Racism is a touchy subject in this refugee crisis. The first thing we saw on our TVs about this was Ukrainian border guards pushing black people away and letting white people get on the trains. My Polish colleagues in Edinburgh told me this was because those very same black people were trying to jump the queue. Other people said that it was a black man trying to get on the train and the guards/police were prioritising women and children so they pushed them to the back. Then we saw interviews with some black people saying that it was understandable that police and army were favouring their own citizens over foreigners. Other black people were outraged and their body language very demonstrative about the way they were being treated being completely wrong. I can confirm first-hand that I’ve seen this racial tension. I travelled to Warsaw to work in a humanitarian capacity. Due to these reports, I started to focus in early on ethnic minorities coming off the coaches.
Because they do not hold a biometric Ukrainian passport these people are treated very differently by some of the Ukrainian refugees and also some authorities and staff.

I was with an African man trying to get the free tickets for the train to Germany on my second day and we waited for a good 40 minutes in the queue and there were attempts at creating tension by other refugees which we diffused but he himself was actually unaware of the queuing system. Everyone is just respectfully, in a dignified manner, queuing in total chaos and moving forward slowly towards the end of the queues in many cases. Some of these queues are 30-minutes and some about 2-hours long. At the border they’re probably several hours. People just stick bumper to bumper with those in front. Tensions fray, oddly enough, when people are getting  nearer to the front.

We calmed ourselves when we were at the front of the queue and my friend started to be rebuked by older ladies pushing him to a different queue and the people in the other queue were getting very irate. We remained calm because I could sense that the mobile phones were going to come out and start recording any second. I told my friend that not everyone was a racist and we should just wait for someone to let us be seen at the window. A young man who did not speak English just read our body language. He left a small gap in front of him and as soon as he did so, people behind him started asking him questions. He turned around (he was no more than 20 years old) and sharply and indignantly rebuked about 10 people standing in the queue around him and they immediately shut their traps. He just looked at my African friend and my African friend looked back at him and he slid over to the little space. We had been waiting in full view of all these people all along right behind a dozen white Ukrainians who were diffusing into the window queues. When it was our turn to be seen it suddenly became a problem that we were between two queues (but all the white people in front of us had just filtered into both windows).

All Alex had to deal with then was the stressed public servant who shouted at him and didn’t look him in the eye but he got his ticket for the free train for himself, his wife, his two mixed race children, their grandma and their dog. Alex is in Germany right now one of the safest men on the planet. His house was blown up in a Russian rocket just days before. They’d just left the house to flee the bombing, 24 hours earlier. His whole precious family could all have been dead if they had stayed. That house is only a percentage of what they have lost. When I first saw him he was gently and firmly ushering his elderly (white) mother-in-law to a Porto loo.

I fist bumped our young friend and said ‘Slava Ukrainia!’ [equivalent of ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá’]. And I said it loud enough that a few rows back could hear (wouldn’t be like me🤪). All were smiles. Crisis averted.