Poland accepted 2.9 million Ukrainians out of 5 million who went abroad because of the war.
Poland can no longer cope with the flow refugees from Ukraine. The country’s resources, including volunteers, housing and jobs, are being depleted.
This is reported NBC News.
Thousands of people in Poland mobilized at the start of the all-out war in Ukraine to welcome Ukrainians into their homes. But since then, finding housing has become more difficult.
Polish families wishing to take in refugees have already filled the vacant rooms. The number of apartments for rent in Warsaw has decreased significantly. Rental prices have risen more than 30 percent since the end of February.
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Due to the lack of housing, many Ukrainians are forced to stay in mass shelters, which are adapted for a short stay (to sleep and eat, and then go to another country or find housing in Poland). One of these was the exhibition center on the outskirts of Warsaw.
Today, the center is increasingly home to large families who find it difficult to find a Polish family willing to host a large number of people for free and a suitable cheap apartment to rent.
There is also no one to accompany and provide assistance to refugees – fewer and fewer people agree to be volunteers.
Adriana Porowska, a Polish social worker, told reporters that in late February she was barely able to follow the flow of people signing up to help Ukrainian refugees arriving in Warsaw. After 9 weeks of war, the search for volunteers becomes a test.
“New people don’t come to volunteers, they just leave. Those who sign up have to do more work, and they get even more tired,” she said.
Porowska herself says that she has hardly been at home for the past two months.
“I just hope my husband doesn’t divorce me and my son doesn’t leave me. But really I hope the volunteers don’t leave me,” she joked.
Employment has become another major challenge for some refugees. By the beginning of the war, there were many vacancies in Poland. But it was already difficult for refugees who did not speak Polish or English to find work. The vast majority of refugees are women and children. Women are forced to compete for a limited number of jobs that can meet childcare needs.
“There are a lot of refugees looking for work, and there aren’t that many job openings,” said Taras Tsymbalyuk, an international employment organization manager who helps refugees at the Warsaw exhibition center find jobs.
There are also problems with the provision of public services such as education. Distance learning is still available to many refugee students. But many parents are looking for opportunities to keep their children in school. More than 190,000 Ukrainian children are registered in Polish schools, and this number is predicted to grow to 700,000.
Schools that are ready to accept Ukrainian children face a shortage of money, space and teachers. Ewa Pietrikiewicz, director of a private school in Warsaw, rented additional premises, hired more teachers and doubled class sizes since the start of the war. The school receives money from the state to help Ukrainians, but relies primarily on private donations. Now money is sorely lacking.
“We can expand and rent more space, but we don’t have the money for that anymore. Buying essentials like toilet paper is a difficult task,” Petrikevich says.
Poland received approximately 2.9 million of the more than 5 million Ukrainians who fled the country. In the capital, Warsaw, the population has grown by about 15 percent since the start of the war.
Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski warned that Warsaw was “overcrowded” and unable to take in the new wave of refugees expected as Russia concentrated its attacks on eastern Ukraine.
“Long term, we foresee quite a lot of problems, and this is putting a huge strain on the city,” he said Tuesday in an interview with MSNBC.
Trzaskowski predicts that people in Poland may begin to resist supporting refugees unless more is done to help cities like Warsaw.
“As this crisis continues and city services are overwhelmed… We can expect a bit of a backlash. That’s why we need a system, we need to share the burden,” the mayor says.
As UNIAN reported earlier, the Polish authorities expressed the hope that refugees themselves will ask to be resettled in other cities when life in crowded cities becomes unbearable.
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