Late in the evening around ten thirty, the square behind the Przemysl train station suddenly fills up.

Here, from the outermost platform 5, the trains to Ukraine depart.

There are now around five a day, they rarely stick to the timetable in the small Polish border town, but when a train is announced, people flock to the waiting line.

Alexander Haneke

Editor in Politics.

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In the first few weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Przemysl in the extreme south-east of Poland was the hub of the refugee movement from the neighboring country.

At the nearby Medyka border crossing, cars were backed up for miles, and helpers came from all over Europe to provide the refugees with hot tea, food and everything they needed.

A few weeks ago it was almost impossible to get through the small waiting room with its baroque stucco ceilings.

But now calm has returned.

The remaining volunteers in their yellow safety vests meanwhile help most of the people carry their heavy suitcases up the stairs towards Platform 5, where the trains head back to Ukraine, back to the homeland where they left their old life on February 24 were torn.

Grateful for acceptance in Poland

At the front of the line is Kateryna Kolomiietz, a young woman of 17 who fate could not take away from the joy of life that speaks from her face.

She spent a month and a half in Szczecin with her mother, aunt and cousins.

Her sister is studying there, and her landlord, “a very Christian person,” as she says, let the whole large family live in one house without asking anything.

"I'm very grateful for the way we were treated in Poland," she says.

But now that after the Russian withdrawal from northern Ukraine some normality is returning to Kyiv, it is time to go home.

"People are tired of hiding in their cellars, they want their lives back," says Kateryna, "work, pay taxes so that the country can get back on its feet." Besides, her father and brother are there, the as able-bodied men were not allowed to leave the country - and the two dogs.

"But on the other hand, nothing is normal yet because people are still dying every day in the Southeast."

When the war started on the morning of February 24, Kateryna was awakened by her parents' voices.

Her mother's brother is a firefighter and was one of the first to hear about the explosions in Kyiv and called immediately.

"We expected that at some point I would pack my things for the night," she says.

"But I still wasn't prepared."

Kateryna's father immediately decided that the family had to get out of town.

Everyone drove to the small weekend house in the country south of the capital, where it was safer.

They spent eight days there with cousins ​​and aunts, ten people, the nights on the floor of the banya, a kind of sauna, because they thought it was the safest place.

Lessons in Ukraine continued virtually

Then the father heard about the first massacres in the suburbs of Kyiv through a friend.

"Two hours later, the whole family was at the train station." Kateryna will never forget the chaos that reigned in Lviv, in the extreme west of Ukraine, where the streams of refugees converged.

She couldn't hold back the tears anymore.

Somehow, after many hours, they got further to the border and then here, to Przemysl.

Only the men had to stay behind in Ukraine.