In Warsaw Park, Ukraine’s Teen Refugees Hang Out and Hang On

WARSAW — Each afternoon at a park outdoors a distinctively Stalinesque skyscraper in central Warsaw, scores of Ukrainian youngsters come collectively. They’re younger refugees, attempting to manage.

Many have give up college to float round Warsaw, rootless, misplaced even, as younger as 14 or 15, smoking cigarettes and swigging low-cost beer. They collect beneath the maple bushes, enjoying Ping-Pong or sprawling out on the benches, heads in one another’s laps, questioning what to do.

“I’ve seen some wild stuff right here,” stated Mark, an 18-year-old Ukrainian who was hanging out the opposite day within the park. “Knives. Weapons. Drunk children preventing.”

The teenager years are onerous sufficient anyplace. Our bodies change. Carefree childhood swirls away. Every thing will get extra critical so quick.

However for the a million or so Ukrainian teen refugees, it’s just like the mirror they have been peering into, attempting to determine their futures, exploded of their faces.

Simply as they have been changing into adults, Covid upended the world. And simply because the pandemic was lastly lifting, their nation was invaded and flung into battle. Their households have been break up up. Their cities have been bombed. They fled to international lands and 4 months later, with the battle nonetheless raging, they don’t know when, or even when, they are going to ever go house.

“Each day I have to select,” stated Mark, who escaped Ukraine proper earlier than his 18th birthday to keep away from navy service and didn’t need to share his final title for worry of being punished or, at a minimal, ostracized if he returns. “I may come right here and hang around with my mates and have a very good day. Or I may return to my room and research and have a very good future.”

“Man,” he stated, smiling an enthralling younger man’s smile. “I actually want I may very well be a 15-year-old boy once more who didn’t have to consider the long run.”

A trademark of any battle is youngsters on the transfer. Lots of them. Terrified. Fleeing one thing they don’t perceive. Going someplace they don’t know. Consider the Kindertransport of Jewish youngsters earlier than World Battle II. Or the Misplaced Boys of Sudan, trekking by a hellscape of violence and drought to stumble half useless into Kenyan refugee camps.

Ukraine created an exodus of younger folks, too. As quickly as Russia invaded, numerous dad and mom made the agonizing resolution to uproot their youngsters and get them to security. Most crossed into neighboring international locations with their mothers however with out their dads, due to Ukraine’s restrictions on navy age males, 18-60, leaving the nation.

However some teenagers took off with none mum or dad. The New York Occasions interviewed a half dozen within the span of a pair days in Warsaw. They have been put within the palms of fleeing mates or household, or, in some instances, they crossed worldwide borders alone. Sprinkled all through Warsaw in rented flats, or with Polish households, or some by themselves in dorms, these are the refugees who face the very best dangers.

“The little children will combine. The adults will get jobs,” stated Krzysztof Gorniak, a chef in Warsaw who runs a number of nonprofits serving to refugees.

However the youngsters, he stated, “don’t know if they need to construct a life right here or simply spend time ingesting, doing medication and enjoying.”

Maxym Kutsyk, a 17-year-old orphan, stated he had left with out permission from a youth hostel in central Ukraine.

“It was a matter of hazard and security,” he stated, about fleeing the battle. “But it surely was one thing else,” he defined. “I needed to get out. I needed to see the world.”

Now he lives along with his half sister, her three younger youngsters and her boyfriend close to Warsaw in a tiny slit of an house.

The youth hostel Maxym fled, the final stage in Ukraine’s orphanage system, was tied to a vocational college. However in Warsaw, he’s not taking any courses — he’s not — and avoids eye contact and stands barely stooped, like bracing for a blow. The spotlight of his week is a boxing class, however he’s holding on to a dream.

“I need to go to the US,” he stated. “It’s very stunning there.”

How does he know?

“I’ve watched TikTok.”

Throughout city within the fairly, quiet neighborhood of Muranow, Katya Sundukova, 13, works on her drawings. As she clutches a pencil and leans over a black-and-white sketch, her pink Mona Lisa socks peeking out, she radiates an depth.

She wears huge headphones and listens to Tchaikovsky and Japanese hip-hop. Individuals are speaking within the room and shifting out and in however her consideration is targeted purely on the pencil in her hand and the figures rising.

“I see the battle as pointless,” she had stated in an earlier dialog. “I stored asking my mother: Why did they assault us? I by no means obtained a solution.”

Firstly of the battle, the explosions in Kyiv, the place Katya lived, disturbed her.

“She simply sat in her room speaking to her cat,” stated her mom, Olga. “Her interlocutor was the cat.”

Her mom made the tough resolution to get her out. However she is a lawyer with a busy observe. If she left Ukraine, she stated, “Who’s going to assist me financially?”

So she despatched Katya to dwell together with her different daughter, Sofia, who was working for {a magazine} in Warsaw, although Sofia, 22, stated, “I’m not prepared for being her mother.”

The entire household, like so many others from Ukraine, has change into a research in resilience. Katya has realized to cook dinner dinner, with macaroni her specialty. She began a brand new college in Warsaw — a Ukrainian one — midsemester, however together with her sister working and her mother often far-off aside from the occasional go to, she can be studying methods to take care of feelings and fears on her personal.

As she stood again from her drawing, a precociously expert portrait of three fantasy figures, Katya allowed herself a glance of satisfaction.

“The sketch is completed,” she introduced. “The one factor left is to hold it in my room in Kyiv.”

A couple of days after the battle broke out in February, Mark fled the battered metropolis of Kharkiv by himself. He was scared he can be stopped on the border as a result of he was 17 and touring alone. However within the chaos he slipped by, no questions requested, arriving in Warsaw 4 days earlier than his 18th birthday, when he would have change into of navy age and unable to go away.

“I didn’t need to struggle on this battle,” he stated. “It’s a silly battle.”

Mark was given a room in a university dorm not removed from the Vistula River, which flows by Warsaw.

When he’s not finding out pc programming on-line at two universities, he’s hanging out at “the Park.”

There are various parks in Warsaw — a verdant metropolis, particularly beautiful in June — however “the Park” all of the Ukrainian children discuss lies within the shadow of a Warsaw icon: the Palace of Tradition and Science. Accomplished in 1955 however commissioned throughout Stalin’s closing years, it’s a 42-story monument to Poland’s socialist days, hulking however in some way nonetheless elegant.

Earlier than the Ukraine battle, the park out entrance had been uncared for, changing into a campground for the homeless.

However beginning in March, Ukrainian teenagers found it. The volleyball courtroom is at all times busy. There’s a skate park the place shirtless Ukrainian children clatter on their boards and wipe out noisily. Younger girls sit beneath the bushes and take all of it in.

Mark stated that within the park, folks don’t discuss in regards to the battle.

“In order for you mates,” he stated, “you don’t discuss politics. As a result of everybody has a distinct view of the scenario.”

And whereas it’s onerous being with out his dad and mom, he stated, and never understanding what lies forward, he additionally feels a way of chance, of getting a future that’s but to be carved.

“Life’s not unhealthy,” he stated. “Warsaw is a stupendous metropolis. I am going round on my own, sightseeing.”