It’s 11:30 a.m. at Krakow Main Station and Ruslana Shtuka is desperate for some fresh air.
She and her friend, Anya Pariy, are Ukrainian refugees who’ve spent the last hour sorting through cardboard boxes full of children’s clothing in a dim tent just outside the train terminal of Poland’s second city.
As Shtuka, 30, and Pariy, 25, push their shared black stroller around a historic square, they pass Italian tourists and shoppers with designer handbags in the sunshine, a world away from the war in Ukraine.
The two mothers left Mykolaiv four days ago as Russian forces began bombing the southern Ukrainian city, which sits on the mouth of the Black Sea. They’ve been sleeping in a temporary shelter near the station for two nights. Shtuka and Pariy are heading soon to the Polish city of Poznan, where they have been promised jobs and places to stay.
When Shtuka called her mother to check if she was safe, she told her daughter not to return.
“She said, ‘there’s nothing to return to, just nothing,'” Shtuka says, staring straight ahead. Snow is falling in Mykolaiv and the morgues are already full. “She said, ‘just try to settle there and maybe we will come later.'”
Back in Krakow’s sun-drenched square, Shtuka’s daughter Alina tosses a chunk of ice, left from a Christmas skating rink, until it crumbles into small snowy shards. “Mama, mama, did you see me throw it?” the little girl says.
By noon, both Shtuka and Pariy begin making their way back inside the station, where hundreds of newly arrived refugees wait in small groups in the multi-story terminal.
Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine over three weeks ago, more than 3.3 million people, mostly women and children, have fled, more than half of them to Poland. Krakow Main has become an artery for thousands as they make their way to accommodation around the country or to travel onwards to the rest of Europe.
The station is a modernist maze of train platforms and bus terminals, all connected to Galeria Krakowska, a busy shopping mall where businessmen scroll on their iPhones and sip Starbucks next to teens posing for Instagram in their Doc Marten boots. In the span of one hectic 24 hours at the station, the lives of ordinary commuters and shoppers intersect with the harried path of war refugees, who roll their suitcases to an uncertain future.
