Ukraine? “I’m still thinking about it and that’s why I argue with my wife every day,” says the man in his mid-fifties. He now helps war refugees. As soon as the women and children arrive, he will take them to Germany. Accommodation for them has already been arranged.
Almost no one is going in the other direction to the Ukrainian side. A Ukrainian military man is waiting in a tent for possible volunteer fighters. In all, several thousand men have volunteered in the past few days since the war began, he says. Most came from Poland, but men from Germany and the Netherlands would also volunteer to fight alongside Ukraine.
Source: Nachrichten
