Page 9 - BusinessWest June 27, 2022

Paul Kozub says his trip to the border in March was surreal in many respects and included work as a “war correspondent.”
they were leaving.
“The stories of atrocities that we’re now hear-
ing every day ... I was hearing them in the begin- ning,” he went on. “It is so unbelievable that this is going on today; it’s very heartbreaking, and you just don’t want to believe that it’s true.”
While there are still some people leaving Ukraine for Poland, much of the activity is now
“As we were driving toward the border, and as we got to within 10 miles of the border, there
was nobody ... no cars going in our direction; instead, we saw all the buses going in the other direction.”
moving in the other direction, with many return- ing to the country they fled. Still there are mil- lions still in Poland forging a new life for them- selves there, a challenge made simpler by the Polish government’s decision to change its law and allow people from the Ukraine (which is not part of the European Union) to come into that country and work and start businesses.
Kozub
Continued on page 47
adding that the sights from those days remain with him even though the scene has changed, as have the needs of the refugees that have made their way to Poland.
While what he saw was disturbing on many levels, so too was what he heard from some of those he encountered, he said, noting that he has come to understand the Polish language, which
is very similar to what is spoken in Ukraine. “We could understand most of what they
were saying,” he noted. “We would see the cars of people driving into Poland, and they would have pieces of paper in the window with ‘ditya,’ which is ‘child’ in Russian written on them. We were hearing stories that the Russians were shooting at them; they were bombing these lines of cars as
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BusinessWest FEATURE JUNE 27, 2022 9