It was March 5 , three days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine when a friend called Jerzy Donimirski, a hotel owner from Kraków.
“He told me that while half of the country stands in the line at the border to pick up a Ukrainian family, there are people that have nowhere to go, no friends, no relatives,” he told Crux.
So Donimirski decided to open his four-star hotel in the heart of Kraków, by the Floriañska historical gate, to refugees.
“It is war everyone fears. I just had to do it.”
Last Monday, the first 20 people – six adults and 11 children – occupied rooms in his hotel.
“I thought it’s not too much of a burden for our hotel to take 20 more,” so he sent another bus to the border with Ukraine. Today, he has 45 refugees in Hotel Polski.
It is because of people like Donimirski, a Catholic and member of the Order of Malta, that Poland has a million refugees in its territory and not a single refugee camp.
As the Polish Ambassador to the United States, Marek Magierowski, told: “This is probably the first migration crisis in Europe’s history, in which the host country doesn’t need to build refugee camps.”
“Here in Poland, I really felt what fraternity is,” Olga Panivnyk told Polish Television on Sunday. She escaped Ukraine a week ago.
“It was scary – there were planes flying over our heads” she recalled. “Some of our friends had to stop on the way because there was a shooting in the fields.”