Cork convoy diary: Volunteers refused entry to neutral zone

CORK Humanitarian Aid Ireland’s convoy was last night forced to turn back from the Ukrainian border in Poland after Polish border officials refused them permission to bring humanitarian aid into the neutral zone between the two countries.

The group had hoped to give six tonnes of aid to a Kyiv-based cardiologist who had made the hazardous journey to Poland. However, border officials, who had been letting Polish vehicles into the neutral zone, refused to let them through.

The group, which is made up of 10 volunteers from Cork charities Cork City Missing Persons Search and Recovery (CCMPSAR) and Cork Penny Dinners, had brought five vans — each containing approximately three tonnes of humanitarian aid donated by the people of Cork — to Poland, to help Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of their country.

The convoy left Cork on Tuesday afternoon and drove across Europe.

Yesterday evening, the Cork volunteers arrived at the Medyka border crossing near the city of Przemyśl, where they had planned to give Dr Anastasia Volkova, a Kyiv-based cardiologist, six tonnes of humanitarian aid in the neutral zone between the two countries.

Border officials, who were said by local sources to have doubled security at the crossing in recent days, told the volunteers they could not enter the neutral zone but were welcome to cross the border into Ukraine. However, the officials said they could not guarantee how quickly the volunteers would be allowed back into Poland.

Cork Penny Dinners co-ordinator Caitríona Twomey, who is travelling with the convoy in a personal capacity, said the group felt they had little choice but to turn back.

“We are absolutely heartbroken for Anastasia and we are hoping to find some other way to get aid to her, but we were left with no choice in the short term.”

Ms Twomey said it had been distressing to see so many people waiting at the border in sub-zero temperatures and she said the group intended to return to the border in the coming days with aid for refugees at the border.

“The people of Cork have shown incredible generosity in supporting our appeal and these are the people they wanted us to help,” Ms Twomey said.

She added that the group planned to meet with Redemptorist priests working in Ukraine and hoped to give them several tonnes of humanitarian aid.

Earlier yesterday, the Cork volunteers arrived at Medyka, near the city of Przemyśl.

At Tarnów, a city of 107,500 people in south eastern Poland two hours from the Ukrainian border, the group had delivered medical supplies, children’s clothing, nappies, and food to a makeshift refugee reception centre at Tarnów train station,

At the makeshift refugee reception centre , The Echo spoke with a family of refugees who had left the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro earlier in the day.

The adults had no English, but Yarek, aged 12, said he and his 10-year-old sister Anna had arrived in Tarnów with his grandad, his two grannies, and their mother.

“It was very scary when we were leaving Dnipro, but now it is not so scary,” Yarek said, adding that he and his family know nobody in Poland but they felt safer to be away from the bombs.

Shortly after Yarek spoke with The Echo, three airstrikes on Dnipro, which left at least one person dead, were reported. Ukrainian authorities said one of the strikes was near a kindergarten.

One city official in Tarnów said they were encouraging refugees to stay in their city, which is a major stop on the main train line from Lviv to Kraków, as they were in a better position to help people than some of the larger cities, which she described as “overwhelmed”.

Yesterday morning, the Cork volunteers met Jonah Lowenstein, a 21-year-old student from London who travelled to the Ukrainian border with his 57-year-old father, Paul.

Jonah Lowenstein, who said he had fond memories of childhood holidays in Crookhaven, said they had come to Medykja from the UK with a van of humanitarian aid “to show it could be done”.

He said that, for his father and him, it was a matter of family honour to help people fleeing tyranny.

“We are German Jews, and the trauma of 1945 looms very large over my family, as all of my great-grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz.

“We felt we could not sit idly by as people were driven from their homes by the invading forces of a dictator, so we organised what supplies we could and came out to Poland to help them in their hour of need.”

The student said he and his father were on their way home to the UK, having delivered their van load to Medyka.

They had met “huge numbers” of refugees at the Ukrainian border, mainly women and children, who were traumatised by what they had experienced, he said.

With night-time temperatures along the border dipping to -10C, cold is a concern for aid workers attending to refugees.

“We saw a lot of people huddling in the cold, pushing supermarket trollies full of their belongings and trying to pass food through the fence to people on the other side of the wire, and it’s just chaos there,” Jonah Lowenstein explained.

“It’s so slow and cold and people are existing in soul-crushing boredom at the border crossings.”