When the war began in Ukraine, 36-year-old Olena had been working at a coffee factory in Poland for a month. She had gone to Poland with a friend, temporarily leaving her four children with family in Ukraine so that she could earn more money to support them. When her home city of Zhytomyr (close to Kyiv) was bombed, she knew that she would have to bring her children to Poland to protect them. Olena’s husband passed away when she was pregnant with their youngest daughter, and she has been raising them on her own since. “I didn’t want them to see the war or to hear air raid alerts. I didn’t want them to be stressed by all of that.”
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