One Humanity

It's ten weeks ago that I first arrived at Przemysl, the town in Poland just a few kilometres from the Ukraine border and one of the main crossing points for Ukrainian women and children fleeing from Russian aggression. At that time Russian forces were advancing on Kyiv and cities like Kharkiv were being occupied. I spent many, many hours at the town's railway station providing  exhausted, traumatised women and their children with basic needs - food, medicines, clothing and a place to pause and rest, before helping them board trains and buses for onward journies to homes and refuges in Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Moldavia and in a small number of cases the UK. Returning to the same station two weeks ago was a real surprise. The station was relatively quiet, traveller numbers much as normal but with the main activity being women and children returning to western Ukraine. Talking to some it became clear that they now saw western Ukraine as relatively safe and for those t