Hosting Refugees

Zbigniew Szmyt

Kate in refugee camp in Italy

Kate didn’t hesitate long when deciding whether to take someone in. In the first days of the war, she welcomed a family from the Volhynia region – a mother with three children. They spent two months under the same roof. The children went to school and nursery, while Zoya found work cleaning the homes of the town’s better-off residents. She returned home once it became clear the Russians wouldn’t reach Volhynia any time soon. Her husband was at the front, sometimes wounded and in hospital; their smallholding lay untended. And besides – Poland was interesting and beautiful, but home was home. By then, an air-raid shelter had already been built at the village school, so life could go on. “Khai bude – what will be, will be,” Zoya muttered under her breath as she carefully packed her suitcases.

But why did Kate decide to host Zoya and her children? Because she herself had once been a migrant. Her father, a doctor, couldn’t find his place in the world of real socialism and left to work in Algeria, then Tunisia. Kate was a teenager, learning what it meant to grow up and go to school in a foreign land – in an Arabic-speaking environment. Then came martial law, and the family decided not to return to Poland. They ended up in a refugee camp in Italy, where they spent a hard year waiting for legal status. Kate taught herself English from whatever dictionaries and textbooks she could find. It was worth it – eventually, the family gained refugee status and emigrated to the United States.

A Polish suburb of a dying Detroit became her new home. She graduated from university, married a Polish American, and eventually the couple decided to return to Poland. It didn’t happen straight away, but in 2006 they came back, had children, and finally bought a house near Poznań. That’s the same house where Zoya from Volhynia and her three children – Lubchyk, Masha and Misha – later found refuge.

You might say it’s an exceptional case – that not everyone had a father who was a doctor without borders, and that the average Pole “hasn’t been anywhere and seen nothing.” You might say that – but you’d be wrong. Many hosts we spoke to mentioned their own experiences of migration: working in Britain, labouring “in the Reich”, or earning a living in southern Europe. The head of a village near Wolsztyn hosted women refugees – Ola, and Irene with her children – because he had spent three years working in the same haulage company as Ukrainians and driving with them to Italy and Spain. Arek from Wolsztyn noticed that attitudes towards Poles changed in Germany and the Netherlands – countries he has travelled to for work for years – after Polish society mobilised on a massive scale to help refugees from Ukraine:
What happened back then really opened eyes in the West. I’m talking mainly about Germans and the Dutch — many admitted they’d never seen Poles in that light. Up to then there’d been a crude stereotype about us: petty crooks, drunks and thieves. And I partly understand where it came from — in the 1990s plenty of people went West to dodge military service, maintenance payments or debts; often people with problems rather than those focused on getting on. That image stuck. Then suddenly there’s a war just across the border, millions arrive and find a roof over their heads. The whole world saw it. Germans started saying “dzień dobry” [good day] to us, and the Dutch took an interest in Poland. And it really changed our image.

Arek and his wife hosted Tatiana and her daughter Ania from eastern Ukraine for half a year. They not only provided the refugees with decent living conditions, but Arek also regained his dignity and shed his inferiority complex towards acquaintances in the West. For Kate, the need to care for three children and their mother pulled her out of post-Covid lethargy, fear and depression. She had to act – and that, quite simply, got her back on her feet. This experience also taught her that not everything has to work out, and not everything needs to be under control. Sometimes it’s fine to let go and see what happens. Let it be – khai bude – repeats Kate, echoing Zoya’s words.

Have you ever wondered why so many people opened their doors to complete strangers? Sure – the starry sky above me, the moral law within me, the humanitarian imperative. Anyone would have done the same, right? Only, not everyone did. In fact, three years after the war began, many Polish politicians – and plenty of decent, ordinary Poles – are now calling for those same Ukrainian women to be sent back home. Because they’re taking child benefits. Because they’re getting too comfortable.