标题: 2022.03.02 从乌克兰到波兰的大逃亡 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-3-3 02:08 标题: 2022.03.02 从乌克兰到波兰的大逃亡 EYEWITNESS
“Svoboda! Liberté! Freedom!”: the great flight from Ukraine to Poland
Some refugees are welcomed with open arms. Others get a frostier reception
Mar 2nd 2022
BY WENDELL STEAVENSON
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We stood for a day in a queue of people outside the station in Przemysl on the Polish border, waiting for a train to get into Ukraine. A train had arrived from Lviv, two hours away on the Ukrainian side, and we could see a great number of refugees on the platform waiting to be processed by the Polish authorities.
At lunchtime it was sunny and unseasonably warm, and we exchanged hellos with the people standing in the queue next to us. Alex is 25 and had been living in Cambridge in Britain when war broke out. He was trying to get back to his girlfriend. He had bright blue eyes and a smile as wide as the steppe that belied a trembling bottom lip. If he returned to Ukraine there would be no way back: Ukrainian men of fighting age, those between 18 and 60, are not permitted to leave the country.
After their documents were processed, refugees emerged exhausted and pale with unslept faces. Mothers pushed buggies and held hands with their children. Some very young ones were crying, older ones dragged their feet with tiredness, teenagers stared wide and seemed in shock.
The numerous well-organised volunteers in yellow high-vis jackets handed out coffee, soup and sandwiches, and blankets and clothes for those who needed them. Over the road from the station, people held up signs advertising free rides to Krakow and Warsaw. I saw kindness in many small gestures: a policeman helping to carry bags; a station official giving cuddly toys to the kids.
“I am from Cameroon!” he cried, declaiming about God and Putin in several languages
We waited an hour, then two, then three. As the sun went in it became colder. I noticed that when African refugees came through they were accompanied by a phalanx of Polish police, who were not so polite and wore scarves wrapped around the lower half of their faces. One refugee objected to this treatment, throwing down his bags and opening his arms wide to heaven. “I am from Cameroon!” he cried, declaiming about God and Putin in several languages. “You took all my documents!” he said, “where are you taking me? Svoboda! Liberté! Freedom! They came with the guns and I don’t want to die! Svoboda! Liberté! Freedom!”
A woman standing beside him collapsed, unconscious. In the commotion of an ambulance crew arriving, I didn’t see if the Cameroonian managed to get on the bus with the other Africans. There have been other reports of foreign students being beaten up and experiencing racism along the way. Some who couldn’t get on a train have spent days on the road trying to get out. Some Ukrainians have friends or contacts in Poland. But citizens of other countries who make it over the border often have no idea what to do once they get there.
The train we’d intended to take left without any passengers. We were told it had been filled with humanitarian aid. Perhaps another train would come, but no one knew when or if it would take passengers. It began to snow.
The next morning we went to the road crossing at Medyka, half an hour’s drive east. Many people from India and Africa were arriving from the other direction, utterly exhausted. Some were unable to walk and sat slumped on plastic chairs. Volunteers gave them food and advice. A refugee camp had been set up nearby with somewhere to charge phones and a company that sold sim cards for €5 ($5.50).
He hadn’t wanted to call his parents until he was safe. Now his phone was dead
The refugees talked of long journeys: “We left Kharkiv on Thursday, six days ago”; “We tried to leave Odessa on Friday morning, but there was already a great crowd at the station and we couldn’t get on a train”. They told their stories in fragments, speaking of halted trains and buses, of minivan drivers demanding exorbitant fees, of cars that broke down or ran out of petrol. Some told us about being pushed off trains, so that women and children could board, which was perhaps understandable. There were also tales of sheer discrimination, of being pushed around and having guns pointed at them at checkpoints.
Dyn, from Congo-Brazzaville, is a 20-year-old pharmacy student travelling with two Congolese friends, Jessica, a doctor, and Randa. Randa was so tired she couldn’t even make the effort to sit down, she just stood swaying on her numb and aching feet. She told me that they had walked 55km in a day to the border. It had taken nine hours. Dyn had only a denim jacket lined with fake fur and was shivering, but wouldn’t move to a warmer place because he was waiting for another friend who was still being processed. He had an uncle in Poland who could help, but he hadn’t spoken to his parents yet because he hadn’t wanted to call them until he was safe. Now, of course, his phone was dead.
We took a taxi back to the station. With rumours of another train coming, a new queue of people was beginning to form. Two Ukrainians from France got into the taxi we had just got out of. They were going home to fight.■
Wendell Steavenson has reported on post-Soviet Georgia, the Iraq war and the Egyptian revolution. She is sending regular dispatches for 1843 magazine from Ukraine. You can read her previous one here. Additional reporting by Marion Péhée and Ann Hanna
