It already feels a bit like home, says 14-year-old Nina about the shelter for Ukrainian refugees in Rzeszów. “We’re like one big family.” About sixty people now live there, mostly women and children. “At first it felt weird living here. But recently I was away for a day and then I missed it here.’ On her finger, Nina wears a yellow and a blue ring, the national colors of Ukraine.
She has been living with her mother in this Polish for three months ośrodek, a formerly vacant holiday center that now serves as a refugee shelter. “We know we can’t stay here forever. And then we have to go back to Zaporizhzhya, because we can’t afford a house in Rzeszów.’ Her mother has found a job in a sewing workshop, but rents in Rzeszów, just under 100 kilometers from the border with Ukraine, are skyrocketing.
The population of Rzeszów (about 200 thousand inhabitants) has grown enormously since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At its peak, the town had one refugee for every two other residents. According to the municipality, between 30 and 50 thousand Ukrainians still live in the city, hundreds of thousands have traveled through it.
‘Now the integration begins’
This leads to challenges in areas such as the housing market, the labor market and education. Rzeszów is thus a miniature Poland, where the population has made great efforts over the past four months to receive the approximately 1.6 million Ukrainian refugees who are permanently in the country. Most of them reside in or around cities.
“A new phase of the crisis has begun,” said Deputy Mayor Krystyna Stachowska at Rzeszów Town Hall. ‘The first phase, of large-scale spontaneous aid, is over. Now the integration begins.’ And that is desperately needed. According to a poll in late May, 58 percent of Ukrainians want to stay in Poland as long as the war continues, and 27 percent say they plan to stay for good.
At the same time, the Polish government has decided to roll back a number of support measures for Ukrainian refugees: for example, since June 1, they will no longer be allowed to use public transport free of charge, and the daily allowance of PLN 40 (EUR 8.50) per day will stop on July 1. refugee to Poles who have taken Ukrainians into their homes. “We are convinced that many people in Poland can become independent and adapt,” said the responsible State Secretary.
This does not go smoothly, as can be seen in Rzeszów. In the shelter where 14-year-old Nina lives, on the outskirts of the city, Ukrainians who have not yet found a home can stay for free. And the people keep coming. The spontaneous help is not yet completely over, according to a conversation with Magdalena Mukomiełow, the owner of the large ship-shaped building. It should have become a hotel in the coming years, says the 36-year-old entrepreneur, who runs a barbershop in the center.
Less often volunteers
A few days after the invasion, she prepared the building with volunteers as a reception location. “There was nothing here at all. There wasn’t even power. But help came from everywhere’, says Mukomiełow, sitting next to a human-sized teddy bear in the play corner of the building. Only: where a while ago volunteers came every day, they now come once a week. ‘The aid is drying up. Everyone is tired.’ Mukomiełow is also at the end of her rope. “I don’t have the strength anymore.”
The demand for help is unabated. Although more people return to Ukraine every day than to Poland, countless are still displaced. People also move within Poland and Europe. ‘Soon five new people will come here, including a child with a disability,’ says Mukomiełow. Because the allowance has ended, they could no longer go to the family where they stayed.
The allowance also stops for Mukomiełow, which she has not received for every refugee due to bureaucracy. ‘And then people say that I would make a profit here. Very frustrating.’ She fears that she will no longer be able to afford the costs. Energy is becoming more expensive and food donations are shrinking. “I have no idea how long we can stay open. Hopefully as long as it takes.’
It is difficult to predict exactly what the effect of stopping the grant will be and how migration dynamics will develop, says Dominika Pszczółkowska, who works at the Center for Migration Research at the University of Warsaw. “The social response in this crisis has been very positive, there is a strong will to help. But Poles also want to go back to their normal lives.’
Busy in the city
Rzeszów’s sudden population growth is difficult to see with the naked eye, but if you listen closely, you can hear Ukrainian and Russian on the street all the time. In an old bazaar in the center, with shophouses made of corrugated iron, Polish grumbles can also be heard: more traffic jams in the city, longer waiting times at the doctor. ‘A month ago it was so busy that the supermarket shelves were sometimes empty when I arrived after work’, says Paweł (52), who does not want to use his last name in the newspaper.
Pawel has a shop with sportswear, flags and football shirts. ‘A month after the war started, you couldn’t get anything done at the town hall because they were so busy with the refugees.’ Still, he thinks it’s important to help. And as a seller he also sees positive sides: ‘It is good for the economy.’
He is not convinced that all Ukrainians are equally in need of help. “Some have money. It would be good if the government looked more closely at who really needs financial help and who can manage.’ Finally, Speech Waterfall Paweł would like to emphasize that Ukrainians are very grateful. “When they buy a Ukrainian flag from me, they always take a Polish one.”
The employment rate of refugees is incredibly high, emphasizes Pszczółkowska, partly due to the tight Polish labor market. ‘Almost 40 percent of the refugees already have a job.’ But an overheated, extortionate housing market and the education system plagued by teacher shortages lead to problems, especially in the long run. Systematic assistance is necessary, says Pszczółkowska. ‘People want to build a normal life. That is not something that individuals can help you with, but that the state has to step in.’
Entrepreneur Mukomiełow has nothing good to say about the government. “They haven’t passed by here once.” Deputy Mayor Stachowska does not think it fair that the local government is portrayed as absent. ‘We work with companies and NGOs to help people. We were present all the time with information points. And we have put 3.6 million złoty (768 thousand euros) in aid.’ The local government is also broke and exhausted. “We can’t do it alone anymore.”
Fresh auxiliaries
Fresh auxiliaries have recently arrived in Rzeszów, according to a tour of the city. The UNHCR has set up a community center where refugees can go for social and legal support. Unicef is coming, much to the delight of Deputy Mayor Stachowska.
The American humanitarian organization Core is also active. This has hired a number of volunteers to ‘guarantee sustainable assistance’, says a spokesperson. Refugees can also receive a monthly supplement of 600 zoty (128 euros). Core also purchased coal for two months to power the Mukomielow shelter. “They were suddenly at my door,” she says. The spokesperson agrees that they support fourteen similar shelters in and around Rzeszów.
Meanwhile, 14-year-old Nina and her mother like to be close to Ukraine, should things change. ‘And my grandmother is still in Zaporizhzhya, she didn’t want to leave. But I don’t think we can go back for a while, because the Russians want to conquer our city.’ She would like to go to a Polish school in September. ‘Polish is already going well, our languages are similar. I help my mother translate.’
In her spare time she practices on a guitar given to her by volunteers. She likes to play Ukrainian songs and American hits from the nineties: Nina leaves the first chords of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit to belong. They have no plans for the summer yet. ‘We live from day to day. Actually I would go camping with a friend in Ukraine.’
How many Ukrainians are there in Poland?
It is unclear how many Ukrainian refugees are in Poland. The influx and outflow of people is dynamic, the data registered by the Polish government is limited. The Center for Migration Research at the University of Warsaw estimated the number of refugees at the end of April at 1.4 to 1.55 million people (Poland has 38 million inhabitants). The Polish media often quotes 1.5 to 2 million as an estimate.
The government also often refers to the much higher number of border crossings since the start of the war, which the Polish Border Guard keeps a close eye on. On June 24, four months after the invasion, there were nearly 4.3 million. On the other hand, more than 2.3 million border crossings from Poland to Ukraine were counted. The Border Guard does not keep track of whether people transit to other countries or where they come from when they travel to Ukraine.
This is not to say that the Polish population or government had no role in hosting those other millions. Among them are also refugees who stayed briefly in Poland. Take Rzeszów: now there are an estimated 50 thousand people, at the end of April there were still 100 thousand. And since the invasion, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have traveled through this city to other places in Poland and Europe.
The applications for a Pesel (Polish social security number) offer a little more guidance. Between March 16 and May 15, 1.09 million Ukrainians received one. 95 percent of this group consists of women (48 percent) and children (47 percent).
Finally, there is the question of where people stay. At the end of April, the Polish government made a rough estimate without further explaining the methodology. According to the responsible Polish Secretary of State, 1.6 million refugees were living in Poland at the time. Of these, 600 thousand people lived with Poles, 800 thousand with Ukrainian relatives who had already lived in Poland before the war and 200 thousand in large-scale government shelters.