A group of Ukrainians have tidied up a park and other public spaces as a way of expressing gratitude to the Polish city that has taken in them and around 1,000 other refugees.
“We wanted to repay the city and the people that live here for welcoming us,” Irina Koval, one of the Ukrainians involved in the gesture, told TVN24. “They gave us a home, food, clothes. We are happy that at least we can say thank you for it.”
The group of around 30 Ukrainians asked the municipal authorities if they could carry out the action, which was then coordinated with the city’s roads and greenery department. There is a tradition in Ukraine, known as subotnik, of clearing up public areas in spring, Irina, a refugee from Zaporizhzhia, told TVP.
Suwałki, a city of 70,000 residents in northeast Poland, has taken in around a thousand refugees from Ukraine, estimate the local authorities. Many more have passed through on their way to the Baltic States, with Suwałki located around 25 kilometres from the Lithuanian border.
Local authorities have provided places in shelters for hundreds of refugees over the last month and many residents have also hosted families in their homes. The mayor, Czesław Renkiewicz, said two weeks ago that he was working on a mechanism to exempt those who host refugees from property tax.
The city has also launched a bilingual service providing information to refugees and those who wish to help them. It extended the working hours of municipal offices to help Ukrainians to register for Polish identity numbers. Local schools have also started teaching dozens of new Ukrainian pupils.
The situation in Suwałki reflects in microcosm the situation across Poland as a whole, where a combination of national and local authorities, civil society, businesses and other groups have rallied to support, house and in other ways help refugees from Ukraine.
Among the roughly four million people to have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion, around two thirds (almost 2.4 million) have crossed into Poland. While some of those have then moved on elsewhere, it is believed that the majority have remained in Poland.
Around 300,000 are currently in Warsaw alone, meaning that the city’s population has increased by around 17% in the space of a month. Kraków has seen a similar rise.
Main image credit: Miłosz Kozakiewicz/UM Suwałki (press materials)
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
