For countless Ukrainian refugees, leaving home has meant giving up almost everything they’ve worked for
Valentinya Melnyk used to conduct choirs and teach music at a university in Ukraine. Now she volunteers as a cleaner at Ukrainian House in Przemysl, Poland.
She and her family have been living just across the Ukrainian border in Przemysl, Poland, since last spring. Her lack of Polish has made it difficult to return to teaching or conducting, and so she spends her days as a volunteer at Ukraine House, a cultural centre that runs a shelter for refugees. She’s happy to help and believes she’s making a contribution, but music has always been her true calling. “If the opportunity comes up, yes I would like to teach,” Ms.
Abkhazia in 2008 and from Crimea in 2015. So when Russia’s latest invasion reached her home in Mariupol in April, she pulled up stakes once more and headed to Warsaw with her teenage son, Mikhail. Yelyzaveta Varshno used to be deputy head of a pension fund in Ukraine. Now she runs the kitchen as a volunteer at a refugee shelter on Woloska street in Warsaw.
Like so many others at the shelter, Ms. Varshno doesn’t speak Polish, and while she would love to get back into the investment world, she knows that’s unlikely. More than 60 per cent of those surveyed by the ONS said they were not working in the same field as they did in Ukraine and almost half said they were employed in retail, food service and manufacturing.
Zhana can’t do much more in Poland without a licence, and that could take years. Maybe she’ll return to the cut and thrust of legal arguments one day, but for now she’s found meaning in helping others. “Now I’m working for my soul,” she said. “Not just to make money.” Even as her daughter begged her to stop hiding in bomb shelters and get out of the city, Ms. Pakhomova demurred and made herself borscht one night. “I longed to eat it,” she said. Something in the soothing nourishment gave her the strength to go. “After eating, I started packing.”
Kateryna Skrypko got her big break in acting just before the war began. She’d landed a starring role in a police drama on Ukrainian television and there were plans to shoot a second season. The invasion cut short the production and Ms. Skrypko headed to Poland with her mother and sister-in-law. One of her fellow actors died in the fighting around Kyiv last March and another colleague is serving on the front line in southern Ukraine.