A year ago, Russia launches military attack on Ukraine sent millions of refugees fleeing west, often to countries wary of foreigners, has raised fears of a repeat of the political upheaval caused by the 2015 migration crisis that involved fewer people.
But the paradox of governments’ reluctance to accept large numbers of Ukrainians is especially evident in Poland, which has long been one of the world’s most ethnically homogenous countries. a deep distrust of outsiders and a troubled, often painful history with Ukraine.
Since February 24 last year, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Poland has recorded nearly 10 million crossings of the border with Ukraine into Polish territory. President Biden, on visit to Poland on Tuesday, honor that feat in a speech in Warsaw. “God bless you,” he said.
To understand this overt armed reaction in a country that was just before the war started hit back asylum seekers Ryszard Marcinkowski, 74, a retired Polish railway worker, has experience trying to sneak in from neighboring Belarus.
He grew up with horror stories of Ukrainian nationalist atrocities told by his parents and aunts, all of whom were refugees from former Polish lands. , since World War II, is western Ukraine.
However, when millions of Ukrainians started arriving in Poland last February, Marcinkowski drove to the border to deliver food and other necessities.
“My family had a very bad impression of the Ukrainians but realized that I had to help them,” Mr. Marcinkowski said. “For Poland,” he added, “Russia has always been the greater evil.”
Since the war began, Polish authorities have recorded 9.8 million people crossing the border into Poland from Ukraine. That includes the numerous back and forth of some people and others who quickly left for other countries. But Poland, according to Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, is currently a haven for about two million Ukrainians, down from more than five million last year but still more than the population of Warsaw, the Polish capital.
Morawiecki said in an interview on Tuesday that some far-right politicians “are trying to make noise and hostility between Poles and Ukrainians” but “they have failed”. Rather than becoming a burden or threat, he said, the influx of immigrants “will strengthen Poland demographically” and “enrich our culture”.
“I wish Ukraine all the best, but if the people who come here want to stay, then after a while, they will have permanent residency papers and will be able to stay, and will make us stronger from many points of view. different angles,” the prime minister said.
Rebuilt from ruins after 1945 amid simmering hostility towards Germans, Russians and Ukrainians, Poland has taken in more refugees from neighboring Ukraine than any other country. Next is Germany with about a million.
Poland’s response to the refugee situation in Ukraine has won praise from the European Union and given the country’s right-wing government more influence, in return. previous reputation as a troublemaker for what the bloc’s executive branch in Brussels sees as moves that undermine the independence of the Polish judiciary and discriminate against LGBT people. But the lingering disputes with Brussels still rumble.
In the early days of the war, people fleeing the war in Ukraine, mainly women and children, flooded the eastern Polish towns across the border. But as hopes of a quick end to the fighting faded, nearly all moved further west, eager to find a place to live and work.
Refugees, largely dependent on the charity of strangers for food and shelter, are now often self-sufficient residents. Few have permanent resident status but many have jobs in Polish companies and have children attending Polish schools. All have access to Polish healthcare and other services.
The scale of change in Poland is particularly evident in the western city of Wroclaw (pronounced VROTZ-waf), the former German city of Breslau. Completely eliminating the Germans after 1945 and resetting them with ethnic Poles, many of whom were refugees from lost territory in Ukraine, the city has long boasted that “every stone by stone” in Wroclaw all speak Polish”.
Now, local officials say, more than a quarter of Wroclaw’s population speaks Ukrainian and or Russian, and about 20% of the students in the school are from Ukraine. It has more than half a dozen grocery stores and two Ukrainian-run supermarkets that sell mostly Ukrainian food, like Kyiv cakes and patriotic boxes of sweets called “Everything will be Ukraine.”
The presence of what officials estimate to be around 250,000 Ukrainians in a city that, before the war had a population of 640,000, displeased everyone.
At a football match at Wroclaw Stadium in October, a group of fans held up a large banner that read: “Stop Ukraineization of Poland.”
But this, according to Radoslaw Michalski, Wroclaw’s refugee response coordinator, reflects only a “subsection”. He says the public has largely gathered in support of the Ukrainians, a generosity he compares to grassroots mobilization during the catastrophic floods that engulfed the city in 1997, a disaster that from the Netflix series “High Water”.
“As happened during the flood, people spontaneously mobilized not against someone but to help their city,” he said. In the early days of the war, more than 4,000 Wroclaw residents volunteered to help Ukrainians who arrived by rail.
“Nobody coordinated everything from the start,” says Michalski. “It was spontaneous.”
Yurii Matnenko, who oversees a reception center at a station operated by Fundacja Ukraine, said new arrivals by train in Wroclaw from Ukraine, peaked at 12,000 on a single day last March, has dropped to about 20 people per day. The charity has shifted from focusing on finding shelter for Ukrainians to helping them find jobs and navigate the Polish bureaucracy.
“Everybody thought the war would end in a month or two but now see this has not happened, so they need to get a job,” he said.
Most Ukrainians say they eventually want to go home, a desire encouraged by the government in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, which offers an online learning program for refugee children so they can keep up with the program. Ukrainian teaching.
Veronika Goncharuk, who arrived in Wroclaw in April from Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine with her husband and three children, is leaving her options open, enrolling her two sons and daughter in a Polish public school and both online Ukrainian classes.
But she said it probably made more sense “for the sake of my children” to settle in Poland because “with a neighbor like Russia, Ukraine will never be at peace”. Her husband found a job as an electrician.
Currently, the family lives for free in a single room in the old university dormitory.
The kids are already learning Polish, though 10-year-old Anastasia laments that her only friend at school is a Ukrainian girl, Katya, who recently got sick and left her with no friends in class. Her Polish classmates did not call her Ukrainian, she said, but “let me sit alone. I really miss Katya.”
Igor Czerwinski, a Polish language teacher at a school in Wroclaw that accepts 150 Ukrainian students in addition to 250 Polish students, said he has heard complaints from colleagues about the stress directly brought by the influx of foreigners.
An ethnic Polish born in Kazakhstan, he speaks Russian as well as Polish, attends an Orthodox church in Wroclaw crowded with Ukrainians, and praises the “positive energy” that he has given him. the many success-hungry refugees brought to the city. The Ukrainian is one of his best students, he said.
As the war continued, Ukrainians in Wroclaw were no longer fleeing for a living but were often helped by Polish-speaking countrymen who had emigrated before the war, trying to settle down. At the city’s civil office last week, two Ukrainians from Odesa were married in a ceremony presided over by a Polish secretary with the assistance of a Ukrainian interpreter. Both the bride and groom found work at a battery factory and, according to bride Elena Poperechna, “we decided we wanted to live in Poland.”
Grzegorz Hryciuk, a history professor at the University of Wroclaw, said the influx of Ukrainians reflected the landing in Wroclaw more than eight decades ago by hundreds of thousands of ethnic Poles from the lost Polish territories in western Ukraine, formerly eastern Poland.
Many of these Polish refugees, he said, harbor a deep hatred for Ukrainians, whom they blame for massacres before and during the war, as well as hope for a speedy recovery. return to their old homeland in and around former Polish cities such as Lviv. Gradually, though, “they adapted to reality,” the professor said, and began a new life in exile.
That pattern is now beginning to repeat itself, with only ethnic Ukrainians instead of ethnic Poles, raising the question of whether cities like Wroclaw and the Polish state can handle the dramatic change in population. number and ethnicity for how long or not. Professor Hryciuk said Poland, which opposed accepting people from the Middle East and Africa in 2015, mostly welcomed Ukrainians, who, according to Professor Hryciuk, benefit from the fact that “In terms of appearance and customs, they are not much different from the Poles. They are nobody else.”
There is still some concern that the influx of immigrants could provide an opportunity for ultra-nationalist groups to support Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, which is itself a conservative political force. once campaigned on a promise to discourage foreigners.
But Przemyslaw Witkowski, an expert on far-right extremism from Wroclaw who teaches at Collegium Civitas, a private university in Warsaw, says Poland’s ultra-nationalist faction is currently divided because war and refugees from Ukraine.
Radical groups like the League see Russia as a bulwark against Western secular values and denounce the process of “Ukrainization” of Poland, while groups with neo-Nazi tendencies, he said. paganism favors the Ukrainians “because they are white, they are Slavs and they are against Russia.”
Neither, he added, has garnered much public attention, in part because “it’s hard to create serious stress when people have jobs.” The unemployment rate in Wroclaw is below 2 percent.
Lukasz Kaminski, director of the National Ossolinski Institute, an organization that promoted Polish culture that moved from Lviv to Wroclaw in 1945, says the nationalist ideal of a fully Polish Poland is now over.
“Everything changed because of the war,” he said, describing the influx of Ukrainians as a return to Wroclaw’s roots in the Middle Ages as a “mixed land” of Germans, who Poles, Jews and other ethnic groups. “Poland as a nation has always been artificial – against our history and past experiences,” he said.
