PRZEMYSL, Poland — Polina Makarova said she made the most difficult decision of her life when she awoke early Feb. 24 to the thud of explosions near her home in Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine.
For the past eight years, the threat of war had never been far off, she said. Still, it came as a surprise when the bombs from nearby Russian artillery batteries began to fall onto her city, the second-largest in the country after the capital of Kyiv.
“We were talking about war all the time,” said Mrs. Makarova, 29. “But when we woke up from the bombing, it was so surreal.”
At 5 a.m. on the first day of the invasion, she gathered a few essentials from her apartment and set out with six female family members to their summer home southwest of the city.
Her husband, Oleksii, stayed behind.
During their drive, she said, they listened to updates on the radio. It became clear that they would have to leave the country altogether. In an instant, Mrs. Makarova realized that she might have said goodbye to her husband for the last time. They were left with little choice but to head west in what became a four-day journey to the Polish border.
Over the past week, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have faced the heartbreaking decision of whether to leave their homes and family members. The Russian invasion has created what some fear will be the most expansive mass migration in Europe in decades.
More than 830,000 people, primarily women and children, have fled to bordering countries since Russia began its assault, according to United Nations figures released Tuesday. Poland alone has taken in more than half of those fleeing the war along its 330-mile border with Ukraine, and Polish authorities estimate that 50,000 more refugees are arriving every day.
The evidence and the stories of human tragedy are mounting at the venerable trading town in southeastern Poland, just miles from the border.
Border checkpoints in Poland, Moldova, Slovakia and Romania have been flooded with people fleeing the fighting in every way possible. Like Mrs. Makarova, many drive. They wait hours, sometimes days, in a line of cars before reaching the border. Others come in packed trains and buses after rides lasting days. Some have little choice but to walk, carrying only a few remnants of their lives as they leave their homeland with doubts about when, if ever, they can go back.
Mrs. Makarova’s journey was a blur of endless hours on the road in a car packed with six members of her immediate and extended family. She said they stayed with family, friends and acquaintances along the way. At night, they couldn’t sleep because of the haunting air raid sirens and the sounds of warplanes and rockets overhead.
Only when they reached the border did they begin to feel safe, she said.
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“I was almost sure that they were not going to bomb queues of people so close to the border with Poland,” she said.
A flood of people
Many Ukrainians have connections in Poland through friends and relatives.
Even without the bombings or ground offensives, the trappings of war are visible everywhere.
At the border crossing in Medyka, discarded suitcases and strollers, loose clothing and bedding line the insides of massive tents set up to temporarily house those fleeing the war. Groups of refugees warm themselves by small fires as they await transportation deeper into Poland.
Fernand Cohen-Tannoudji, 55, a team leader for Rescuers Without Borders, an Israeli nonprofit operating out of the Medyka crossing, said he has seen a constant flow of buses carrying women and children and hundreds of others crossing by foot.
“A lot of people, maybe 200 or 300 a day, are coming by foot,” he said. “And there are many medical problems linked to their walk. Many haven’t drunk water for three or four days and are very tired. Others have broken legs.”
Many of those traveling by foot are from third countries — expatriates caught amid war in their adopted home.
Unnikrishnan Sureshkumar, a volunteer from the Indian Embassy in Poland, arrived at Medyka on Monday to receive a group of Indian nationals who had been in contact from Ukraine as they made the trek to the border. One Indian among the estimated 20,000 studying in Ukraine was killed by shelling in Kharkiv. It was the only known foreign casualty of the war to date.
“They are drained,” Mr. Sureshkumar said of those arriving by foot. “They have no motivation.”
Others from around the world — including Iran, Morocco and Somalia — have poured across the border.
Aziz Mahasen, a middle-aged man from Saudi Arabia who worked for a media company, said he walked through the night to the border from Lviv, a city in western Ukraine that had not experienced the level of fighting raging in Kyiv and the eastern part of the country. He said he waited at the border for days before he was allowed to cross.
“It was horrible,” he said. “No electricity. No running water. No privacy.”
During his wait to cross into Poland, he said, he saw four people die of hypothermia.
Most of those crossing from Medyka are taken to the central train station in Przemysl, about 10 miles from the border.
People crowd every inch of the train station. Mothers gather with small children, elderly parents and family pets on platforms guarding their very last possessions as they await trains to Krakow and Warsaw.
Injured travelers wait outside a ticket booth converted into a makeshift infirmary. One of the waiting areas is lined with cots.
Anastasia, a 22-year-old from near Odessa who did not want to provide her last name, waited outside of the station in Przemyslon on Tuesday night for a train to Warsaw. She had recently returned to her parents’ home in Ukraine after studying in Poland.
“My parents told me to leave immediately,” she said. “The bridge in my city was open for only about two hours, and in that two hours, my parents got in the car and drove me to Odessa.”
Her parents stayed behind. Anastasia said she wanted to stay, but her parents insisted that she leave.
“In my condition, I’m really skinny. I couldn’t even go outside,” she said. “If I could, I would have taken a gun. I wanted to stay and help my parents and help other people.”
She said the train ride to the border, normally 10 hours, took 24.
Scores of volunteers, many wearing bright orange and yellow vests with the languages they speak written in permanent marker, have flooded the borders and train stations throughout Poland to serve hot meals and coordinate with railway staff.
Bartek Wilk, 29, returned to Przemysl, his hometown, from Warsaw to help in any way he could.
“When it all started, it was chaos,” he said. “Everyone wanted to help, but nobody knew how. There was just a line of vehicles outside. Trucks full of supplies couldn’t get through because there were so many people.”
He said Poles have rallied to help. Nobody can turn a blind eye to the war on the other side of the border, he said.
Maciek Hoffmann went to Medyka to drive a family from the crossing to Przemysl.
“So I transported one family to Przemysl, came back and was asked to push a shopping cart up the hill, and this is how it started. I have been here for four days now,” she said.
Rescuers and refugees alike speak of an overwhelming sense of kinship that has emerged between the Ukrainians and Poles. How long the goodwill will last is another question.
“Here, you can walk up to almost anyone and they will help,” Mrs. Makarova said. “But I am also worried that Polish people will get tired of it. There are thousands and thousands of people coming in.”
“They are brothers and sisters,” Anastasia said. “We are very thankful to Poland.”
Staying behind
Almost all who have found safety in Poland have friends and family that stayed behind. Most fighting-age men have joined the Territorial Defense Forces or are serving as emergency personnel. Authorities in Kyiv last week prohibited men ages 18 to 60 from leaving.
Mrs. Makarova said her husband is helping transport supplies to hospitals treating the wounded in the fighting. Scores of men his age have joined the defense forces, and he is waiting for an opening.
She said the situation in Kharkiv has worsened.
“Because of the bombings, many buildings are now without windows,” Mrs. Makarova said. “The Russians are aiming not only for sleeping quarters but for critical infrastructure, and some buildings don’t have heating now, so people freeze. Many people don’t have food. Most of the shops have either sold out of everything or have been robbed by Russian troops or are completely destroyed from the bombings.”
She said Kharkiv is getting no humanitarian aid because of the danger. People are running out of medication. Every day, she said, people are dying not only from the bombings but also from the humanitarian catastrophe.
Although safe in Poland, she said, she cannot escape the war.
“I haven’t processed these feelings,” Mrs. Makarova said. “I don’t allow myself because if I do, I will break. I need to use my every power to help and to win. When I feel that it is coming up, I say to myself, ‘Save your tears for another day.’”
Sense of resolve
Still, the Ukrainians have developed a sense of resolve.
Alexander Lukan and Dennis Galitsky, who work as freelancers in western Ukraine near Ivano-Frankivsk, have volunteered to serve with the Territorial Defense Forces. They say everyone has united around a sense of purpose.
“It’s really hard to describe war, but we’re not scared,” said Mr. Galitsky. “Maybe we were scared during the first day because we didn’t understand what was going on, but right now we are extremely focused. We don’t think about the future. We think about what is happening at this moment right now. So there is no fear.”
He said residents have gathered to prepare Molotov cocktails to help defend the city, and citizens have been blocking tanks and telling Russians to leave.
“And obviously, they are killing some people,” he said. “The whole city is helping.“
He said families in Ukraine’s western regions have opened their doors to those displaced by fighting in the east.
“Everything is free in Ukraine now,” Mrs. Makarova said. “Nobody needs money. Everyone shares everything they have because we have one aim: We have to survive this war, and we have to rebuild our country.”
Those who have reached safety in neighboring countries said they feel committed to helping their fellow Ukrainians.
Danilo Damianenko, 21, who began volunteering at the central train station in Warsaw after settling outside of the city, described an overwhelming sense of duty among the Ukrainian diaspora around the world.
“My family is still in Ukraine,” he said before a brief pause. “I am really nervous about it. I cannot help them now, so I try to help Ukrainian people here.”
For many, Ukraine has been transformed in only days by a sense of unity and type of patriotism that can emerge only from the most trying of times.
“When everything was OK, we were constantly arguing,” Mrs. Makarova said. “Ukrainians are people who argue about everything. But from the morning of [Feb. 24], everyone is united. Every person in Ukraine will do everything they can and sacrifice everything they have to get our country back.”
• Joseph Clark can be reached at jclark@washingtontimes.com.
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