Diaries from Przemysl: Part One

Date Published: 31.05.2022

During March-April 2022, Wadham lecturer in Russian translated at a train station 10km from the Polish-Ukrainian border.

Adapted from Pany's March 28 letter back to the UK

"Where did you learn to speak such good Russian?"

Pany would answer this question 8-10 times a day.

Pany teaches Russian at university. He's a lecturer for Wadham. Over Easter, Pany took his Russian language skills to the small town of Przemysl, where he worked at the train station located 10km from the Ukrainian border.

"On the surface there isn't anything striking about the station," Pany writes. But then you notice the peculiarities. "Nearly all those travelling are women and children..."

Endless flows of homeless, displaced people moved through the station. Many travelling abroad for the first time. Berlin, Hannover, Giesen, Bielefeld, Prague, Krakow, Warsaw, Gdynia, Gdansk: places picked because of ties as weak as a cousin or grandchild there.

"Nearly all volunteers, police officers, and soldiers at the station only speak Polish," Pany explains. But many of the people they are there to help don't speak Polish. They don't speak English either.

"Nearly all volunteers, police officers, and soldiers at the station only speak Polish."

Pany was part of a small group – about five at the start – doing translation work. They helped people understand the architecture of the station as quickly as possible: where the food is, where the toilets are, where they can sleep, where they can get medicine. They helped them to their final destinations as quickly as possible.

In his first diary entry, Pany recalls two women waiting in a queue to get a train to Berlin and, from there, to Rotterdam. Due to language barriers, they did not know there was no direct train to Berlin that day, and that the next day's train was fully booked. "Without us they would have taken 3-4 extra days to travel to the Netherlands and would have spent 3-4 days sleeping in a refugee camp in a repurposed Tesco on foldup beds or thin mattresses laid out on a cold floor."

Many have been travelling to Przemysl for several days from bomb-hit towns where they have had to bury loved ones in mass graves. Some haven't sleep for over 20 days for fear of getting killed during unexpected shelling. Small-scale, personal acts of assistance seem to be able to make a big difference to people’s lives at this given moment.

Pany hears many of their stories. As he wrote back to the UK during his stay, he shared some of these stories. "One fears that the hundreds of thousands of individual accounts about the events of the past five weeks will somehow be lost," he says. Pany was only able to jot down the outlines of a few stories he heard. Still, over the next few posts in this series we'll publish those stories, and Pany's as part of the witness to these extraordinary and tragic events.

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KHARPP: The Kharkiv and Przemysl project

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