“Today, the most terrible thing is that we don’t know what our future will hold. We would like to go home, but in Mariupol there is no more energy, no more accommodation, no more work. There is no future for my children,” dit Alexandra Huseinova.
The young woman, her daughters aged 8 and 14, and her sister Daria fled Mariupol on February 24 as the first Russian Grad rockets began to fall on the city. One hundred days later, they work as volunteers amidst mountains of jars of jam and bags of pasta in a refugee aid distribution center in Warsaw. In their mobile phones, they keep photos of the family apartment with gutted walls, the floor strewn with rubble.
In Poland, more than 100,000 Ukrainian refugees have already found jobs
What to do ? To return to Ukraine or not? When will the war end? These questions plague the refugees. For now, the big wave of arrivals seems to be over. Since the beginning of June, the number of people crossing the border to Ukraine has clearly exceeded the number of people entering.
Hundreds of thousands of precarious Ukrainians
Since February 24, some 3.8 million Ukrainians, mostly women and children, have entered Poland. But how many are still there? The calculation is difficult: 1.2 million have obtained a social security number, called “PESEL”, which gives access to legal work, health services and some allowances. But experts, who cite the number of telephone conversations from Ukrainian numbers in Poland, add to this a million people. Warsaw City Hall estimates the number of refugees in the capital at 200,000, where Ukrainian and Russian speak everywhere.
According to the Ministry of Education, nearly 200,000 Ukrainian children attend school in Poland, including 17,000 in Warsaw. The others follow courses given online from their country. Of the 450,000 adult refugees who received their PESEL, one in three found work. Even if we double this figure to take undeclared work into account, it reveals the precariousness of the situation of hundreds of thousands of people.
When the refugees arrived, Polish society responded beyond expectations. Volunteer structures have sprung up everywhere to collect donations and distribute them. They always work at full speed. The government, which started a little late, followed suit, indirectly succeeding in improving its image abroad and in Poland, damaged by its quarrels with Brussels and the brutal refoulement of refugees and migrants coming from the Middle East via the Belarus. In particular, it granted an allowance to those who welcome refugees at the rate of 40 zlotys (9 €) per day and per person.
This aid, which was to enable refugees to find a job, will end on June 30. “We don’t lack the desire to work”explains a refugee saleswoman, Ira, who came from western Ukraine with her 8-year-old son, “but the language barrier is a difficult obstacle”. “Now, even to wash the dishes in a restaurant, we are asked to speak Polish. »
“Go fight at home”
The communication problem also weighs on relations with the Poles who welcome them. Anita, a psychologist from Warsaw, mother of two little boys, opened her three-bedroom apartment to two middle-class Ukrainian women, a 50-year-old woman and her 19-year-old daughter, a law student. But the current never passed. The refugees wanted neither to share meals with their hosts nor to take part in the cleaning and isolated themselves in their rooms.
This kind of problem is minor. But it cannot be ruled out that anti-Ukrainian feelings, already perceptible in extreme right-wing circles, will grow stronger. On the Facebook page of Euromaidan Warszawa, a foundation working to bring Ukraine and the EU closer together, a video of the “Thank you Poland” concert given by Ukrainians, provoked hostile comments, on the subject “instead of playing the guitar in Poland and abusing the naivety of the Poles, go and fight at home”.
“These reactions are irrelevant, explain to The cross Natalia Panchenko, leader of Euromaidan. They do not reflect the attitude of Polish society. Our page is constantly attacked by Russian trolls. »
The great momentum of solidarity is coming to an end
But, drawing on her experience of welcoming refugees six years ago, she observes that “the first stage, that of the great outpouring of solidarity of the Poles”, coming to an end. Comes that of silence, indifference, feeling “we have done enough, we would now like to forget the war and the refugees are preventing us from doing so”. Later, she thinks, “As in 2014, the last stage will come, that of aversion”.
“The Poles do not realize that the refugees are badly marked by the scenes of war, murder and rape, which they have seen up close, and that at first they do not show it, do not don’t talk about it”, explains the young woman. This powerful stress resurfaces after several months, and affects relations with their hosts.