Hosting Refugees

Klaudia Kosicińska

Puzzles depicting the image of a steed. Photo taken by the protagonist of the text

Before they jointly decided to evacuate, they were awakened by gunshots on February 24, 2022. As in 2014, they decided to go to Alexandra's parents living in the west of the country and wait it out. However, when rumors began that Russians might drop bombs on a refinery nearby, Alexandra and her husband did not delay their decision to move again. For him, the borders were already closed, so she left alone with her children.

At first they stayed at a hostel in Slovakia. Here Alexandra had time to process everything, after which it became clear that three days were not enough to calm the situation. It was necessary to plan next steps. Through her husband's contacts at work, she got an offer to live with her children in an apartment recently inherited by someone in Wroclaw, which was up for sale. However, the owner was in no hurry to find a buyer, but her role was to show it to potential customers. She decided to take up the offer.

The move was assisted by employees of the Polish branches of the American company where her husband worked. On March 1, 2022, she was already in Lower Silesia, in a studio apartment with a separate kitchen.

They would spent their evenings together with Grzegorz, the apartment owner, and Anna, his partner. Together they put together puzzles, given to her children by their hosts. – These puzzles are very important, because in the beginning we didn't know what to do. There was no school, there was no work, there was only looking at the news, listening, contacting the family, what was going on there in Ukraine and not knowing what could be done. And those puzzles, they were so reassuring for a while.

Puzzles in progress. Photo taken by the protagonist of the text.

The chestnut steed finally emerged from a thousand pieces, and Alexandra decided to put the painting in the frame she bought. It now hangs at her home as a memory of that time.

– They also gave us coloring books. Such anti-stress, some such different abstractions. And we in the evenings, although the TV was on and we heard news from Ukraine, we colored at the same time and it calmed us down so much.

They also went out to spend time together outside the house. Grzegorz and Anna would help them run errands at public institutions, and sometimes they would bring in groceries. – The owner's partner would say: “take some more milk, it will be for later”. And in fact they always gave me the feeling that it was okay and I was taken care of.

Every time Grzegorz would give her advance notice every time someone was due to come see the apartment. So she had time to quickly embrace the space, which, with a small space and two growing children, was almost always necessary. However, she says, this did not make her uncomfortable. – For me it was very important that I had a door I could close," she says. She was aware that many refugees were forced to live in one of the collective accommodations, where privacy was hard to come by. She also didn't mind that the tenement was quite chilly, and the heating was old-style electric. However, she didn't want to expose her host to high bills, preferring to freeze a little.

At first she didn't want to buy anything new for the house – she felt she was only here for a while. It was an older woman's apartment, full of many different useful things for the house:

– It had towels, bedding, pillows. The granny was probably a good housekeeper, I had sewing utensils after her, some buttons, dishes in the kitchen. I didn't have to buy anything. Everything was ... just walk in and live. But I remember that I bought myself a frying pan, because the ones at granny’s were for one person, so too small for us. And I thought, okay, I have to buy this pan. But I was very much opposed to this step. Because it seemed to me that once I bought something of my own for this apartment, it would be like a confirmation that I was living here after all. And up until now I felt that I was in as a guest, that it was only for a while, that I would leave right away. And when I bought that first pan, it was like an acknowledgement that for a certain period of time this is my home and I live here. And it was so emotional. So simple, but so emotional.

They stayed there for a year and a half. It wasn't until mid-2023 that Alexandra began to wonder if all three of them needed more space after all. She already had a job, she figured she could afford the rent. She had worked as a journalist and PR manager in Ukraine, but she didn't know Polish good enough. Her husband's colleagues came to her aid again, hiring her at a PR agency in Wroclaw. However, she felt that this was no longer the job for her. She wanted to get involved in aid, to support other refugees. So she resigned from the corporation and started working with an international humanitarian organization, where she worked for the next three years. However, the U.S. decision to cut American humanitarian aid also left her unemployed.

Alexandra is worried about her job, but she feels comfortable in Wroclaw and in the apartment she rents. She would like to stay in Poland at least until the boys finish school here. They are now 16 and 14 years old and are participating in school competitions, so she has high hopes for them.

When someone asks her where she is from, Alexandra doesn't know what she should answer.

She was born near Lviv, in Drohobych. She married in Donetsk, where she lived with her family until 2014, until, as she says, “the war started, the first part, which was not full-scale.” Then, together with her husband Serhiy and children Andriy and Mykola, they lived in Kyiv, in a rented apartment, because their own, the one in the east of Ukraine, they had to leave behind.