WARSAW, Poland — A week after Russia invaded Ukraine, Juliya Sergienko and her two children, aged 3 and 5, stood in a packed train alongside hundreds of other families like theirs trying to escape the war.
As they tried to flee Kryvyi Rih—a city in central Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hometown—and reach the relative safety of Lviv in western Ukraine, the Russian shelling began.
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“We had to turn back,” Sergienko, 36, told VICE World News through a translator. She said the Russians were deliberately targeting the train.
Before the train headed out a second time, its lights were shut off, a protective barrier was erected along its sides, and passengers were asked to keep their phones off so that the Russians wouldn’t be able to track them.
The trip, which normally takes about 10 hours, took 20 hours, Sergienko said.
After arriving in Lviv, the family crossed the border and made it into Poland, where they first visited friends in Wrocław, a city about 350 kilometres southwest from the capital Warsaw. Despite reaching safety, Sergienko’s children are still reliving the circumstances of their escape.
“There, at the airport [in Wrocław], my kids saw planes and my daughter started crying because she thought it was an attack,” Sergienko said.
Sergienko’s children are among nearly 1 million child refugees in Poland alone, while according to the United Nations’ children’s agency UNICEF, 1.5 million children have fled in total.
Many of these children are already starting to experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress injury (PTSI, otherwise known as PTSD).
Dariusz Skorupa is a psychologist in Warsaw who’s been volunteering to help Ukrainian refugees. He said a fellow volunteer recently spoke to a 9-year-old boy who was startled when a Polish ambulance drove nearby.
“When he heard the ambulance sirens passing by, he was already asking if they needed to run to shelter,” Skorupa said. “That’s a symptom of PTSD.”
Mental health crises will likely worsen in the coming weeks, Skorupa said. That’s because people who were fleeing at the start of the war hadn’t necessarily seen violence or civilian casualties yet.
“Russians have escalated their offensive against civilians. People see that, and then the trauma is even worse,” Skorupa said. He added that it takes several weeks for PTSD to set in, and many Ukrainians are only just getting to that point.
According to Skorupa, the most important thing is to create environments where child refugees feel safe. Play and group activities are the best way to ensure they feel comfortable.
“Whenever we can, we try to set up play. Here in Warsaw there are many places where kids can be together,” Skorupa said. “There they have care so they’re not alone.”
Earlier this week, Sergienko and her children arrived at the volunteer-run help center where Skorupa spends much of his time. The space has a corner devoted to kids, filled with large jigsaw puzzles, stuffed animals, and a hopscotch mat. Sergienko’s children played uninterrupted for about an hour, occasionally approaching nearby adults to give them toys.
A bigger challenge is securing psychologists and counsellors who are fluent in either Ukrainian or Russian, Skorupa said, adding he hopes Poland hires psychologists fleeing Ukraine, so that they can support children and families who need to talk to someone in their language.
“You can’t do psychology through a translator. It really breaks the communication.”
