‘You Cannot Host Guests Forever’
Photographs by Marcus Glahn
On February 24, within hours of the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Karolina Lewestam and her husband, Jakub Fast, saw on social media that Ukrainians were arriving at bus and train stations in Warsaw with no idea where they would sleep.
Without even pausing to discuss it, the couple—a writer and a banker—jumped into group chats with neighbors whom they had never met and started plotting to exchange mattresses and other supplies, as they all rushed to prepare spare bedrooms and sofas. A few days later, at about 2 a.m., a van pulled up outside their historic home in an affluent neighborhood, and 10 people climbed out, including a 6-year-old boy carrying a stuffed cat. “I wanted to cry when I saw that,” Karolina recalled. “I just thought about what you choose to bring with you when you are packing in a hurry to run out of your home. That’s what he chose.”
In just a few months, Ukraine has become the epicenter of one of the largest human displacements in the world. As of late April, an estimated 7.7 million residents have relocated within the country and another 5.6 million have crossed international borders.* Most of those, at least for now, are in Poland. In a politically divided nation that is typically hostile toward refugees, hundreds of thousands of Polish people moved in astonishing unison following the Russian invasion, upending their lives in order to house, feed, and clothe traumatized Ukrainians. The display of generosity stood out from other mass-migration events I’ve covered.
But by the time I met Karolina and other Polish hosts, in late March, they were exhausted. They had missed work and lost sleep, and were stressed about the strain that caring for Ukrainians was putting on their dwindling bank accounts. (They were also wondering whether their own country would be Putin’s next target.) Many of them were ruminating over the same question—one they were gingerly trying to broach with their guests: When would they be leaving?
in Poland, Nikita, the boy with the stuffed cat, and his mother, Irina Sytnik, who had worked as a taxi driver in Ukraine, were struggling. Nikita was waking up in the middle of the night calling out for his
