On the day that the number of refugees fleeing Ukraine officially passed 2 million, Maarten Roelofs from the Netherlands was focused on finding just one of them – a woman, 33-weeks pregnant, who could give birth at any moment.
At the thronging Medyka border-crossing into Poland, Maarten and his neighbour Hans van Wyk split up to cover the exits, holding up hand-made signs that said “Ellen” and peered urgently into the faces of the exhausted women streaming endlessly towards them.
The two men had driven 15 hours from Haarlem and had arrived at 9.30am on Tuesday morning. Hans, 47, an event manager, had never met Ellen and only had a photograph to rely on. But Maarten, 49, who owns a digital design company, knew Ellen as the wife of a former employee who had fled Donetsk and then Kyiv - and whose husband had desperately turned to him for help.
“Maarten sent out a WhatsApp to our street group and asked if someone could accompany him on a 15-hour drive to bring Ellen to safety,” said Hans.
“I thought, yes, I can do that and so I took off work. We have been here a few hours and it is dramatic and completely heartbreaking. I cannot imagine the stress of leaving homes and husbands and, in Ellen’s, case being heavily pregnant with her first baby and having to flee bombing and shelling not once but twice.”
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They were just two of a growing but indeterminate number of people who have travelled across Europe “to lend a hand”, often to save friends of friends or people they barely know.
At Medyka and two other border points we visited, we spoke to people who had driven in from Switzerland, Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic and Portugal, some holding crude signs like Maarten and Hans, and many waiting up to 24 hours in the freezing cold to pick people up.
These were ordinary people doing extraordinary things - their heart-warming acts of kindness leavening an otherwise bleak and pitiful scene at the border.
Among these unsung heroes was Nick Horseman, 62, known by officials at the Korczowa border point as “the man from London” – even though he is from Hampshire. Nick, a semi-retired, self-made millionaire who lives in a £3m house in the village of Hook, took 30 hours to drive to the Polish Ukrainian border four days ago.
His aim was to bring in essential provisions and medical supplies, but he was so moved by the scale of the unfolding human disaster that he had stayed to help.
He has since ferried 20 women and children (and the occasional dog) to safety, driving 14 hours a day and spending £3,000 of his own money to pay for their first night’s accommodation in a hotel and hot meals on their way to wherever they ask to go.
We met Nick at the McDonald’s over the road from a giant humanitarian aid centre that has been set up a few miles from the border in Przemysl where thousands of refugees waited in a massive, emptied out mall amid mountains of aid clothing and people dispensing hot food – and then later accompanied him to Przemysl station where 1,500 more Ukrainians arrived on the 6.15pm train from Lviv.
The destination showing at the front of the train, lit up in orange, had been changed from Przemysl to two words: “Putin D***head.”
Nick said: “When I arrived on Saturday, it was much more chaotic at the Medyka and Korczowa reception centres than it is now and you had a real sense of women and children in peril. People were exhausted and desperate. You would tell the official where you were driving and he would shout “Krakow” and point to you and suddenly you would have women and children surging towards you. The hardest part was that I could only take four people in my car and so I had to choose.”
Nick, a divorced father of two who is dyslexic and left school at 14, said he was moved to come because he found himself glued to TV coverage for days and decided he could no longer stand idly by.
“My father was a war hero, he fought with the Desert Rats and was held in a POW camp in Poland for three years after being captured in north Africa,” he said. “He survived the death marches at the end of the war but he was skeletal and weighed just six-and-a-half stone.”
None of his family background was uppermost as he drove to a coffee shop in Folkestone where they had been collecting aid for Ukrainians.
“We loaded my car to the gunnels with blankets, sleeping bags, chocolate, non-prescription medicines, toothpaste and children’s boots and I headed for Poland,” he said.
Nick’s intention was to drop off the goods and bring a refugee family back to the UK to put up in his home, hoping the regulations regarding Ukrainian refugees would have been eased. But when that didn’t happen – the UK have taken just 300 Ukrainians compared to 2,200 in Ireland and more than 1 million entering Poland – he decided to pitch in as he could. The first family he took, two sisters and their children, asked to go to an address three-and-a-half hours away in Krakow.
“They had been queuing for 30 hours at the border and as soon as they got in the car, the children immediately collapsed and fell asleep,” he said.
“I will never forget how the mothers looked around at their sleeping children and tears just rolled down their cheeks.”
He added: “When I dropped them in Krakow, the one mother said to me, ‘I didn’t realise there were people like you in the world’. It made me feel so inadequate to receive such extreme gratitude for such a small gesture.”
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He got back in his car and drove back to the border and loaded up with four more women and children.
“Some of them had horrific video footage they told me they had taken themselves on their phones. One woman showed me an animal rescue RSPCA officer being shot dead by Russian soldiers while trying to feed the growing number of stray dogs foraging for food across the city. Another showed me her block of flats with huge chunks missing. All had stories of husbands left behind to fight in Kyiv and Kharkiv, or wherever they came from.”
Nick was aware, too, of dark rumours circulating that some men picking up women at the border could be people traffickers masquerading as helpers. Signs at the reception centres gave women advice on how to protect themselves.
“It is a major concern,” said Nick. “There are no checks on the drivers by the authorities at all. I was very worried about it, but then I decided it’s not a good enough reason to stop helping. I was supposed to be walking the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain this week, but I have decided to stay a week or two more, as long as I can make a difference.”
Meanwhile Maarten had news to report. “Ellen has come through the border, we have got her and five other refugees including another pregnant woman and her child who needs to go to hospital,” he texted yesterday afternoon. Late last night I got another text. “Arrived in Dresden. Have sent the family of 5 (2 kids + pregnant woman + grandmother) to a refugee home.” Ellen, he added, was “dead tired” and resting in a hotel. “It’s so sad. She didn’t want to leave her husband and is afraid she won’t see him again. Tomorrow we will take her to a relative in Holland.”
Additional reporting, translating, by Sofiia Sas
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