An airport in south-eastern Poland went from handling a few flights a day to receiving shipments of Western weapons destined for Ukraine
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskAt the start of the year Rzeszow, an hour by train from the Ukrainian border, was the 15th-biggest city in Poland with a population just under 200,000. Since then about 100,000 refugees have arrived; depending on how many have stayed, it may now be the tenth-biggest. Ukrainians are not the only newcomers. Foreign diplomats, American troops and aid workers crowd the hotels and restaurants.
“But where are the refugee camps?” the city’s mayor, Konrad Fijolek, recalls people asking at the start of the war. There aren’t any to speak of. Only a fraction of the displaced live in shelters. The rest were taken in by locals, or rented places of their own. As soon as the war started, emergency aid, packed onto buses, lorries and passenger cars, began making its way from Rzeszow to western Ukraine.
The warmth surprised even the locals. Relations in the border areas had been haunted by memories of atrocities during the second world war: massacres of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists; ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians by Polish partisans and later the communist regime. These fading grudges have been wiped away by Russia’s invasion, says Mr Fijolek. “The Ukrainians are fighting for us,” he says, “so that the Russians don’t get any stupid ideas about coming here.
Many Ukrainians who passed through have moved on to bigger cities, or returned home. Ola Filaretova, a ballet dancer from Dnipro, and her two children returned to Rzeszow after a few weeks elsewhere in Poland. Her youngest daughter had missed the city, and the friends she had made here. Mrs Filaretova missed being closer to home. “It’s only 100km to the border,” she says, through tears. “That makes things more bearable.