STAROVOITE, UKRAINE — A long line of Ukrainians wait to be processed out of their country, registered, and handed a certificate, then walk a few steps through red-and-white “no re-entry” gates  and become refugees.    

Dragging airline luggage, shouldering backpacks, and carrying suitcases, gym bags or anything else in which they could stuff essential belongings, they cross the line from their past into an uncertain present and future.

I’ve been working for several days with Caritas, the international Catholic relief agency, at a reception point in Dorohusk, on Poland’s side of the border near Starovoite. The work involves unloading trucks, vans and cars of supplies that are coming from all over Europe.

Some are from huge international organizations, others from churches or civic associations, and some just from individuals who felt compelled to help with a humanitarian crisis Europe has not seen in such proportions since World War II. I flew to Poland on March 9, two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, to volunteer in relief efforts.

One man drove a passenger bus from the Netherlands filled with donated canned food, bottled water, household appliances and clothes, then filled the 44 seats on the bus with refugees who had places to stay in Warsaw and Berlin.

Young volunteers

The Caritas volunteers are mostly young people, who stay at a nearby school and sign up for two-week stints. Many stay.

“This was supposed to be my gap year,” said Weronika Eszyk, 23, a recent college graduate, who was running the medical and military donations tent. “But I’m here, and I’m exhausted but I can’t tear myself away.”

Disaster response has an addictive quality. The work, like the rush of refugees, has no end in sight, and the more you do, the more you feel you need to do.

While here, I’ve played sidekick to Krzysztof Blaziak, a small, quick-moving man who is the unelected head organizer of the Dorohusk relief site. He put his family and dog-training business aside to work 15-hour days among the red tents and hundreds of boxes of donations. The long days mean that in addition to sorting through the donations and loading trucks, volunteers also chop wood for the outdoor fires where they huddle for warmth in the early morning and evening.

When I began work with Caritas on March 10, Blaziak and I went several times to the Polish side of the border just three kilometers away through Dorohusk, a farm village of 100 or so small houses, a general store and auto repair garage. It is surrounded by the fertile land of the Bug River delta.

Two days into the work, Blaziak offered to take me over to the Ukrainian side but there is a risk. The volunteers need a special visa, which I don’t have.

“Maybe they won’t check,” he says in his limited English. “Anyway, we’ll only stay a minute.”

Before we climbed into his battered van, he joked, “You’re not a spy, are you? … if you are, it’s OK.”

Waiting to be processed

Buses from the war-torn country’s interior drop people off to form a line to be processed out of Ukraine by that country’s officials. From there they can either wait for another bus or walk over the Bug River on a bridge much smaller than New Jersey’s pedestrian bridges that cross the Delaware in Columbia, Riegelsville, Milford and Frenchtown. The Bug itself between Starovoite and Dorohusk is little more than a slow-moving, meandering stream.

‘They are mostly mothers, with crying children and elderly parents to bring to safety, burdened by all the necessities from home they could pack in manageable luggage.’

As the refugees come through the Polish-side processing center and emerge with blue certificates that give them official passage, they are greeted by volunteers in the red vests of Caritas or the light blue of Polska Akcga Humanitarna or the high-visibility green-and-orange of other volunteer groups. Those volunteers welcome the refugees and invite them into tents of clothes, coats, shoes, snacks, sandwiches, grilled meats, water, baby needs, feminine hygiene products and free 5G phone plans. There is an array of such tents, a flea market of donated goods.

It is here that the real-time despair and urgency behind this massive effort hits me as being familiar on so many levels — both in the shock and confusion in the faces of the refugees, and the outpouring of generosity of the volunteers aiding them.

As a columnist for The Star-Ledger I covered Superstorm Sandy and its aftermath extensively. I couldn’t pull myself away for more than a year after it happened. Stories needed to be told of the immediate human misery, the heroic rescue and relief efforts, and, eventually, the red-tape frustration and insurance stonewalling many experienced trying to get back into their homes.    

During my time here, I’ve not only been to the border crossing at Starovoite and Dorohusk, to the nearest large city of Chelm, where trains arriving from Kyiv release daily onslaughts of refugees, tired, hungry and confused. They are mostly mothers, with crying children and elderly parents to bring to safety, burdened by all the necessities from home they could pack in manageable luggage.

In each place, I recall scenes of New Jersey’s own unprecedented disaster. In Chelm, the town sports arena (Miejska Hala Sportowa) is being used as a shelter, like so many school gymnasiums and town rec centers were in Ocean County, where Sandy did the brunt of its damage. Here, cots are lined up the length of a basketball court, and partitions to give families privacy have been put up in the areas where the bleachers have been pushed back.

‘It proves there are more good people than bad ones.’

Volunteers register the refugees and try to find them more permanent lodging in hotels in Warsaw, Kraków and Poland’s other large cities, or with the thousands of Polish families who have offered them rooms in their homes. Warsaw has taken 300,000 so far, swelling its population by 17% in less than a week.

At the reception point in Dorohusk, the refugees pick through stacks of donated clothes and counters filled with nonperishable groceries. There is a reservoir-worth of bottled water and a mountain of diapers. Baby and feminine hygiene products go quickly because most of the refugees are women and children. Again, watching people trying to replace what they’ve lost with the donations of others is at once heartbreaking and heartwarming.

“It proves there are more good people than bad ones,” said Joanna Wozniak, a Caritas volunteer who operated a coffee, tea and baked goods stand for the refugees. “Of course, one bad person, one monster like Putin, can unfortunately affect the lives of millions of good people.”

Blaziak views the overwhelming donations as both a godsend and necessary evil, an echo of many Sandy volunteers.

“People clean out their houses in the name of goodwill,” he said. “We get too much junk. Too many old clothes, old toys.”

He pointed to boxes upon boxes of cloth stuffed animals that lay outside the few tent coverings.

“One rainstorm and this is all garbage we’ll have to get rid of,” he said. “Luckily, so far, no rain.”

‘He wanted to stay and fight’

At the Polish border, many refugees are loaded onto buses for local reception points, like Dorohusk, or big cities. But many have relatives or friends throughout Poland or the rest of Europe who meet them at the border.

Luyba Tsaruk waited at the border for her sister. Tsaruk was with her three children Sony, 6, Lera, 4 and Maks, 2, and her nephew Stas Radchuck, 15. Her sister, who lives in Glowno, a small town in the center of Poland, sent the nephew there to help them.

“He wanted to stay and fight,” Tsaruk said through a volunteer translator, “but his mother insisted he give me help instead.”

‘It’s hard to believe this is happening to us … Ten days ago, everything was normal.’

The family came from Sarny, near the border with Belarus, a country also hostile to Ukraine.

Tsaruk said her husband remained home and while Sarny had not yet been bombed or invaded by the Russians, other nearby towns were shelled, and she equally feared the possibility they would be attacked by soldiers from Belarus.

“Where we live no longer feels safe,” she said. “I don’t want that kind of future for my children.”

To an American, the compact nature of European hostilities is difficult to grasp.

From Sarny, four countries are now impacted by a major war in a geographic area not much larger than the swath of destruction left by Sandy in New Jersey. Russia, the aggressor; Belarus, which allowed Russia to stage the invasion and may send troops; Ukraine, which is being destroyed; and Poland, the front line of this humanitarian crisis.

“It’s hard to believe this is happening to us,” said Tsaruk. “Ten days ago, everything was normal.”

All photographs by Mark Di Ionno.

TOMORROW: In Part Three, why so many Poles want to help: “We felt abandoned by the rest of the world, and we know how lonely the Ukrainians must feel.”