Ukrainian Refugees’ Journeys Have Just Begun

 

 

"When the Polish photographer Rafał Milach took these pictures, on his country’s eastern border, the war in Ukraine was less than a week old. During that week, nearly a million people fled Ukraine, half a million of them escaping to Poland. (Both numbers have since doubled.) It was freezing along the border. Before refugees crossed to safety, they endured delays of many hours, or even a few days: in cars, in trains, on foot. The first quality that stands out in these portraits is the exhaustion in people’s faces. The muted colors in the background—the pewter sky, the drab pastel walls, the dead white of the bus—seem to sympathize.

I witnessed Milach at work, and was struck by how long he talked with each refugee before taking a photograph. He wanted to hear their stories. “What can you do when a grown man starts to cry in front of you?” he said to me. “What can you do when people tell you how they had to abandon their homes and their relatives overnight? I can listen. I can document it—to remember, so the images and words can resonate long after this nightmare is over.”"

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Ukrainian Refugees’ Journeys Have Just Begun | The New Yorker