I returned to this refugee center in the village of Mogilany in April 2023, about 12 miles from Krakow’s center and and 45 minutes to an hour by bus, it is an old country villa owned by too many descendants to agree on what to do with it, so it’s managed by the village and when its days as a private home were over, it became a hotel, and most recently a refugee center. I met Nataliia and her parents there in October 2022. When I first met them, they had arrived recently from Snihurivka, a town about 35 miles north of Kherson. Their town had been occupied by Russians almost immediately. She described living through the occupation, disbelief, expecting that it would end soon- the internal negotiations of getting used to frequent missile strikes and considering it a good day when there ‘weren’t as many’, sleeping in her clothing to be immediately ready to take shelter in the basement. At last they couldn’t take it and headed west to Poland. She, her husband, his mother who was on kidney dialysis, and her mother and father. Her husband and his mother drove in one car, she and her parents drove a yellow Lada that her father had bought on a whim to take on vacations to the sea. Instead they were using it to flee a war.
The yellow Lada. With a cracked windshield due to shelling, and a couple of bullet holes, it made it across Ukraine and into Poland.
Nataliia fills me in on how it’s been going since I spoke with her 6 months before. When I first met her, she and her family had just arrived. They were in shock, traumatized. She described to me in detail how Russian soldiers told them if they became part of Russia things would be better for them, but she had said to them- things are good, we don’t need anything from you here. And the soldiers marveled at the flat screen televisions and indoor bathrooms and asked if they were rich to have these things, she said to them no, she was just a teacher. She missed home, she had never wanted to leave Ukraine, she had had a good life there, a life that made her happy. Now she said she was in a country where things looked like they did at home- trees, cars, buildings- but it was not home. Six months later, she had a new energy about her. She was figuring out how to make money. She told me the Polish government was pulling back funding, that staying in the refugee centers would begin to cost money. She told me they would begin charging $1500 zl for their shared room (between $300 and $400 USD, this may not seem like much, but in Poland, it’s the price for a modest apartment). She was concerned, but optimistic. She had a lot of ideas and wanted to start her own business. Kherson and her village had been liberated in November 2022, but she did not want to go back. She knew that she would need some money to go back and rebuild, but her father and husband wanted to return immediately. She resisted, her husband would be conscripted, and with no money to rebuild her father wouldn’t get very far. This time she said she knew it would be ok- she saw the trees, the cars, the buildings and they reminded her of home and now this brought her a sense of peace, and a feeling that they would be ok.
Her father shows the interior of the Lada. He calls it his sparrow.
Her father has had many people approach him to buy the Lada. This gentleman said he had a friend that wanted to buy it and tour it around Poland and try to get donations for Ukraine from such an installation. Her father held out for a while, but in recent communications, I was told he agreed to sell it.
