– “When they say goodbye before leaving, they don’t know if they will ever meet again. They have to leave their possessions, and going to another country is going into the unknown”, bishop Radosław Zmitrowicz, Chairman of the Commission on the Family of the Ukrainian Episcopal Conference, said about the experience of Ukrainian families during the war, at a panel on rebuilding Ukraine, at the Economic Forum in Karpacz. Migration affects a huge number of families, with 6 million people leaving the country during the war and another 5 million relocating within the country.
The bishop cited a conversation with a Ukrainian woman he met on the train on the way to Karpacz. The woman had just emigrated from Ukraine with her two children. At the beginning of the war, they hid in a basement in Kharkiv for 18 days, then escaped to another city, but the bombing started there, too. Her husband had to stay in the country. – “Throughout that year of war, she experienced a whole range of feelings, from hatred, to gratitude, through anger, despair, and hope”, described bishop Zmitrowicz.
In his opinion, several hundred thousand families are also affected by another problem, i.e., the severing of ties with relatives in Russia who support the aggression and do not believe the reports of the Ukrainians. People also live in great pressure because, as the bishop pointed out, in almost every family someone is at war — husbands, fathers, sons — and every missed phone call can mean that something has happened. Some families also face the mental difficulties of soldiers who have returned from combat, including PTSD.
Dr. Marcin Rzegocki, Managing Director of the Auxilium Foundation from Tarnów, spoke about the aid for refugees. He described the huge wave of migrant aid that the people of Poland launched at the start of the war. As a result, there were no refugee camps in Poland, which was a worldwide phenomenon. However, the first problems reported to the psychological support foundation came just a few weeks after the war broke out, and from volunteers.
– “This tremendous physical strain at the beginning, and the mental stresses caused rapid burnout”, said Dr. Rzegocki.
