Russia Burns Evidence of Ukraine’s Culture, but These Women Rewrite Their Own Stories in Poland

Clutching her 5-year-old son, Klement, close to her heart, Kamilla Kosenko agonizes over how she ended up in Krakow, Poland.

Kosenko and her son are among nearly 1 million Ukrainians who have found refuge in Poland since the war with Russia started more than three years ago, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency.

Kosenko, like many other women in her situation, is searching for answers. The recently retired military veteran and lover of history said her new life in Poland, although far from the ravages of war, is a hard pill to swallow. Her family is still living in a war zone, and many of her friends are still fighting the Russian aggressors, she said.

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However, knowing her son will be safe gives her peace of mind.

“The day of the start of the war, the planes started to fly, everything was bombed, everything was on fire, and kids were screaming,” Kosenko, 34, said. “I took my kid and ran from my home.”

Moving to Poland was not what she wanted to do, but rather what she had to do.

Kosenko’s story is not unique. According to the NGO Project Hope, 80% of refugees from Ukraine are women and children who were forced to leave after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

The war has caused the largest European refugee crisis since World War II, according to the U.N., forcing 956,000 Ukrainians to flee westward to Poland—more than the entire population of Krakow.

Many have had to leave family and husbands behind as fighting continues along Ukraine’s 1,500-mile land and sea border with Russia. Here’s what three women said life is like in Poland and what they hope the future will bring.

Kamilla Kosenko: ‘I Know Better Because of the War’

When Kosenko first arrived in Poland, she first stayed in a Project Hope center. She says her time there felt very secluded, as she was an hour away from the closest city with no public transportation.

“There are many people in the [Project Hope] centers who are afraid to go to streets, to go away from the center. Their hearts only know war so they don't do anything,” she said. “They don't look for jobs. They don't look for apartments. And don't do anything for two years.”

This was not Kosenko's experience. She wanted to get out, explore Krakow and learn more about Poland and Ukraine’s histories. So she posted on Facebook: “Any girls looking for roommates in Krakow who want to drink coffee and explore?”

Two Polish women responded. They are now her roommates.

Project Hope offered her a job as a psychologist for refugees. But it is a blessing that torments her. Listening to Ukrainian refugees talk about the war she fled is unnerving.

An added challenge is the long-held belief among Ukranians that seeking therapy is a disgrace — a holdover from years in the Soviet Union. Psychologists are only for the mentally ill, they’ve been told.

But working as a psychologist is a job, and as Kosenko sees it, it’s not that refugees are mentally ill, but rather that they need help navigating their grief.

“Everyone needs psychologists in their life, especially in war,” she said.

Kosenko studied at the National Defence University of Ukraine, earning a degree in psychology. In 2010, she graduated with a military commission and served in Crimea for four years before Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014. She also served in Zaporizhzhia and Donbas in eastern Ukraine.

After Russia invaded in 2022, Kosenko found herself in the middle of the fighting in Mykolaiv, 746 miles east from where she is now. She retired from military service in 2024, although she has been living in Poland for the past two years.

Shortly after Klement was born, Kosenko moved to Mszana Dolna, a mountain town outside of Krakow.

Here she uses history as a distraction—digging into manuscripts from the 15th and 16th centuries to learn more about her homeland in south-central Ukraine. Kosenko said she has been able to piece together her family’s genealogy as she unearths more documents.

Her roommates have been helpful, even learning how to speak Ukrainian, allowing Kosenko to speak her native tongue at home with her son.

But nothing can replace the feeling of being back on the Crimean Peninsula with the mountains and the sea, Kosenko said, hoping to grow old there one day.

“Being Ukrainian is a path; it's a road,” she said. “For my son, not having a Ukrainian passport doesn’t mean that he is not Ukrainian. In my situation, I was born there, and I didn't know who I was, and now I know better because of the war.”

Alla Diagleva: Horrors of War

After all Alla Diagleva has been through, her face lights up when asked what Ukraine means to her.

“Ukrainians don’t look like any other country,” she said with a laugh, “I am proud to be a Ukrainian.”

Diagleva is from Kherson, a city on Ukraine’s southeast coast that was one of the first to fall after Russian troops swept in from Crimea in 2022. She lived there as fighting raged for nine months, until Kyiv’s forces retook the Black Sea port.

Diagleva left her beloved hometown and moved to Poland. But it meant leaving her son and husband behind to fight. Today, three years since the war started, shelling from Russian drones and artillery from across the Dnipro River—a mere mile away—is the worst yet, according to a CNN report.

With tears in her eyes, Diagleva recalls the horrors of war that she and her family endured.

“A big building with chickens, [the Russian soldiers] didn't allow the people to go feed them, so they couldn't. Chickens all died and they left them there,” she said. “People lived there as well. People had to take the dead chickens and eat them because there was no other food in town.”

Water was scarce as well, Diagleva said. They had to collect rainwater to survive.

The Russian invaders burned Ukrainian flags, books, and newspapers and replaced them with what Diagleva called propaganda.

“At the time there was a Russian newspaper that was free. It was Russian propaganda,” she said. “And us Ukrainian people then went to all the stores, took all the newspapers at the time, and burned them at home. So there was no Russian propaganda.”

Now, her life in a town an hour-and-a-half outside Krakow is quieter. She has even found work teaching history, a continuation of the career she had at home. She teaches Ukrainian children whose families have been displaced by the war.

“When I teach kids, I don’t have to think about war,” she said as children laughed and played.

Teaching gives Diagleva a mission, for now. Her hope is to return to her family in Ukraine, soon.

Iryna Antonets: ‘I feel more Ukranian … in Krakow’

As far as Iryna Antonets is concerned, her life in Poland is “ideal.”

She’d thought about moving to Krakow before. The escalation of hostilities in 2022 pushed Antonets to flee with her then-9-year-old son. They found an apartment in Krakow with the help of a friend.

The art historian from Odesa has continued her career at the Regional Public Library museum in Krakow, which widely supports Ukraine. They no longer purchase any Russian history books, Antonets said. Only Ukrainian history books. She also organizes events for Ukrainians to meet, find community, and learn more about their heritage.

“Being Ukrainian for me is to remember our history, our culture, and to tell our children about it, because they are the future of our country,” she said. “And I think here in another country, we have a very important mission to save this culture, and I'm very angry when Ukrainians don't want to speak Ukrainian.” 

Her son speaks both Polish and Ukrainian. However at home, he admonishes his mother for speaking Polish to him saying, “Mom! We are Ukrainian, speak to me in Ukrainian.”

Antonets mentioned that she feels her hometown is a betrayal of Ukrainian culture because it insists on speaking Russian. This has further assured her that Poland is right where she should be.

“I was in Ukraine during the war in my city for a week to see relatives, and it was [a] so, so sad experience for me because there nobody speaks Ukrainian, but they all speak Russian,” she said. “I feel more Ukrainian than ever in Krakow because here I can speak Ukrainian and meet wonderful people.”

Antonets feels that Poland has not only been a blessing for her family's future but also for her love of history.

“Here in Krakow, I see these opportunities, a lot of them, I'm a person of a culture and art, and really it's an ideal place for me, for us,” Antonets said.