As soon as she learned a project to send supplies to the Polish border with Ukraine still needed volunteers, Beata Winiarska alerted her boss.
Mrs Winiarska is the manager at Forest Farm Dairy, in Blackburn, but spent the weekend instead collecting donations from the public that will be driven across Europe and given to those fleeing the war.
The volunteers sifted through donations at Craigievar House in Dyce and collecting items such as toiletries, nappies, sleeping bags and children books.
On Sunday, the vans took the items to Glasgow, where they will be loaded onto a lorry and transported across the Channel.
Before she knew about the campaign, she previously called her mother, a doctor at a hospital near Wroclaw, to say she wanted to come back to Poland to help – but was told there were already so many people there, it would be best to find a way to assist closer to home.
‘Like a smack in the head’
Born in Lviv in western Ukraine, Mrs Winiarska’s keenness to help stemmed from images she had been sent and messages she had received from family and friends.
A railway station where desperate refugees face 700 minute delays. A Polish train set to be directed to Ukraine to pick up the wounded and take them back across the border to her mother’s hospital – despite it being on the other side of the country. A cousin and a family friend travelling to Kyiv and picking up arms to defend their country.
She said: “When everything happened over the night, it was like a smack in the head.
“A proper smack in the head, it completely threw me off to be honest. I cried all day, literally all day.
“I think war is the worst when we have friends calling us and saying they are on the border waiting 14, 15 hours and they can’t get out of the country. And they had to leave their houses and everything.”
Family determined to stay in Kyiv
A friend told her she was getting out of Lviv because she simply could not bear the constant blaring of the sirens – and said the pharmacies were out of first aid kits.
Mrs Winiarska said: “The latest news we’ve heard is that there’s almost no petrol at the station, if there are any petrol stations left they are allowed 20 litres per car.
“There is no more rice, pasta, flour in the shops at all.
“Unfortunately a lot of people are coming and trying to rob empty flats and houses, because they see the opportunity that the places are empty and they just want to raid them. It’s getting really scary.”
But despite the fear and pain of the situation, her Ukrainian family – Mrs Winiarska moved to Poland with her parents in the late nineties when she was young, but her dad’s relatives stayed – are determined not to leave the country.
She said: “They want to stay.
“The boys went to war in Kyiv, they don’t want to leave at all. They said it’s their country and they’re not going to be flushed out.”
