Poland extends a warm welcome to refugees from Ukraine
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. JR is the producer and he has uploaded the full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/466. Remember that the full lesson includes a step-by-step video, the transcript, translations of key words, exercises, and much more. PlainEnglish.com/466.
Coming up on today’s lesson: Five million people have left Ukraine in just over two months. That’s like the entire city of Los Angeles getting up and leaving a country. The majority of people have gone to Poland, where they’re getting a warm welcome.
In the second half of the lesson, I’ll show you what it means to ride something out. And I have a quote of the week for you. Let’s get started.
Refugees find a warm welcome in Poland
The war in Ukraine is now about ten weeks old, just over two months. In that time, about five million people have left Ukraine. Among those five million people, about half have gone to neighboring Poland. Poland’s population has swelled about eight percent from refugees alone. Now, one in five people in Warsaw, the capital, is Ukrainian.
Refugees arrive on trains and buses. The situation is dire. In the war’s first weeks, Ukrainians with passports and savings were the first to escape. They were also more able to look after themselves in a new country.
But as the war grinds on, more and more people are seeking to escape. This second wave includes refugees that are less able to provide for themselves in foreign lands. Many are elderly, disabled, or have children with special needs. Others had been trying to ride the war out : they wanted to stay, but they left after Russian missiles flattened their homes and cities. Often, they left with just a few minutes’ notice , after having secured a last-minute spot on a train, on a bus, or in a van.
The journey to Poland is long: one mother said she stood for the entire twenty-hour journey to Poland. Witnesses said they had never seen trains and platforms so packed. People pour off trains in Poland with just a few belongings stuffed in a backpack. Tired, hungry, fearful, separated from loved ones, unemployed, and having spent all their savings, they step off the train into a foreign land.
And what they find in Poland comes as a shock: they’re getting a warm welcome.
Polish people, refugees say, are loving and welcoming and offer an unexpected level of support. The European Union and the Polish government have made the legal transition relatively smooth. When they cross the border, Ukrainians don’t need to show a passport; they only need to provide some identification—it could be a driver’s license, a phone bill, or something like that. Ukrainians can then apply for a residence permit and Poland’s national ID number at welcome centers or in major cities.
The European Union has given Ukrainians permission to travel, live, and work in any EU country for three years. Ukrainians are eligible for cash assistance from the Polish government; it’s 1,500 euros per month for a family of four. It’s provided on a cash benefit card that can be used right away.
Children can register for school in Poland. Almost every classroom in Warsaw’s schools has Ukrainian children. A special program is hiring Ukrainian women to be teachers in Polish schools, the better to accommodate the influx of over 160,000 new children enrolled in Polish schools.
Much of the assistance for refugees comes from private individuals, often organizing on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Polish volunteers refer to the Ukrainians as “guests,” not refugees. Some volunteers speak Ukrainian, but most get by with Google Translate.
At welcome centers, volunteers serve hot meals and fill cardboard boxes with donated clothes, toiletries, toys, food—even pet food. There’s even a massage chair at one refugee center; a magician entertained children while their parents planned their families’ next steps.
A volunteer taxi service has sprung up to drive Ukrainians from their arrival points to other parts of Poland, or even to other countries. Most volunteer drivers are men, but most refugees are women and the elderly. Seeing that, one volunteer organized an all-female volunteer group of drivers for Ukrainians who might not be comfortable riding with male drivers.
“Free stores” are popping up in Warsaw, offering newly-arrived Ukrainians access to warm clothes, winter coats, food, personal hygiene products, books, and more. The materials are donated by local residents or aid groups.
Individual families offer to provide spare rooms in their homes for refugees. Volunteers with laptops and internet connections help match refugees with host families at arrival points. New websites help find a good match, too. Often, the host family provides more than a bed, but help finding a job and getting settled in a long-term apartment.
Most Ukrainians do not want to stay in Poland, or Europe, for long. In interviews, the vast majority say they want to go home as soon as the war ends, if not sooner. Most people left homes, businesses, jobs, professions, networks of friends and family; they want to get that back as soon as possible. For that reason, many of them are not going much deeper into Europe. Instead, they’re stuck in an odd limbo: they need to make a living and offer some stability to their children, but they want to maintain hope they can return home someday soon.
Bright spot in a dark world
I don’t mean to say that everything is going perfectly in Poland. There have been bureaucratic delays, instances of abuse, things like that. We’re also only in the third month: frustration has not yet set in . But I do mean to say that this is going much more smoothly than other refugee situations, even others in Europe’s recent history.
And in a situation where there is so, so little to be optimistic about, when the images from Ukraine are just so devastating, it’s nice to see that people fleeing that terrible situation are at least getting a warm welcome from a neighbor.
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