Nantucket Cares Lifts Spirits In Poland

“I’m struggling with the fact that our team of eight is experiencing things today that are impossible to put into words,” Tom McCann wrote from Poland this week in a message to friends and family back home on Nantucket. McCann and the group of island residents who banded together to take part in the Nantucket Cares aid mission for Ukrainian refugees have spent the past week trying to share as much love and support as possible. Since our last update on Wednesday, their journey has taken them from small villages to the Warsaw train station, and finally to the hometown of Nantucket Cares member Kasia Chmielewska Rodriguez, a native of Poland.

“Watching this horror on American television is far from how bad this situation really is,” McCann wrote. “On a TV segment you can’t feel the pain, anger, fright, and so many more emotions that all of us felt first hand the last two days. I know the members of the Nantucket Cares team, like myself, are more dedicated than ever before, more than even they could imagine when they signed on to this journey.”

On Wednesday, Nantucket Cares delivered supplies and groceries to two more refugee camps in the villages of Brusy and Osiek. Meeting with the mayor of Brusy, they pledged to sponsor the town’s community center at $5,000 a month for three months.

At the community center, they met nearly a hundred refugees, including a Ukrainian man in his seventies, who was the first male refugee the group had encountered. The rest were back in Ukraine fighting the Russians.

“Every woman we spoke to had either a husband, brother or father back in Ukraine fighting for freedom,” said Nantucket Cares member Yulia Novak, shortly after leaving the community center. “Some of the woman had lost loved ones and now have no one to go back to.”

Many of the woman arrived in Poland with little more than the clothes on their backs, having sought shelter in Ukraine for what they thought would be a single night but what ultimately led to them permanently evacuating the country.

On their fourth day in the country, Nantucket Cares went to the train station in Warsaw where busloads of refugees were arriving. While Jonathan Rodriguez, Chris Yates and others volunteered dishing out meals at World Central Kitchen, McCann began buying train tickets for refugees who had arrived without any money. For the next twelve hours, he saw to it that a hundred families were able to board trains bound to relatives and contacts living in France, Italy, Germany, Bulgaria, England and elsewhere in Europe.

While volunteering with the World Central Kitchen group in Warsaw, Nantucket Cares member Brian McKernan said they were "serving food to line after line after line of women and children looking for food. We are prohibited from taking pictures of what is unfolding in front of our eyes. If you’ve ever seen movies of refugees coming off trains after WW2 looking for food and shelter, you will get the picture. Horrible. And in this, we stand working with people from all over the world, not even being able to communicate with most of them and yet all working together helping these innocent people, many in tears. Many remind me of my mother and grandmother and kids with nothing left but a small bag of articles and clothing."

In the photo above, Nantucket Cares member Jacquie Colgan shared a very poignant story of a mother and son fleeing the war.

“Please believe me what you see.

Elena wants everyone to know that the atrocities committed by the Russians are real," Colgan relayed. "Her husband joined the army to fight and she fled with young Georgie. He is autistic, has Asbergers, and is ADHD. He has been suffering with tics since the bombings in his town. In Poland they stayed in a shelter, but they were kicked out because of her son’s constant outbursts. She was given an apartment for one week and has no idea where she will go from there. Although her husband was to send her his small army salary, the paperwork has not processed. Not only does she not have that, but she fears that if he dies she will not receive a widow’s pension. She tells me that she must plan her life as if she is already a widow as that is not an unlikely outcome. She would join the army were it not for her son. She is in such despair that she said she would just like to go home, but if something were to happen to her son, it would be as if she had killed him herself. We gave her money and arranged for her son to see a doctor (she had no more of his meds). She will set up a bank account and send me the account information."