Displaced, page 6
The hundreds of people evacuated by Israel4Ukraine constitute less than one percent of all Ukrainian refugees. Most of them leave on their own or use the evacuation trains and buses provided by the government and by international humanitarian organizations like the Red Cross, but bureaucrats are not flexible, and if something goes wrong, they just stop or cancel the entire convoy. Incidentally, there are already hundreds of volunteer organizations like the one created by Shimon and his friends, and their role in evacuating refugees is significant.
Israel4Ukraine’s greatest innovation is, perhaps, an online form for refugees. All you need to do is fill it out and help is on the way. The Israeli businessman Alex Gurevich created the form, which consists of only three questions: your name, the number of family members, and your phone number. For people under shelling, for people whose hands are shaking from fear, insomnia, hunger, and cold—it’s hard to answer even the simplest questions. So, it’s just your name, the number of family members, and your phone number. Somewhere in Israel, Britain, Australia, or Canada, the call-center operators will call, and the mere fact of that call brings hope—someone is thinking about you somewhere on the other side of the world. The operators will ask about your particular circumstances, give instructions, indicate the time and place of the next evacuation, and try to provide some comfort. The operators will call again during the evacuation to see if everything is going according to plan and, if necessary, they’ll modify the plan. The refugees, too, can call the operator at any time and ask any questions—and the refugees do call. Shimon relates that if the refugees on a bus traveling along the dark roads of the Chernihiv, Kyiv, or Galicia regions urgently need to use a bathroom, as a rule they won’t tell the driver; they’ll telephone their call-center operator in another part of the world, and that operator will call the driver and ask him to make a sanitary stop.
VOVAN
Another important difference between volunteer-organized evacuations of refugees and official evacuations organized by the state and the Red Cross is that bureaucrats don’t know how to rescue people from hot spots—from occupied Chernihiv or bombed out Mariupol. Only volunteers can do that; they can even evacuate people across a frontline.
It takes weeks for Irina Veryeschuk, the vice president of Ukraine, to arrange the opening of green corridors for refugees. She negotiates on the governmental level and talks with the United Nations, alternately pleading and cajoling. But one out of three times, something unforeseen happens—ranging from an exchange of gunfire to simple treachery—and the humanitarian corridor gets closed even before it was opened.
Church leaders organize a religious procession and under the cover of that procession take women and children from the ruins of the Azov steel plant, this citadel of Mariupol that kept fighting even after the entire city had been occupied. But it seems that God is not that omnipotent anymore, and the procession was canceled.
At this moment, Vovan appears.4
A man calling himself Vovan sent his photo to the Rubikus coordinator responsible for the evacuation of the refugees, explaining that he wanted to become a volunteer-driver to transport people away from hot spots. The Rubikus coordinator recoiled. Staring back at her from the computer screen was the face of a typical thug. A once broken now crooked nose, puffy eyes that looked with defiance at the camera, thin merciless lips that stretched into a sarcastic smile revealing missing teeth—an outlaw right out of central casting. The coordinator, however, didn’t refuse the offer. Vovan took two hundred dollars for gas, wrote down the names and addresses of the old people who needed to be evacuated, and disappeared without a trace. The coordinator didn’t lament the lost money for long—silly her, she shouldn’t have trusted this gangster. But one week later, he emerged from the gunfire and returned with the elderly refugees. Moreover, the Rubikus volunteers couldn’t praise Vovan enough; they kept saying, “Volodenka is such a good guy, he’s so good, so wonderful!”
Alex Gurevich says that everywhere, literally in any of the hot spots—in Chernihiv, Mariupol, or Rubezhnoye—you can find a daredevil like Vovan. The only problem is figuring out somehow over the phone or through social media if the guy is a swindler. Alex even tried to make a list of the characteristics that might differentiate honest daredevils from con artists, but nothing came of it.
If an unknown driver calls and says he can evacuate five people from a city that’s under attack, like Mariupol, for five hundred dollars per person, does it mean he’s a swindler? It’s possible, but Israel4Ukraine knows several examples of successful evacuations of that kind. One of them even happened in a refrigerator truck, where the refugees literally traveled inside the refrigerator until they reached Zaporizhzhia.
If a driver asks only for gas money and doesn’t expect any compensation for his services, does it mean we’re dealing with a selfless philanthropist and a patriot? No, it doesn’t mean anything. In those areas caught up in the war, gas becomes a valuable commodity. If a swindler fills up five gas canisters in Zaporizhzhia, he can drive them through checkpoints, sell the gas for five, or even ten, times the price, and disappear. Or he can come back and say that he didn’t find the refugees at the address given and then ask to be sent on another expedition. A driver can also tell stories about bribing Russian soldiers at the checkpoints when he’s taking people from Kherson through the frontline. But the Russian soldiers aren’t going to give you a receipt, so all you can do is believe that the driver bribed the Russian soldiers and didn’t just pocket the money.
When daredevil drivers go on rescue missions, they never drive empty vehicles; they take along humanitarian aid—potable water, canned goods, soap, grains, and medications. And how can you verify a daredevil’s claim that Russian soldiers took some of the humanitarian aid? And even if the driver sends you a video of civilians unloading boxes of food from his truck, how do you know who those people are? Are they really civilians living in the basements of Mariupol or are they the driver’s relatives? Or just fakes?
This is a war, and you can’t verify anything. During times of war the rules of financial accountability are turned upside down. It’s well-known that if you deliver humanitarian aid in the form of medications, for example, you should, under no circumstances, carry any documents indicating how much that medication costs. If they’re expensive, the checkpoint soldiers will demand money, justifying this highway robbery by saying, “Wow, they’re expensive! So, you need to pay tax.”
The only reliable way to evaluate a driver’s honesty is to believe him, give him the money, and wait to see if he returns with the refugees. If he does come back with the refugees and wants to go on another run, and recommends his relative as a new driver, it would make sense to trust this daredevil and his relative. If a driver comes back with refugees five times but disappears on the sixth run, don’t assume right away that he’s a crook—he may have died. But he may have also gotten tired, then gave up, pocketed the money, and disappeared into the fog of war.
In any case, I can imagine a monument in the middle of the Taurian steppe—a minibus riddled by bullets with Vovan, Tolyan, Petro, or Vasil behind the wheel. They drive refugees. These amazing daredevils rescue people, and who are we to judge whether they do it out of reckless greed or selflessness.
A PLACE IN LINE
In general, it’s hard to compare human behavior and human actions during war with how people behave in peace time. Within the span of a minute, the same person can show both self-sacrifice and baseness, and then baseness again, and after that self-sacrifice. In a flash, evil can turn out to be good, and good can turn out to be evil. Your impression of a person can be based entirely on how far, up to what episode, you listened to their story.
Take Karina Kovalchuk. At the railway station in Kyiv, she hears an announcement for the train to Lviv. On a sudden impulse, she gives all her food to a stranger, grabs her five-year-old son, and takes off—dragging her enormous suitcase behind her.
The crowd around her grows more and more dense. Karina can no longer walk by herself; all she can do is try to remain upright and not to fall, not to lose her son and her suitcase in the stream of human bodies. And this stream carries her toward the train.
This human stream crashes against the train like a wave crashing against the rocks, leaping forward and rolling back. There are no police officers there to regulate the human stream. Some girls in uniforms try in vain to organize the crowd. Not losing your child and your suitcase on the platform is as difficult as not losing them in the surf. Now the crowd surges, several people squeeze into a train car, but then a heavy woman falls off the steps and the human tide drags Karina backward. “Easy! Easy! A woman was crushed!”
The crowd surges once again and carries Karina back to the train. “Watch your suitcase, lady! Carry it the right way! You ruined my stockings!” With the third or fourth wave, Karina and her son are thrown into the train car, but at the last moment our skinny vegetarian doesn’t have the strength to hold on to her suitcase, and it slips out of her hand. The suitcase falls, people trip over it, and walk over Karina’s remaining possessions.
“My suitcase! My suitcase!” Karina yells. “Pass me my suitcase, please!”
A stranger hears her, lifts the suitcase, and . . . walks away from the train. He stole it! And there is nothing she can do about it. You’re not going to leave an evacuation train to save your suitcase. The man with Karina’s suitcase walks farther away. He stole it! Or maybe not? Maybe he’s not leaving but was carried away by the surging crowd? The next moment, the human wave rolls over the train. The man lifts the suitcase high above his head and like a ball into a basketball hoop, he throws Karina’s belongings into the vestibule.
“Here’s your suitcase, young lady! Hold on to it! And take care of your kid!”
Only when her suitcase is inside the train does Karina realize that it’s a crime against all the people left on the platform to have a suitcase with her. This suitcase takes up space. Instead of her suitcase another human being could have been evacuated.
It’s crowded and dark inside the train. People share their food with Karina and her son. In the dark, Karina tries to figure out from its smell if the food she’s being offered is vegetarian or not. Just in case, she barely eats anything and only feeds her son.
The train stops at a small dark station, the doors open, and two huge bags move into the vestibule, where there’s plenty of luggage as it is and people sitting on those pieces of luggage.
“Step aside! Step aside!” an energetic woman screams and pushes her bags further inside the train. “Let me put my bags down!”
Then the loud woman opens her enormous bags and takes out sandwiches lovingly wrapped in paper, apples that had been washed and thoughtfully put into plastic bags, and small bottles of fruit juice.
“Pass it along! Pass it along!”
And she keeps passing along the food until both her bags are empty. She takes the empty bags under her arm and leaves the train even before the dumbfounded refugees have time to come to their senses and thank her or to ask if she feeds people out of goodwill or because she works for a charitable organization.
Almost all refugees have a story about strangers that fed them. Almost all of them talk about strangers who sheltered them for at least one night. But it doesn’t mean that refugees don’t have stories about how they were cheated or about a hysterical woman who tried to kick them out of line at the border.
Marina Polishchuk with her children and fiancé are leaving Kyiv in two cars and driving through Ternopil and Lviv. Marina takes her daughters, and her fiancé takes his former family—his ex-wife and their child. Marina manages to cover the six-hundred-kilometer distance to Lviv in only thirty-three hours. Then from Lviv Marina drives her car through Ivano-Frankivsk to the village of Yavorov where people she barely knows let her and her children stay overnight. In this village two days later, Russian missiles will fall on the military training grounds. Marina is exhausted and needs to get some sleep. The next day, Marina’s fiancé gets up earlier to secure a spot for Marina in the line at the Shehyni-Medyka border checkpoint.
After a good night’s sleep, Marina puts her children in the car and drives off. The line stretches for many kilometers. Many people, even those who are elderly or with children, walk to the checkpoint. Marina drives along the line and every minute or so someone asks who gave her the right to drive to the border ignoring the line. She calmly answers that her boyfriend got up early in the morning to save her a spot and after she takes his spot in line, he’ll return to Kyiv in his car because, as you all know, there is martial law and men aren’t allowed to leave the country. It works but only up to a point.
After Marina has gone about two kilometers along the line, a woman throws herself on the hood and pounds on it with her fists:
“Where are you going? Get out of here! The line is for everybody. Turn around, bitch!”
Marina again explains that her fiancé has been in line since early morning. It has no effect. Marina again explains that, obviously, her fiancé won’t be able to cross the border anyway, and he’ll drive back and give his spot to Marina. Again, no effect. Marina calls her fiancé and complains. He asks her to put the woman lying across the hood on the phone.
“Listen,” he says in a voice that can’t be countermanded. “Let her go. She’ll take my spot in the line, and while she’s waiting, I’ll drive back and forth giving rides to old people, children, and pregnant women who are walking to the border.”
In other words, Marina’s fiancé tells the woman blocking Marina’s car that he’ll help another hundred people skip the line. But for some paradoxical reason, the woman gets off the hood of the car and says to Marina: “Go.”
Even after taking her fiancé’s spot, Marina waits in line for twelve more hours. She has a lot of food—in Ternopil her grandmother made tons of blintzes and cutlets for them. Toilets are anywhere you like. To relieve themselves, people go a few meters away from their cars and squat in the reeds trying to ignore one other. The line moves slowly, very slowly. And all this time Marina’s fiancé drives back and forth along the line to brings pedestrians, more than a hundred people, to the checkpoint. And no one in the line protests. Everyone sees what he’s doing as a good deed.
Finally, Marina reaches the checkpoint. For the last time, her fiancé brings a woman with children. Marina steps out of her car, and so does her fiancé. They hug and kiss each other. Here is another idea for a war monument: a man and a woman standing in the middle of the road at the Shehyni checkpoint. They stand and hug each other. God only knows how long they’ll be apart. A moment later, he’ll return home to sign up for the Territorial Defense Forces and she’ll cross the border with their children and enter a refugee camp.
3 Kadyrovtsy is the unofficial name for a paramilitary organization in Chechnya, Russia, that is nominally under the umbrella of the Russian National Guard. Made up mostly of ethnic Chechens, the Kadyrovtsy are named after Akhmad Kadyrov, the first president of the Chechen Republic, who defected to the Russian side during the Second Chechen War.
4 Vovan is a low colloquial form of the Russian name Vladimir. A more standard diminutive form is Volodya from which the affectionate diminutive Volodenka is formed. The latter is used below by the Rubikus volunteer Rita.
CHAPTER 4
Shelter
“The Ukrainian army continues systematic shelling of humanitarian convoys and attempts to shift responsibility for their inhuman acts onto divisions of Russian troops. During this week alone, 17 attacks on civilians traveling along humanitarian corridors were recorded.” Official Telegram Channel of the Russian Ministry of Defense,
March 25, 2022.
TRIAGING REFUGEES
The flap of a big, warm tent opens, and a young woman walks outside. She’s dressed like all Southerners dress in colder climates—too warm, although it’s almost spring here, in Poland. Wearing a down coat, a hat, and heavy, lined boots, the woman walks through the slush passing the other tents that have been set up along the road leading to the checkpoint on the Ukrainian border.
As strange as it may seem, a refugee camp looks a bit like a fairground, only without the music or people with carefree, happy faces. But there’s smoke coming out of braziers where the Spaniards are cooking paella in huge pans, and there are the Hungarians stirring goulash with a Rabelaisian-size ladle in a ten-bucket kettle. The Germans fry sausages and feed their compatriots—German psychologists who came to help the refugees but didn’t find enough translators now languish without anything to do.
This is Medyka, a small Polish town on the border and a primary accommodation camp for refugees, where the people fleeing Ukraine are admitted, provided with first aid, and sorted. In military field medicine a key step is the triage of the injured—so it is with the admission of refugees.
Our Israeli volunteer—a young woman from the Israel Psychological Association—crosses the border without showing any documents. She crosses the border at least twenty times a day, and all the border patrol officers recognize her. Before they can give her a smile or a greeting or make some politically incorrect joke about her Southern beauty, she’s already walking along the line of cars and pedestrians that stretches to the border from the Ukrainian side.
The woman looks around attentively. She sees an almost brand-new car with a mother and two teenage children inside—they can wait. Then she spots a bus, a PAZ model from Soviet times; it’s cold inside and not very comfortable, but the passengers are rather young—they too can wait. Now she catches a glimpse of a woman with an infant—she’s standing in the March drizzle looking completely lost.
