On March 30, 2022, a 68-year-old YPO Gold member decided he could not sit and watch the situation unfolding in Ukraine through his television set any longer. With little knowledge or experience, he bought a 15-seater minivan christened JFDI (Just Effing Do It), loaded it up with essential supplies and raced to the Polish-Ukrainian border town of Hrebenne to help.
The following is the anonymous account of his six-day journey to ‘just effing do it for Ukraine’. These words form the true and honest account of his helter-skelter experience on the roads of Eastern Europe both literally and emotionally. Should you manage to make it through this entire passage, be not surprised if you are left as breathless as our anonymous writer was by the time his rollercoaster ride to help Ukrainian refugees was over…at least for now.
“I don’t exactly know who you guys are but…” was the WhatsApp message I woke up to in Pforzheim, Germany, having driven there with JC, my co-driver, some 17 hours to transport three families of refugees to safety.
These three families had arrived in Poland that morning from Kharkiv and other war-torn places via Lviv. These were four generations of Ukrainians, including an 85-year-old great grandmother, her daughter and granddaughter and great grandson, who had all been made homeless. They were carrying what remained of their worldly possessions in a few plastic roll-on wheely bags and an Ikea plastic laundry bag, with other bits and pieces stuffed into various backpacks they were carrying.
We had delivered these people to Germany safely from Warsaw the night before, arriving in Pforzheim at 04:00 local time after 17 hours on the road with us, after having travelled some 10 hours from Lviv.
However, before making the trip from Warsaw to Pforzheim, we had a whole other mission to complete in the form of a run from the Polish-Ukrainian border town of Hrebenne to Krakow with 11 passengers, two of which included a mother and her young son. The son was a young boy who had been hiding in school shelters in Kharkiv for two weeks after their apartment was bombed. He was ‘extracted’ from Ukraine and brought over the border where we eventually picked him up from the Arkadia Hotel meeting point in Hrebenne along with his mother and their pet dog.
Initially, the plan was for us to have met the Kharkiv trio (the dog included) at the Biedronka supermarket parking lot in Hrebenne at 17:00 local time. While we were waiting for them to arrive, we went to the local registration centre where we offered the other 10 places on our minibus to anyone else wanting to be taken to Krakow. The opportunity was announced on the PA system, and we were instantly surrounded by 20 refugees, all women and children with desperate and worried looks on their faces.
Unfortunately, we only had 10 places on the vehicle. So, we selected two families, completed registration with the local police for our vehicle, passports and the details of the two families to guarantee they would not be trafficked or exploited, and we said we’d return to collect them just after 17:00 when we collected the trio from Kharkiv from the supermarket.
While waiting for the trio at the car park, I encountered Nikolas and his family, which was comprised of two grandparents, his two children and his wife. They had a car and had escaped from Ukraine three days before but were in need of refuge in Germany which could accommodate the whole family. The children could speak German but were not proficient in Polish, and they had been trying to find somewhere in Germany to stay. I therefore got in touch with fellow YPO member Andrea in the German town of Pattensen, who was arranging for Ukrainian refugees to go and stay with German families. She found them a place in her village before I received a Telegram message from another volunteer out there called Lena.
Lena informed me that the Kharkiv trio would no longer be meeting us at the supermarket carpark and had been diverted to the Arkadia Hotel. So, we returned to the registration centre to pick-up our other 10 people for the journey to Krakow. Upon returning, we encountered an amazing Polish gentleman called Arturo, and he had a problem. Arturo had seven people packed into his Volvo that he had picked up from Lviv in Ukraine and transported across the border. He needed to get these people onto Krakow, but it would be a long journey for them all to be squashed into his Volvo and the passengers did not want to be separated into two cars.
Arturo needed to offload one passenger because he could only comfortably fit six into his Volvo. However, I was in a situation where I could not find the 10 people we’d arranged to transport, presumably because they’d already been transported ahead on a larger bus. Also present at the registration centre at this time was an English volunteer called Angelika who was carrying six people in her vehicle. Arturo therefore asked us to transport the seven he had in his car while offering spaces to three more at the centre, while he’d take Angelika’s six passengers and allow us to follow him to Krakow.
We successfully completed the journey having found three more passengers. Arturo was amazingly helpful in guiding us to Krakow, but upon arriving we discovered that our additional three from the registration centre required transport two hours further, by which time tiredness had set in and we felt unable to complete the trip. Arturo therefore took it upon himself to transport them one hour further on to his home in Katowice where he put them up for the night, and in the morning his brother transported them the rest of the way to where they wanted to go.
From Krakow, we then set off for Warsaw to collect the three families of people who we’d eventually be taking to Pforzheim in Germany. However, we broke down 15 minutes outside of Warsaw, and our waiting refugees had to wait a further 24 hours in a dark student hotel. On the motorway, we contacted Mercedes 24 to try to get back on the road. While speaking to Andrew in their call centre in Amsterdam and attempting to get towed to a garage for repairs, we encountered Dennis, who U-turned on the motorway to come and help us after seeing the ‘Ukrainian Passenger Services’ sign on the side of our bus.
Approaching us and speaking in broken English, Dennis asked how he could help. It turned out he was a Ukrainian working in Poland, and he had signed up to go and fight back in Ukraine, but stopped after seeing us in our predicament. He took my co-driver JC to the local garage and through Google Translate, he helped us get Mercedes to not only fix a camshaft sensor on the vehicle when the part wasn’t available in the whole of Poland, but he also helped get garage staff to replace a non-standard v-belt. This was all on a Saturday afternoon within four hours and the vehicle was handed back to us in perfect working order.
We also owe a debt of gratitude to Arturo here. Arturo helped Mercedes get hold of a camshaft sensor and emphasised the need for us to get back on the road to help refugees as quickly as possible. Through his company, Arturo also managed to get a trade standard price for the repair job, which included a 50 per cent discount on what the price would have been – reducing the fee from 3,600 zloty to 1,800 zloty. He then even paid the bill for us and won’t let me pay him back even to this day.
It was a show of generosity like this that made me think: experiences like these are all about the people you meet, those who don't mull over things and who just go and 'effing do it.'
With our vehicle JFDI fixed, we arranged to pick up our refugees and transport them on to Germany the following day. We stayed at the Hilton Hotel in Warsaw for the night where I met up with fellow YPO member Joe and a chap called Brian from aid group HelpUkraine22.org, who were both over from the US to help. We agreed for our vehicle to later be loaned to them to help with transport once we’d completed our run.
Not long after, Dennis turned up at the hotel. He’d contacted Arturo to ask where we were staying, and he turned up with four beers and a bottle of Ukrainian vodka as a gesture of thanks for what we were doing to help his home country.
The following day, we picked up our 11 refugees from the three families and lots of luggage (how fortunate it was that we had a roof rack fitted by friends of Tessa and lots of donations from her other friends in Godalming before we left England) and set off for Pforzheim near Karlsruhe in Germany. We arrived at 04:00 in the morning having driven 1,200 kilometres, with Yvgeny and Sandra tracking us online and booking us into the Parkhotel at our end destination for when we arrived.
While somewhat farcical that the hotel staff initially asked the refugees to provide a home address when they quite plainly no longer had one, it was wonderful for us to be in receipt of the great grandmother’s blessing and promise that we’d always hold a place in their hearts, now and in heaven.
It was Yvgeny who sent the WhatsApp message I referred to at the beginning: “I don’t know exactly who you guys are but…what you are doing is amazing. How can I support you in what you are doing? Do you belong to an organisation where I can donate? Or can I just contribute to the costs?”
Yvgeny, who helped guide us to Pforzheim, was a participant in a closed YPO Ukraine Efforts WhatsApp group containing 243 people, and I’d posted in the group to let them know we’d be heading to Hrebenne with our 15-seat minibus and five 18-square-metre gazebos before helping transport refugees and I asked if anyone required assistance.
I was eventually linked up to Yvgeny who came from Zurich, Switzerland, by Raquel who originally came from Los Angeles. Raquel’s friend Nathalia (an Israeli) had seen the YPO post and connected us via Telegram to a woman called Sandra (from Texas), who then put me in touch with Yvgeny.
Yvgeny’s mother lived in Pforzheim and was ready to welcome another nine refugees inbound from Kharkiv after we’d dropped off our passengers from Warsaw. Yvgeny had been working for days to find a solution for nine people to complete the 1,200-kilometre journey from Hrebenne to Pforzheim and they were too vulnerable to send by train and too many to transport in a car.
Seeking mine and JC’s help, we obliged by going back to Hrebenne after a good six hours sleep and then back to Pforzheim with the nine, completing the run in one long and tiring day. We then returned to Hrebenne with two days left before our flight back to the UK with Warsaw. We thought we could do an afternoon’s work, and then on Wednesday find a group to take to Warsaw before flying home.
However, we received a Telegram message from Sandra asking if we were in Hrebenne because 13 blind refugees and a dog needed transporting to Krakow. We answered the call for help and went to the Arkadia Hotel to wait for them to arrive from Kharkiv and other places via bus. Once they’d arrived, we waited for a further two people to arrive from over the border, which took another couple of hours.
After setting off, Sandra messaged again to tell us we were no longer to go to Krakow with the refugees, but they were to be dropped off at Lodz, two hours beyond Krakow. However, two passengers still needed to go to Krakow, so we compromised by dropping them off in Lublin.
The place in Lublin where we left them was an Indian-style retreat in the middle of dense forest, very much off the beaten track. We dropped the two blind passengers off to a warm reception at 22:00 that night and headed on to Lodz.
Having checked into our fourth hotel of the trip at midnight that night, we were desperate for food and a hard-earned beer. Luckily, we had Arturo to give us a restaurant recommendation and he directed us to a place called Hell’s Kitchen, only the kitchen was shut by the time we arrived.
Yet, the owner of the restaurant – a chap called Raj – overheard us talking about our situation and the work we were doing over there. So, he promptly opened the kitchen and cooked us an incredible spaghetti bolognese. He then joined us in some vodka shots at the bar, and clearly took it a little too far because his wife had to come and take him home! So, JC and I closed the bar on his behalf and had a good night’s sleep at our hotel.
The following day, we returned to Warsaw and encountered the American duo again who wanted to borrow JFDI to ship goods over the border into some of the worst-affected areas, before extracting refugees back over the border into Poland. Having already verbally agreed to loan our vehicle, we agreed a way to do it and then took JFDI to a friend called Domi, who owned a dressage establishment just outside Warsaw.
Once the Americans were done with JFDI, Domi agreed to take the vehicle back on our behalf and store it at her business premises until we were able to return and complete more journeys. She then drove us to Warsaw airport for our flight home.
If you have found it within you to keep reading to this point, that’s how we drove 6,200 kilometres in just five days on the road and transported 32 people, including two babies, a few children and two dogs to safety and new lives, while connecting online and face-to-face with more than 50 PLUs (People Like Us).
While JFDI may literally mean ‘Just Effing Do It’, it will also mean to me that ‘I will be back, because I can.’
Photo by Kevin Bückert on Unsplash
