Vsevolod Soroka listened carefully as his Grade 10 teacher walked the class through a math lesson, but his mind frequently turned to his parents back in Odessa, on the Black Sea coast of Ukraine.
Vsevolod, 16, has been enrolled at the Children of Ukraine Educational Centre in Warsaw since last October, when his parents spirited him out of his home city. His mother is an unemployed photographer and his father works at the port, which is under constant Russian attack. They worried that if the war dragged on longer their son might be drafted into the army.
He plans to stay in Poland or move to another country to pursue his education, and he knows that his future doesn’t include Ukraine. “It’s been hard for me to be away from home, but I got used to this,” he said.
School co-founder Natalia Voloshko pooled efforts with other exiled educators to help Ukrainian refugees in Poland.
The centre is the brainchild of Natalia Voloshko, a musician, educator, entrepreneur and all around whirlwind who came to Warsaw from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, with her teenage son shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion. It opened in September, 2022, and it consists of a kindergarten, primary school, high school and a music academy spread over two buildings in the Warsaw suburb of Marki.
All of the roughly 300 students study in Ukrainian, Polish and English, and the curriculum follows Ukrainian and Polish directives. There’s an extensive extra-curricular program that includes an annual musical production performed with a local orchestra, as well as a bus that takes students to a local pool for weekly swimming lessons. To complement a modest tuition, much of everything at the school is funded by donations and sponsorships.
Around 40 students board at the school full-time. Their parents are back in Ukraine, some fighting on the frontlines and others serving in critical civilian posts.
A Ukrainian girl named Dominika designed the school’s logo – a stylized sunflower – and painted it on a shell case she got from her grandfather, a soldier in the Ukrainian army. Dominika gifted the case to Ms. Voloshko.
Ms. Voloshko, 46, got the idea for the centre within months of arriving in Warsaw. She had years of experience in education in Ukraine and ran a series of music schools. She could see how her son and other Ukrainian children were struggling, but she didn’t have the resources to help. She and her son – she divorced her husband before the war – left everything in Kharkiv and arrived in Warsaw with two suitcases, no money and few prospects.
In March, 2022, while working on a charity concert to raise money for Ukrainian refugees, Ms. Voloshko met Olesya Kovalchuk, a fellow educator who’d also fled Kharkiv. “We understood that we wanted to create a new project for Ukrainian children to unite our experience,” Ms. Voloshko explained.
They applied for various grants and, by the summer of 2022, they’d raised enough money to lease two buildings – a former boutique hotel and a nearby defunct fitness club. They renovated them to accommodate classrooms, lockers, playgrounds, a dining hall and rooms for boarders.
“It was important to create a new space, a Ukrainian space in another country for Ukrainian children,” Ms. Voloshko said.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, the schools were bustling with activity.
High school students were studying math, science and Polish while the kindergarten kids were singing a song in English. Each classroom had been fitted with new desks courtesy of IKEA, as well as giant video screens that served as electronic blackboards. Donated drum kits, pianos and other instruments lined the backs of several rooms, and the hallways erupted in chatter and laughter as children moved between classes.
Ms. Voloshko roamed the hall with a cheery smile and popped into a few classes. She greeted the students in English and corrected their grammar when they replied. She urged them to join rehearsals for this year’s musical: A Night on the Roof, written by Eliza Avocharova, a Ukrainian musician who has been traveling back and forth from Kharkiv to work with the students.
Ms. Voloshko also made a point of greeting each teacher and member of staff. Most of them also fled the war and some have spouses or sons serving in the army. That’s made everyone feel like family, she said.
The centre has two psychiatrists on hand to help students cope with the emotional trauma of the conflict and being so far from home. “Some of the children have badly adapted because of the war,” said Natalia Gordyna, a psychiatrist from Kyiv who counsels the high school students. “Some of the children are very closed off and keep to themselves.”
Tasia Havshyna, 13, barely spoke when she arrived here last October from Kharkiv. She’d become distraught by the constant shelling and her parents knew she couldn’t stay in the city any longer. Thanks to a U.S. donor and Rotary International, Ms. Voloshko was able to bring Tasia to the centre and cover her tuition. Tasia has begun to open up and make friends with classmates. But she still worries about her family, and the prospect of going back. “Living in Kharkiv now, I’m afraid to live there. Kharkiv is very dangerous,” she said.
Natalia Gordyna, a psychiatrist at the school, counsels high-school students whose traumatic experiences make it hard for them to share their feelings.
The vast majority of students boarding at the school are 16-and 17-year old boys, sent here by their parents to avoid a future military draft and the likelihood that when they turn 18 they won’t be allowed to leave the country.
After making her rounds at the school, Ms. Voloshko sat in on a discussion involving three boys who talked openly about their fears.
Yevhenii Korol, 17, spoke about how he left Kharkiv with his mother and sister when the war broke out. They lived with relatives in Bulgaria for a while until his mother found out about the school through Facebook. She sent Yevhenii to Warsaw, left her daughter in Bulgaria and returned to Kharkiv to be with her husband.
Last October his mother told him that their old apartment building had been blown apart by a Russian missile. “I was very shocked about it and I’m so sad because all my past was there, a lot of memories,” he said. He misses Kharkiv, he added, but he wants to stay in Poland or go somewhere else in Europe to study artificial intelligence.
Yevhenii’s friend, 16-year old Miroslaw Savonik, who is from Kherson, said he hadn’t heard from his stepbrother since he joined the army more than year ago. “Yes, I’m worried,” he said softly.
Hnat Torhvn, a 16-year old from Kyiv, said he’s stopped following the news out of Ukraine. “My parents told me that I need to continue living because just sitting depressed is not going to change anything,” he said. “So I’m trying to continue living.”
Natalia Savonik is a secretary at the school, where her 16-year-old son Miroslaw is a pupil. They fled Russian-occupied Kherson two years ago. It’s been more than a year since they’ve heard from Miroslaw’s stepbrother, who joined the Ukrainian army.
In talking with the high-school students, Ms. Voloshko is able to share her own experiences of tragedy and loss since the Russian invasion.
Ms. Voloshko sat quietly as the boys spoke. She understands the dislocation and emotional hardship the war has caused.
She had to leave her home in Donetsk in 2014 when Russian-backed rebels launched a series of attacks. She left her music school behind and moved to Kharkiv, where she opened two new schools and had 100 students. But once again she was forced out when Russian bombs began falling around her home in 2022.
Her mother died of cancer in Donetsk just before the full-scale invasion and she fell out with her father, a devoted supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He’d begged his daughter to stay in Kharkiv and wait for the Russian army to liberate the city, then he cut off all contact when she refused.
They didn’t speak for more than a year, until he, too, was dying of cancer. He was still backing Mr. Putin and clinging to hope that Russian authorities would treat his disease. “They didn’t help him. He thought they would and they didn’t,” she said.
The school has become her lifeline and a source of hope. She struggles to keep it going – donations have slowed and the high school needs costly upgrades – but she’s determined to carry on.
“I lost everything in my life in Ukraine, I started here from zero,” she said. “This school is my life. It’s my life project.”
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