Eastern Europe welcomes some refugees, not others. Is it only racism?
When Victoria, a retired university lecturer, fled Ukraine as the Russian military devastated her home city of Kharkiv, she didn’t have many options of where to go.
She has no relatives in Ukraine, or in other parts of Europe. But she still has a friend from school in Warsaw, the Polish capital, who she used to visit frequently before the war began. So she got on one of the crowded trains leaving the city and headed westward.
But when she arrived in the Polish border city of Przemyśl, she did not expect the warmth of the reception she got.
“I was surprised that Poles received us so well. I travel to Poland regularly, and this time the Poles were nicer,” she says. “If you speak to someone, they help you right away. The attitude of Poles toward Ukrainians has changed.”
Władysław, a Polish volunteer with the Food not Bombs group feeding refugees at the Medyka border crossing, agrees: The Polish public’s generous outpouring of support to the Ukrainian refugees is not something he saw coming.
“We didn’t expect such a positive response from Poles toward refugees, considering what happened recently on the Belarusian border,” he says. He is
