Kazimierz Łysiak still remembers the moment the newsroom stopped feeling like a newsroom and started feeling like an emergency room: phones vibrating, feeds refreshing, colleagues calling one another in the dark as Russia’s president announced the start of the invasion. Łysiak, a TVP World reporter who covered the border as the exodus began in February 2022, told News in Depth that the scenes he witnessed are “difficult to describe.” Łysiak recalls “thousands of mostly women and children” arriving on foot, exhausted and carrying whatever they had managed to grab in the rush to flee. Faces, he says, “already looked like they’d been through something unbearable.” The flow was relentless — a human tide moving west while the sound of war pushed from behind. A border turned into a lifeline What remains just as vivid, Łysiak says, is the response on the Polish side. Cars lined up at crossing points. People arriving with bags of essentials — food, toiletries, children’s items, warm clothing — simply because it felt like the right thing to do. Volunteers forming impromptu systems to sort the growing piles of donations, turning chaos into something close to order. That early mobilization, he argues, created its own kind of momentum: strangers offering rides deeper into Poland, friends calling him from across the country to ask what was needed, and local communities adapting in real time as the situation changed by the hour. In the background, international agencies later put numbers to what reporters saw with their own eyes — millions fleeing across borders in a matter of weeks, with Poland taking in one of the largest shares. The pull back east Łysiak says the border was not only a place of escape — it was also a place of return. Men came in the opposite direction, heading back to fight. One image that stays with him is a quiet goodbye: a Ukrainian man speaking to his fiancée before crossing back into Ukraine, a private moment framed by the knowledge that nothing about it was certain. “It was courage and tragedy at the same time,” the reporter says. Four years on the first wave of solidarity has evolved into a more complicated reality, with Poland’s one million Ukrainian refugees – along with society at large – left to deal with the practical challenges of long-term displacement, integration and political tension.
