After a network of Polish activists helped her family escape the invasion of Ukraine, Monica Marks has spent a lot of time talking about angels.
“I call them angels, because that’s what they feel like,” said Marks. “I’m not a religious person. But it’s hard to talk about them without using the language of faith.”
Russian troops attacked Ukraine on Feb. 24, and since then a flood of at least 1.7 million Ukrainian refugees have escaped to neighboring nations that flung open their borders.
But not all refugees received the same welcome.
Many of the thousands of Africans and Middle Easterners living in Ukraine reported discrimination, exclusion and even detention at border crossings.
Marks feared that her partner’s uncle, Osman Al-Hifnawi — a Palestinian Jordanian who’d been living in Kharkiv for decades — could suffer the same fate.
As explosions rocked Kharkiv, Al-Hifnawi’s extended family begged him to leave. But information was scarce. He and his Ukrainian wife, Yulia, had two children to protect. Russian troops grew closer each hour.
They didn’t know whether trains were still running. Worse, they weren’t sure his Jordanian passport would grant him passage to Poland.
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But Marks, a New York University professor based in Abu Dhabi, had a thick list of contacts.
“I turned my whole network upside down and I shook it,” Marks said. “And some true guardian angels fell out.”
“Get in touch with me,” read the fateful initial message from Dominika Ozynska. “I might be able to help.”
Ozynska, it turned out, was working with a loose organization of Polish activists, concerned citizens and non-governmental groups that had banded together under the name Grupa Granica, Polish for “Border Group.”
Since the early days of the Russian attack, the group has helped coordinate a caravan of hundreds of cars, buses and vans to ferry refugees across the Polish-Ukrainian border.
They focused especially on visibly non-white refugees who might otherwise be subject to discrimination — smoothing the way with border guards, and providing access to humanitarian lawyers.
With Ozynska’s help, Al-Hifnawi and his family found a route to flee Kharkiv by train even as Russian bombs pounded the center of their city. They rode all night, in passenger cars filled to many times their capacity.
When they arrived at the Lviv train station, near the Polish border, Ozynska’s friend Jan was there to greet them. He drove them to the border and then to Warsaw, where another of her friends offered a temporary place to stay.
No matter how many times Marks tried, no one would accept money even for expenses.
“It’s an act of enormous generosity,” she said. “They have experience of what the border is like. They have contacts with lawyers if you get snagged on any document-related trip wires. This is especially important for non-Ukrainians and people of color.”
In gratitude, Marks marshaled her own reach on social media to help other refugees find the same safety as her family. For the past week she has spent most of her waking hours on the phone, connecting African and Middle Eastern refugees to travel information or to Ozynska’s informal network of friends and activists.
“When I wake up in the morning, I have a sore right arm and a sore right thumb,” said Marks. “One day I will joke with Dominika that it would have been easier if she just let me send the money.”
Racial discrimination at Polish border
Ozynska began working with Grupa Granica to assist with another border crisis altogether. In winter, hundreds of Middle Eastern refugees were caught in freezing temperatures in the forests between Poland and Belarus, facing both barbed wire and soldiers at the border.
“Belarus was pushing them onto Polish sites in the forest,” Ozynska said. “And then Polish border guards were sending them back.”
At least eight refugees died in the forest, the Associated Press reported, even as Ozynska and other humanitarians brought food and medical aid.
“I was stopped numerous times by police, having my car searched, my bag searched, having to explain why I have warm soup in my backpack, why I have socks in my backpack,” she recalled. “We were treated like criminals for trying to help.”
When the Polish government extended its welcome to all Ukrainian refugees, it felt to Ozynska like a shocking reversal.
“We don’t understand why the response was so different before.” Ozynska said. “The first two, three days in Poland especially, almost all citizens of Poland rushed to help the Ukrainians.”
The Polish people volunteered their cars, their apartments, and their time.
But then activists began to notice a disturbing pattern. Some Polish people offering rides balked when the refugees turned out to be African, Middle Eastern or Roma (traditionally itinerant peoples whose origins are in South Asia but who now live primarily in Europe). So did some offering accommodations.
Ozynska began to hear reports of African or Middle Eastern refugees stranded on the Ukrainian side of the border, or sent to crowded refugee centers.
“This has been really bittersweet,” she said. “To see so many people organized in Poland to help is really heartwarming. But when you hear such information — that they’re willing to help, but only Ukrainian citizens? For me this is really horrible.”
Car caravan for African, Middle Eastern refugees
Volunteers and activists had to change their focus, Ozynska said, building a network of drivers and safe accommodations for those who might face discrimination in Ukraine or at the border.
Margaret Amaka Ohia-Nowak, a Nigerian-Polish academic and anti-discrimination activist, also began hearing reports of discrimination the day after the Russian attack.
“At the border, there were two lines. One line was for white Ukrainians, and the other one was for ‘foreigners,’ ” she said. “Apparently most of the ‘foreigners’ — and I know this from people on the ground — were people of color.”
Officially, Polish officials have told her race is not a factor in issues at the border. But the situation on the ground appeared otherwise, she said.
“Black people experience on a daily basis that their documents are always double-searched, that they are always suspected not to be documented,” Ohia-Nowak said. “Individual prejudices played a role. But when those prejudices are performed by representatives of the state, then it becomes systemic.”
Ohia-Nowak began contacting other Nigerians and activists, asking what she could do to help.
“Somehow it just all started, I don’t really know how. At some point I was coordinating so many connections between people,” she said. “Those that were stranded at the border, or somewhere in the middle of Ukraine. People pushed out of the trains or buses, in the middle of nowhere.”
The job wasn’t done when refugees reached Poland, Ohia-Nowak said. For non-white people traveling from Ukraine, the difference between traveling with assistance and traveling alone could be stark.
Africans seeking accommodation were sometimes victimized by robbers or scam artists, Ohia-Nowak said. And in the border towns of Przemyśl and Lublin, Polish nationalists patrolled the streets.
“There were groups of hooligans… who were chasing people — or actually hunting people,” she said. “Hunting, and waiting for people of color and Black people to arrive.”
Ozynska said she heard from a Polish woman who’d been horrified to see a Syrian family accosted in the street. The woman invited the family to stay with her. But when they tried to cook her a meal in thanks, said Ozynska, they were not allowed to shop at the local grocery store.
Incidents of racial discrimination are not new, said Ohia-Nowak. But in circumstances of such dire emergency, they were exhausting.
“This brought a lot of emotions,” she said, “but also a lot of motivation.”
For now, she said, she’s trying to keep focused on what’s possible: the often overwhelming job of helping refugees find temporary housing, and a trip across the border.
“I gave up thinking that I would change the world, or that I would save the world,” Ohia-Nowak said. “But I’m trying. And I’m striving. And I still kind of believe idealistically that something will change. That’s the only thing I think I can do.”
Matthew Korfhage is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network’s Atlantic Region How We Live team. Email: mkorfhage@gannettnj.com | Twitter: @matthewkorfhage
