The escalation of war in Ukraine in 2022 triggered a global show of solidarity with Ukrainians escaping the country. Many people invited them to live in their homes, an action that soon turned the hosts into a symbol of a humanitarian response to the war. However, the reception put significant emotional pressure on the hosts’ families. I explore this tension as the hosts reconciled their own suffering with the ideal of ‘boundless solidarity’ extolled by the narrative that emerged around volunteering in the early months of the war.
As the all-out war in Ukraine touched the baton with the Covid pandemic in the early 2022, the plight of people escaping the war caught the attention of many. Like many other Poles, I started to scrape for any piece of information about what was going on so close to home even though I lived in Denmark at the time. The horror at what was happening quickly merged with a sense of urgency to act in any way possible. In Poland, there was an outburst of ‘distributed humanitarianism’—the mass mobilisation of private actors to deliver targeted help when and where necessary (Dunn and Kaliszewska 2023). As part of this movement, thousands of people invited displaced Ukrainians to live in their homes. While relatively far away from where the greatest need was, my family and I also decided to offer a room in Copenhagen should anyone venture this way.
We became hosts in March 2022 when a young woman from Odessa, Olga, arrived in our flat with two large suitcases. About one month later, her Russian husband joined us as well. None of us knew how long we would live together, when and if they would receive a permit to stay, or whether they would be allowed to work and find a job. Living together took some adjustments—we bought additional furniture and bedding to convert my husband’s office into a guest room, we negotiated bathroom schedules, and decided to take turns at cooking dinner. For my husband and I, such adjustments were not a big challenge after several years of flat sharing in London. In time, our two-years-old daughter too became used to our guests as if we were an enlarged family. We had some fun times together, but for the most part there was gloom. The war was one of the main topics of our conversations. Olga lived on news from home and stayed up late into the night connected to the Internet. On some days, the mood at home was heavier than on others: when the first missile to hit Odessa struck an apartment block where Olga’s father lived—while he was unharmed—seeing familiar places in ruin affected Olga. Or when reports about the Bucha massacre began to emerge.
Before Olga arrived, like many others around the world, I had been soaking myself in the news from Ukraine and engaged in online activism. However, as I lost my night working space and gradually exhausted myself, I stopped. After Olga’s arrival I became unable to maintain the same focus on work, family, and on Ukraine. Still, it remained a daily practice to tune into the war at least for a moment, because I was then motivated to stay up to date so that Olga felt that I cared, and I would remain informed for our conversations. The news was nauseating, angering, numbing, and brought up tears all at the same time. I also had the fear that the war could spread to Poland. It became increasingly difficult for me to function intellectually, psychologically, and physically. The combination of fear, powerlessness, and the new and old pressures of daily life was taking its toll.
The horror at what was happening quickly merged with a sense of urgency to act in any way possible. In Poland, there was an outburst of ‘distributed humanitarianism’—the mass mobilisation of private actors to deliver targeted help when and where necessary (…)
No one directly negated my experiences, but the workplace still expected a fully productive employee regardless of the changed circumstances. The state was taking its time to hedge itself against politically undesirable outcomes of the influx of people from Ukraine—all the while lauding the efforts of the civil society shouldering the humanitarian response on its behalf. In concert with these institutions, the war coverage across different media chased the shocking images of war and extolled the ‘boundless determination’ (IPA 2023) of people helping the escaping Ukrainians. Finally, my two-year-old still demanded an engaged mother, although she could hardly be blamed for it. Embedded in these multiple relations I was acutely aware that even if not produced intentionally, the silence around the hosts’ experiences in the first months of the war, not only amplified them but also allowed for ignoring the need to accommodate the demands of volunteering in the workings of various (social) institutions and the state.
All this taken together produced a narrative around the war that was clear about whose suffering should be paid attention to. The pervasiveness and persuasiveness of this narrative fostered a sense of abandonment not necessarily by outright negation, but by an act of omission. No matter my mental and physical state, I could not justify any changes in my performance with reference to the ongoing war. I had to stay in the background and act as if I was at the top of my game as a host, mother and worker. The narrative abandonment made it difficult to carve out an alternative space to assert a different vision of what was happening, have one’s experiences recognised, and possibly find recourse and relief. Such narrative abandonment is the focus of this piece.
I know now that I was not alone in struggling to reconcile the realness of my experiences with the sense that they did not merit acknowledgment. I came across very few, but still significant stories of women based in Poland who ended up asking the Ukrainians living with them to move out after several weeks. Our experiences differ, but their reasons seemed as banal as mine: inability to get along with their new housemates, differences in parenting styles, or simply in the basics of housekeeping, such as where to eat or whether to make the bed, etc. What these stories have in common is the sense of guilt and self-doubt. One woman describes her internal torment before she finally decided to ask her guests, a Ukrainian woman and her son, to move out: ‘I was afraid of myself, afraid that guilty conscience would eat me up. After all, these people ran away from war, and I throw them out because I want to get some rest’ (Noizz 2022; my translation). By diminishing her own emotions in the face of the immensity of immediate suffering caused by the war, she was questioning if she should feel the way she did, her own decency to feel the very human emotions she felt.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the official and media narrative did not pay attention. The states recognised that they could not sustain the systems put in place in the frenzy of the early weeks and months of the invasion. There were ongoing discussions over the risks of trafficking and abuse faced by the Ukrainians, as well as over the financial burden on the hosting families, sponsors, and other private actors such as hotels turned into reception centres (e.g., OECD 2022). Experts from the Visegrád Four, which include Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia, warned about the society-wide fatigue in the hosting societies because of the economic downturn and financial pressure this put on the host families (IPA 2023). Such narratives defined what and who was of legitimate concern: the finances and the displaced people. These concerns became even more urgent when the end of the so-called temporary protection measures implemented by many European countries was approaching. However, as much as these were important issues, they nevertheless ignored the emotional struggles of the hosting families.
The pervasiveness and persuasiveness of this narrative fostered a sense of abandonment not necessarily by outright negation, but by an act of omission. No matter my mental and physical state, I could not justify any changes in my performance with reference to the ongoing war.
The narrative of ‘boundless determination’ (IPA 2023) focusing on the societal support for the displaced Ukrainians erased the suffering of some by highlighting that of others. Although by no means selected in any systematic manner, the news snippets about the ongoing volunteering I read every day seemed to be taking for granted the unwavering commitment of the idealised figures of the local hosts and other volunteers working to support the Ukrainians (e.g., NFP 2022; Reuters 2022). By building the idea of heroic hosts and volunteers, this dominant narrative obscured those experiences that did not support and fit with that image. The humanitarianism ascribed to the thousands that took action to mitigate the impact of the war in Ukraine and the fact that, as a result, they too suffered in their own ways, indexed opposing ways of being human. On the one hand, it was human (and humanitarian) to help and sacrifice for another, giving thus priority to the needs of others in the name of human solidarity. On the other hand, however, there was the unreported, but also human, individual suffering of the hosts that prioritized the self. Consequently, this individual suffering that escaped popular and official attention fostered a sense of invalidation that made at least some of the hosts question the morality of their own humanity. To solicit recognition would be self-centred moaning, egoistic self-absorption in the face of the needs of others.
The consequences were both personal and systemic. On a personal level, the suffering of the hosts was amplified by the pressure to act as was suited for the idealised humanitarian figure, the sense of guilt and self-doubt, and the solitude of that experience. Such narrative abandonment forced the hosts to keep up appearances for the sake of the humanitarian story. It required more than ‘management of the heart’ (Hochschild 2012) used by public facing workers who, in order to reduce stress, distance themselves from the emotions required by their job description, be it friendliness or nastiness. Narrative abandonment meant that those abandoned were left with a sense of guilt, an internal struggle between the ethical commitment to the other and the inadequacy of the self that gave in to individual suffering. These feelings were further exacerbated by the fact that, after all, the hosts were the privileged ones, quite unlike people marginalised by systemic inadequacies and persisting discrimination and whose voices are often muted as well. On a systemic level, the invisibility of the host suffering obscured the need for adjustments to the emergency hosting systems that relied on this invisibility. The silenced experiences of the hosts ended up unwittingly incorporated into the official self-congratulatory narrative of the states portraying themselves as open to people coming from outside the borders. In practice, however, the same states failed to fundamentally revise their restrictive and selective acceptance systems (e.g., Koziienko 2023) and continued to rely on the private hosts for alleviating the immediate crisis.
It was not only the hosts whose psychological well-being escaped wider attention. The situation was similar for other volunteers as well. The silencing of the negative emotional impact of volunteering has been perpetuated by research highlighting the motives behind getting involved in supporting the Ukrainians. By presenting the volunteering experience as overall satisfying if sometimes frustrating and time-consuming (e.g., Domaradzki et al. 2022), such research has been reinforcing the same congratulatory narrative that focuses on the selfless humanitarianism of the volunteers. The negative psychological impact of volunteering as the war continues is only starting to be recognised (Chudzicka-Czupała et al. 2023). But as I read the results, I keep wondering about the hosts whose passive volunteering easily escapes both sampling methods and the public eye. If one is not also engaging in regular activities more typically associated with volunteering, hosting alone does not foster a strong sense of achievement or self-image as a volunteer. This happens because hosting eventually blends into a life as normal and thus becomes difficult to capture as an observable and reportable stand-along practice. For this reason, any reporting focusing on psychological effects of volunteering need to recognise the different forms it may take in order to avoid creating new narratives that abandon significant parts of their intended targets.
Hosting offered to the Ukrainians took different forms. Some people made available their second homes, some—like my family—shared the same living space. What it turned out to mean in my case, was that there was no space to speak about my own emotional struggles at home, either. One afternoon over dinner, Olga openly expressed her disapproval of people ‘claiming’ that they suffer because of the war in Ukraine. In her view, you had to be from there to have the right to suffer because of the ongoing war. I could see her point—I too felt uneasy about putting my emotional distress on a par with the suffering of those who could lose their lives at any moment, those who were tortured before being killed, or those who had lost their close ones already. But as I sensed that I was not entitled to suffer because of the war, my anguish only intensified.
Jean Améry maintained that individual suffering cannot be comprehended, let alone captured in words because ‘there is [no] any abstraction and never an imaginative power that could even approach its reality’ (1980: 25-26). Suffering is something that is endured by a victim of violence or a witness then and there and cannot be abstracted from the experience. Any comparison falls short of capturing and conveying it. Olga’s experience was likely different to that of those still in the Ukrainian warzones who were facing immediate physical danger, cold, fear, and pain. However, as a Ukrainian, Olga saw herself sharing the suffering with her compatriots. The claims by non-Ukrainians to also be suffering suggested however that it was possible to comprehend and even approximate what the Ukrainians were going through. Rendering Ukrainian suffering comprehensible in such ways amounted to diminishing their experience. I suspect that on some level that was why Olga objected.
Olga was forcibly displaced from Ukraine in multiple ways: she was away from a country she considered hers, away from her relatives, friends, the job she had, and her own apartment she had bought in Odesa. She knew she might never be able to return to them. I could not claim to be affected in the same way. While Olga’s suffering responded to immediate threats, my situation was quite different. The psychological and physical strain caused by the revulsion at the atrocities reported by the media, the need to continue life as usual despite changed circumstances, and the fear for the close ones all felt of a different order. And yet, my sense of suffering was real and debilitating. But Olga’s short comment foreclose the possibility for me to try to cope with it openly at home. Still, Olga’s statement was but one voice in a concerto that created the space of abandonment. The main factor in my eyes was the lack of public recognition that not everything was ‘as normal’ in my life as well. The fact that the congratulatory humanitarian narrative dominated the public discourse in those early months of war, made me feel abandoned with no narrative space where I could talk about my experiences and be listened to as having something legitimate to say.
By the end of August 2022, we all moved out of the flat we shared for five months. Olga and her husband have secured residence and work permits and started organising what their permanent lives would be. My family relocated to a different country. We stayed in touch, sporadically, over email. The war still features in our exchanges, but in much more subdued ways—when she came to visit me in Poland in the summer of 2024, we hardly touched on the subject. We are now able to look at the feverish time we have spent together with more emotional distance. In fact, for me, the suffering of the time is hard to recall because its viscerality is gone – I can now distance myself and try to heal. I do not think Olga can. This shows how different our positions are, yet again feeding the sense of illegitimacy and a moral failure of an observer that I ultimately am to empathise with the other. But the suffering of those days is still there in more subtle ways; it has since shaped my life and presumably that of others in a similar position. Despite this, it is still difficult to claim the right to recognition. Perhaps this will be possible when the war is over, perhaps not. But if there is any lesson to take away here, it is that we should make sure that any future support systems recognise and are based on narratives that allow space for practical recognition beyond what is most visible and expedient. Otherwise, they risk causing new forms of suffering and undermining their own sustainability.
*All names have been changed.
Photo credit: Semblance of normality in time of war: Bonfire lunch with Olga and her husband, Copenhagen, 2022 (Photo by author).
References:
Améry, Jean. 1980 [1966]. At the Mind’s Limits. Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Indiana University Press.
Chudzicka-Czupała, Agata, Soon-Kiat Chiang, Clara M. Tan, Nadiya Hapon, Marta Żywiołek-Szeja, Liudmyla Karamushka, Mateusz Paliga, Zlatyslav Dubniak, Roger S. McIntyre, and Roger Ho. 2023. ‘Association between Mental Health, Psychological Characteristics, and Motivational Functions of Volunteerism among Polish and Ukrainian Volunteers during the Russo-Ukrainian War’. Scientific Reports 13 (1): 20725.
Domaradzki, Jan, Dariusz Walkowiak, Dominika Bazan, and Ewa Baum. 2022. ‘Volunteering in the Front Line of the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis: A Brief Report from Poland’. Frontiers in Public Health 10.
Dunn, Cullen Elizabeth, and Iwona Kaliszewska. 2023. ‘Distributed Humanitarianism’. American Ethnologist 50 (1): 19–29.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2012. The Managed Heart. Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press.
IPA (Institute of Public Affairs). 2023. ‘Fatigue and Boundless Determination. The Ukrainian Refugee Crisis in V4 Nations as Explained by Experts’. Published on 28.02.2023 (last accessed on 13 June 2023).
Koziienko, Ruslana. March 2023. ‘Against False Solidarity. A Call for True Solidarity among People with Experiences of Displacement‘. Allegra Lab.
Noizz. 2022. ‘Przyjęła Uchodźców z Odruchu Serca. Wyrzuciła Ich Też z Odruchu. Bo Już Nie Mogła Wytrzymać’ [She Accepted Refugees Guided by Heart. Guided by Heart She Then Threw Them Out. Because She Couldn’t Bear It Anymore]. Published on 29.12.2022 (last accessed on 13 June 2023).
Notes from Poland. 2022. ‘US Ambassador Calls Poland “Humanitarian Superpower” for Response to Ukraine Crisis’ (last accessed 9 October 2024).
OECD. 2022. ‘Housing Support for Ukrainian Refugees in Receiving Countries’. OECD Policy Responses in the Impacts of the War in Ukraine (last accessed 13 June 2023).
Reuters. 2022. ‘Tens of Thousands Join Online Networks to Offer Help to Ukrainians Fleeing War’ (last accessed 9 October 2024).
