Aarmored vehicles pepper the macadam. The Patriot missile batteries, which America deployed here in March, scan the sky above our heads. Military planes land, unload their cargo and take off, almost 24 hours a day. Inside the arrivals hall, a couple of foreign volunteers to fight in Ukraine, including a former American soldier, collect their luggage. The airport located just north of Rzeszow, a city in southeastern Poland, previously handled only a few flights a day. Vladimir Putin’s war made it the main warehouse for Western weapons destined for Ukraine. He also transformed Rzeszow himself.
At the start of the year, Rzeszow, an hour by train from the Ukrainian border, was the 15th largest city in Poland with just under 200,000 inhabitants. Since then, around 100,000 refugees have arrived; depending on how many people stayed, it may now be the tenth largest. Ukrainians are not the only new arrivals. Foreign diplomats, American troops and aid workers invade hotels and restaurants. A waitress is surprised when a customer speaks Polish.
“But where are the refugee camps? the town’s mayor, Konrad Fijolek, remembers people asking the question at the start of the war. Strictly speaking, there is none. Only a fraction of the displaced live in shelters. The rest were hosted by locals or rented their own accommodation. From the start of the war, emergency aid, crammed into buses, trucks and private cars, began to flow from Rzeszow to western Ukraine. On May 22, Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, declared Rzeszow “the saving city” of Ukraine.
The heat surprised even the locals. Relations in the border areas had been haunted by the memory of the atrocities of the Second World War: massacres of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists; ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians by Polish partisans and later the communist regime. These fading grudges were erased by the Russian invasion, says Mr. Fijolek. “The Ukrainians are fighting for us,” he says, “so that the Russians don’t have stupid ideas when they come here.”
The local economy is flourishing. The engine manufacturer for America F-16 fighter jets, one of several airlines based in Rzeszow, is the region’s largest employer. Rzeszow is also a this and pharmaceutical division. But Ukrainians are struggling to find good jobs. Oksana Hluschko, who ran a pharmacy in Kyiv before the Russian invasion, now cleans rooms in a hotel on the outskirts of the city. She has enrolled in Polish classes, she says, and plans to become a licensed pharmacist.
Many Ukrainians who passed through moved to larger cities or returned home. Ola Filaretova, a ballet dancer from Dnipro, and her two children returned to Rzeszow after a few weeks elsewhere in Poland. Her youngest daughter had missed the city and the friends she had made there. Ms. Filaretova missed being closer to home. “It’s only 100 km from the border,” she said, through tears. “It makes things more bearable.” ■