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Pete Schmigs Ukrainian journalist Sydney reports from Warsava Poland March 31, 2022

Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Pete SCHMIGS , comments closed
Arrived late in Warsaw and spent time on the tasks that go with working on an overseas project: getting electrical adapters; stocking breakfast food for the days when that will be the only meal; making sure cameras and phones are charged…
The boredom of preparation and expectation soon to be replaced by the blur of purpose and execution.
It’s always risky to think that God’s talking to you. Too often that can be self-rationalising our choices, or arrogantly suggesting some special relationship that one might have compared to others.
But it makes sense to spot signs and to hear hints in context and surroundings. It helps us in fact to make sense.
At one end of my street here in Warsaw, a modern fashionable place, there is a big sign in Ukrainian and Polish of “We Are With You”. And everywhere else, as others have now noted, there are Ukrainian flags in windows and flying from buses, and blue-and-gold ribbons attached to sweaters of solidarity. Even the self-serve machines in KFC have added Ukrainian as a language in which to order.
I watched two young daughters of what was unmistakenly a refugee family being allowed the treat of KFC at the end of a day. Mum, in stylish leather pants, stood outside. She vaped. Her eyes were dark and looking into the busy street.
At her feet, a huge used blue IKEA bag filled with groceries and various items from a humanitarian give-away. Moisturiser, deodorant, dishwashing liquid, baby oil – all the unguents that keep us moving along normally.
At the other end of my street is a park and a statue dedicated to Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, who wrote of freedom and suffered from its denial by Russian czars. A reminder that what we see today in Ukraine is not one-off. That “the orcs” as they’re called in this war have invaded their neighbour at least once a century since the 13th century. That this struggle has been around for hundreds of years. It’s what Ukrainians do to prove they exist and to claim what is their’s.
At Shevchenko’s monument, the words are apt. They are about extending hands and hearts to the Kozak past so that we can renew our peaceful land.
Directly outside my building, there is another monument. Votive candles at its base. For the one hundred regular Poles summarily executed by the Nazis at that spot in August 1944 as one of many reprisals for the Warsaw Uprising. A horrible history that no doubt drives Poles’ commitment to the current cause.
As the Germans should have been retreating, the Red Army held up its advance just east of Warsaw. Stalin effectively chose to let the Germans regroup and lay waste to Warsaw and the Polish Home Army. Some 20,000 Poles needlessly died. Sadly, I can’t help think of Putin’s murder of Mariupol.
The Poles know what fascism looks like – and it’s not what hipster commentators in the West accuse some of their politicians of now. They know it must be fought – not trembled in fear before and then somehow accommodated. Not just Ukrainians, but the world should be grateful to the Poles for their current leadership while others cower.
Tomorrow at 0730, I will leave this street and these signs – whoever they may be from and whatever I choose to make them mean. Operation “Palyanytsya” has given me the opportunity to tag along with a supply shipment to the border and to learn on the job what and how it works with Ukrainians in need. I look forward to meeting the American and Ukrainian crew of medicos and military lads it’s put together – knowing that each of them will be more capable than this scribbler and washed-up political McGiver.
It will be a long day and, at our destination, I will no doubt see many whose lives have been reduced to that one used IKEA bag, or knapsack from Plast, or rolling suitcase with wonky wheels. Bundles of loss, maybe.
My body is older than ever, and it looks it and it feels it, but I am keen in the way I was in the 80s when I was a very small part of system that snuck support to Ukrainian dissidents in the USSR from its then borderlands. Indeed, many have done this before – resisted and renewed – and that gives strength to an old man with only a camera that is locked and loaded.