"I had a dream to visit Ireland one day if I had a lot of money, but now, it is happening in very sad circumstances," Tetiana Komarova says in the car on her way to Warsaw Modlin airport in Poland.
“I don’t understand it. Sometimes I think maybe I’m going crazy and it’s all just a fantasy.”
One week after arriving in Warsaw from Kyiv with her daughter Yana (6), they are making their way to Tullamore in Co Offaly where an Irish family has offered to take them in.
Komarova and her daughter are among hundreds of thousands of refugees who have arrived in Poland's capital city since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24th.
Poland has taken in more Ukrainians than any surrounding country; it is estimated that of more than three million people who have fled the war, about two million have gone to Poland. Warsaw alone has seen its population increase by almost 20 per cent.
“I did not want to leave Kyiv. All of my life was there. My husband worked in IT. I was the editor-in-chief of a magazine. Yana was in school. We had a one bedroom flat in Irpin where my husband’s mother lived. She died two weeks before the war. Now, we don’t even know if the house exists,” Komarova says.
“This is all I have now,” she says, gesturing towards her silver suitcase and the clothes she wears.
They spent 14 hours crossing the border to Poland, and Yana cried “all the way on the bus [because] she understood she was leaving her father behind”.
“It was very hard for her… We’re trying to have a call every day. I’m trying to be in a good mood for her. I cry in the morning and at night when she doesn’t see me.”
While staying with one of the countless Polish families offering their homes up, Komarova came into contact with Irish man Ciarán Murphy.
Originally from Swords in Co Dublin, he has lived in Poland for several years with his wife. They have temporarily opened their home to 10 refugees so far, including mothers and daughters, and an 84-year-old grandmother, who is now in Dublin.
People quickly mobilised to help refugees as Warsaw became “saturated” with arrivals, says Murphy, who is helping put Ukrainians in touch with Irish families keen to take them in.
In the first two weeks since the war began, women and children were “literally piling into the city carrying all they were able to take in plastic bags”.
“It’s the kids that get me. You see the despair in some of the mothers’ eyes, trying to take care of their kids in these horrible circumstances. Listening to Tetiana telling us how she was in the house with her daughter and the house started shaking. If we can offer a spare bed, that’s nothing in comparison,” he says.
After finishing work at a language school at 5pm every evening, Murphy drives an hour each way from his house to drop refugees to the airport. He pays for their flight tickets using money raised through GoFundMe.
After helping Tetiana and Yana check in their luggage at the airport on Friday, he walks them to the security gate, where they part with a brief hug and a “good luck”.
Just under an hour from the airport, on the way back towards Warsaw city centre, a 150,000sq m conference centre has been transformed into a makeshift humanitarian aid reception with the capacity to house as many as 20,000 refugees. At the site, refugees are provided with medical assistance, temporary accommodation, food, basic hygiene products and psychological support before they are further directed to a final destination in Poland or abroad.
Elsewhere in Warsaw, the city is calm and well-organised. Volunteers and aid groups remain positioned at railway and bus stations, and the Ukrainian flag can be spotted hanging at almost every major building, and graffitied on walls.
Large numbers of refugees are likely to stay in Poland, given the size of the existing Ukrainian community since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. For others, it’s merely a stopgap on a longer journey.
While they have been welcomed with open arms so far, space is running out for newcomers and services are beginning to experience strain.
Rafal Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw, said the capital remains the main destination for Ukrainian refugees and the situation is "getting more and more difficult every day."