The tightly packed rows of camp beds stretch all across the massive sports hall in Medyka. Against one wall there are mattresses on the floor. A blanket, a pillow and clean towels are on each bed.
Boys throw footballs at the basketball hoops on the wall. In the far corner, Polish volunteers run a creche to keep the smaller children and babies amused for a while.
The reception centre for refugees streaming in from Ukraine will provide a rest, a shower, a hot meal and a bed for 350 people every night.
The refugee reception centre is supposed to be closed off but a local official sneaked us in because he felt it was important the plight of these people be highlighted. In another nearby town, there are 2,000 beds in a former Tesco supermarket.
Kristof, a Red Cross volunteer who has travelled 500km from the far side of Poland to help out, explains what is happening here.
He’ll be working here for six days and then another group will come to replace him and his colleagues.
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“Stay here, register, stay for 24 hours, then to go to the next point in Poland. Sleep, eat, medical and register here,” he says.
He says family and friends arrive from Poland, Germany, France and UK to collect them here. The Polish authorities organise to have them taken to other places.
A mile away, across the railway line, at the Medyka border crossing, there are tens of thousands of people arriving every day.
Long queues form as a hundred people at a time wait for a bus in the cold.
The border crossing is a one-hour, 45-minute drive from the Ukrainian city of Lviv in normal times. But these are far from normal times. In a quite surreal moment, the tune of Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World fills the air. An Italian man living in Germany, Dario Marcelo, has brought a grand piano in a trailer and set up by the side of the road to welcome the refugees.
Among those in the queue is seven months’ pregnant Ina Kolesnyk. She’s here with her sister, Gaila, and her infant son, Makar, who is being fed on the side of the road in a pram. Her own baby is due in May. The two women are pushing a pram and carrying two suitcases. Rather than resting because she is so heavily pregnant, she has endured a heavy-duty trip. Ina left her home near Kyiv on February 20 and made her way to the west of the country, before leaving there to come across the border a day earlier.
“We take documents, clothes and run,” she says.
“My husband in Ukraine, he helps our army. He must be strong and fire for our country.”
Her husband worked in Poland and he has friends there who will help her now.
“I don’t want to go but my husband says I must for future child.
“I hope that it is two to three days and I want home.”
She is getting on a bus to the reception centre and the next day she will get a train from the nearby town of Przemsyl.
Row upon row of camp beds at a reception centre in Medyka. Photo: Mark Condren
A woman named Kristina wanders around looking for directions on how to get across the border.
“My daughter is on border on Ukraine side. I go to wait in a queue and go back. Something like this. She is 16. I am living in Malta but she is in her final week in school,” she says.
Inside Przemsyl train station, the passageways are packed with hordes of people. On one corridor, there are people huddled together. An elderly woman is lying on her bags trying to rest. Next to her, three children are asleep beside their father.
When a train comes in, there is a rush along the platform get on board.
A train to Krakow leaves at 6.08pm with people standing in the doorways.
The traffic across the border isn’t all one way as there’s a continual trail of cars, vans and trucks carrying people and aid of all sorts into Ukraine.
Out the back of the Medyka sports complex is a smaller basketball court-sized sports hall, which is packed with mounds of supplies – the mountain of clothes rises up near the roof, the mound of blankets tips the basketball ring, there’s another pile of nappies and toiletries, stacks of canned and cartoned food and boxes of medical supplies.
Labels on the boxes say they mainly came from Poland, but also Germany, Czechia, Austria and Italy.
This hall acts as a rallying point, as people going back across the border come here, fill their vehicle with whatever is needed is head off again. In the middle of it all are four lads who have come across from Dublin, who are helping to clear space by moving supplies out.
Alan Gale from Lucan, Peter Sigula from Lusk, Aigars Joksts from Kimmage, and Lukasz Mazur from Lucan all know each other from working in construction back in Dublin.
Through Alan’s business contacts, they were able to raise money fast on their GoFundMe page and launched a website www.ukrainefoodtruck.com to collect donations. They came out on Thursday night to get specific items to send into Ukraine.
Ina Kolesnyk and her nephew after crossing the border at Medyka, Poland. Photo: Mark Condren
Yesterday, they got a van and went around the city of Rzeszow, collecting the material and loading up. Last evening, they passed on about €15,000 worth of supplies to a contact heading back into Ukraine, including equipment for the Ukrainian forces fighting the Russians.
“We’re bringing medical supplies, clothing, military uniforms, we’re bringing drones with high-resolution cameras so the military can use them for surveillance or to watch what’s coming down the road. We hope to set up accounts in this town where we can put the money into accounts, so no money changes hands, we will just pay the bills as they need the equipment,” Alan says.
The next batch will include head torches, camping equipment for troops fighting in the forest and nets for camouflage, along with more medical supplies.
A doctor in a clinical, emergency and intensive care hospital in Lviv gave them an extensive list of medical equipment that they need.
“This equipment is going out tonight and then we will make more runs into this town as we need it,” says Alan, a 53-year-old father of three.
The four lads are going to stay put for the next few days, helping out at the reception centre and going back into Rzeszow for more supplies as required.
The vast majority of the large numbers of people fleeing Ukraine are women and children.
Between one and two million Ukrainians already live in Poland.
The ethnic population has grown dramatically in the last decade as many fled to Poland after the 2014 Russian takeover of Crimea and the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine, which was a precursor of the invasion by Vladimir Putin nine days ago.
As a result, many of those streaming out of Ukraine are finding shelter with friends and family already living in the country.
The refugee number smashed the one million mark this week and anything between 500,000 and 700,000 of these people have come into Poland.
Another major reason so many Ukrainians are fleeing to Poland is the long border the countries share; for many, it’s the nearest way out of the country that isn’t into Russia or Belarus.
But there are also long-standing cultural ties between the two countries.
