Of all the composers, the one Ilaria loves the most is Mozart; so much so that she calls herself Wolf! Already at the age of 6, Ilaria was playing Mozart in an orchestra in Kherson, her city, currently occupied by the Russians. She had just turned 16 when the war broke out. For the first few months, she mostly stayed at home: during the day, she went to watch from her balcony the missiles that struck the neighboring streets; in the evening, the city appeared so black that one would have thought that it no longer existed. On the weekends, she participated in meetings where the inhabitants chanted “Kherson, this is Ukraine” – until the Russians started shooting at them.
In April, she was able to leave the city with her mother and brother, a few days before Kherson was fully occupied. They left without foreseeing anything, they arrived in Krakow by chance. Ilaria hasn’t even had time to learn how to say “Hello!” in Polish that she was accepted into the best music school in town. The young girl is incredibly talented. “It was not easy to leave, most of the roads were blocked, she tells me. We succeeded because we crossed a bridge which we were told was was mined. But no, it wasn’t.”
“I hate the Russnia, let them all die!”
The young girl laughs heartily, and it occurs to me that her first name, in Latin, means “joyful”. Since the start of the war, Ilaria has already changed her hair color three times, but her forearms are still studded with fresh cuts: after all she’s seen, that’s how she handles the tension. She now lives with a Krakow family where the children also play the piano. The bond was forged when they caught her performing a Mozart sonata. In her new house, Wolf-Ilaria has no bedroom of her own, she sleeps in the living room, on the sofa near the piano. His small suitcase with his scores and his clothes lying next to it. She often talks about her beautiful concert ballerinas that she had to leave behind in Kherson. He misses his home. She talks about her friend who stayed there and is now calling her from a Russian number.
“I hate Russnia, let them all die!” ). Ilaria was bilingual since birth, she hasn’t been since the end of February. There are no precise statistics determining the number of Ukrainian refugees who have arrived in Poland since the beginning of the Russian invasion, because some of them stayed there only briefly, before continuing their journey west. A number between 2 and 4 million is mentioned. And all those involved in helping Ukrainians unanimously confirm that about three months after the start of the war, a good number of refugees have returned to Ukraine.
“Poland assimilated the Ukrainians”
“We have all been swept away by a national momentum, it has transformed us, as a society, explains Agnieszka Szyluk, who has been running a refugee aid foundation since the first days. But state aid is insufficient. And the people have exhausted their resources, they have no more courage and money. After three months, official benefits, such as free public transport and trains, were also stopped. It was estimated that after this period, Ukrainians should leave or become independent. There are fewer Ukrainian symbols in the cities, but you still hear Ukrainian spoken in the streets.”
“Poland accepted the Ukrainians, it managed, assimilated them”, comments another anonymous volunteer. “I avoid as much as possible the word ‘refugee’, which has a negative connotation, says Agnieszka Szyluk. Ukrainians are now part of our society.”
Zosia Holubowska, a young scout who took care of the reception point at Krakow station during the first three months of the invasion, also refers to the vocabulary, but from another point of view: “Polish volunteers learn more and more Russian and Ukrainian words every day, and all this forms a kind of international common language.” From now on, it is the scouts of the City Council of Krakow who have taken over at the station, but it is much less lively now.
The Lviv children’s library, a new refuge for all displaced people in the South
From May, internal refugees who had fled to western Ukraine at the start of the war also began to return to the east and south of the country. “They stopped wondering if c was dangerous or not, they were just tired of being away from home,” says Anastasia Levkova, a writer from Lviv, whose home has hosted several groups of transient refugees from the cities of Kharkiv and Zaporizhia. . “Some have rushed into the unknown. Two of “my Kharkivians” packed their bags, they went to the station, saw a bus leaving for Leipzig and got on it without asking themselves any questions, while they don’t know anyone there.”
The word “refugee”, bijenec, disappeared from the Ukrainian language in 2014, to be replaced by a more neutral term: pereselenec, “someone who has moved, has changed location”. The Lviv Children’s Library has been teeming with such people since the beginning of the war. Those who have no children weave camouflage nets there for the army. Some go there every morning, as if they were going to work.
“Lately, many people have returned home, although their city is still bombarded by the Russians, says librarian Olena Kremniova. But only those who have somewhere to go.” Then she tells me the story of this resident of Kherson who traveled more than 1000 kilometers by bicycle to finally end up in Lviv. Like Ilaria, he has nowhere to go now.
Translated from Polish by Caroline Raszka-Dewez.
Zanna Sloniowska (born 1978 in Lviv, Ukraine) is a Ukrainian literary woman who lives in Krakow, Poland and writes in Polish. His first novel “A city with an open heart”, was published in Poland in 2015, it won the Conrad Prize and has been translated into 6 languages, including French (published in France in 2018 by Delcourt Littérature, now La Croisée)
Agnieszka Skawian?czyk
This article is from our special issue “We Ukrainians”on newsstands August 24, in partnership with BFMTV.