“He’s frustrated because he can’t communicate with other people, because he doesn’t speak Polish,” Irina told me.
Now the administrators of a second school said he was kicking and biting other children and asked that he be taken to a psychologist. Nikita was also acting out-something he’d never done before the war-and had already been expelled from a private kindergarten for being too aggressive. Irina Sytnik and her son, Nikita, in the Warsaw home of the Polish family that has taken them in (Marcus Glahn for The Atlantic) “We had no words in that moment,” she told me, through a translator. Irina sobbed as she recalled the moment the bus carrying her and Nikita pulled away from Lviv while Ruslan waved goodbye to them, unsure whether they would see each other again. Nikita was waking up in the middle of the night calling out for his father, Ruslan, who had stayed in Ukraine to fight.
When I arrived in Poland, Nikita, the boy with the stuffed cat, and his mother, Irina Sytnik, who had worked as a taxi driver in Ukraine, were struggling. (They were also wondering whether their own country would be Putin’s next target.) Many of them were ruminating over the same question-one they were gingerly trying to broach with their guests: When would they be leaving? They had missed work and lost sleep, and were stressed about the strain that caring for Ukrainians was putting on their dwindling bank accounts. The display of generosity stood out from other mass-migration events I’ve covered.īut by the time I met Karolina and other Polish hosts, in late March, they were exhausted. In a politically divided nation that is typically hostile toward refugees, hundreds of thousands of Polish people moved in astonishing unison following the Russian invasion, upending their lives in order to house, feed, and clothe traumatized Ukrainians. As of late April, an estimated 7.7 million residents have relocated within the country and another 5.6 million have crossed international borders.* Most of those, at least for now, are in Poland. In just a few months, Ukraine has become the epicenter of one of the largest human displacements in the world. “I just thought about what you choose to bring with you when you are packing in a hurry to run out of your home. “I wanted to cry when I saw that,” Karolina recalled. A few days later, at about 2 a.m., a van pulled up outside their historic home in an affluent neighborhood, and 10 people climbed out, including a 6-year-old boy carrying a stuffed cat. Without even pausing to discuss it, the couple-a writer and a banker-jumped into group chats with neighbors whom they had never met and started plotting to exchange mattresses and other supplies, as they all rushed to prepare spare bedrooms and sofas. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.