A yr in the past, Russia’s navy onslaught on Ukraine despatched tens of millions of refugees fleeing west, usually to international locations cautious of taking in foreigners, elevating fears of a repeat of the political convulsions set off by a migration disaster in 2015 that concerned far fewer folks.

However the paradox of foreigner-leery governments taking in large numbers of Ukrainians has been particularly stark in Poland, lengthy one of many world’s most ethnically homogeneous international locations with a deep-seated distrust of outsiders and a tangled, usually painful historical past with Ukraine.

Since Feb. 24 final yr, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Poland has recorded almost 10 million crossings throughout its frontier with Ukraine into Polish territory. President Biden, on a go to to Poland on Tuesday, paid tribute to that feat in a speech in Warsaw. “God bless you,” he mentioned.

To grasp this open-armed response in a rustic that simply earlier than the battle began was beating again asylum seekers making an attempt to sneak in from neighboring Belarus, take into account the change of coronary heart Ryszard Marcinkowski, 74, a retired Polish railway employee, skilled.

He grew up with horror tales in regards to the brutality of Ukrainian nationalists informed by his mother and father and aunt, all refugees from previously Polish lands in what, since World Warfare II, has been western Ukraine.

But when tens of millions of Ukrainians began arriving in Poland final February, Mr. Marcinkowski drove to the border to ship meals and different provides.

“I had a really unhealthy picture of Ukrainians from my household however realized that I had to assist them,” Mr. Marcinkowski mentioned. “For Poland,” he added, “Russia has all the time been the larger evil.”

For the reason that battle started, the Polish authorities have recorded 9.8 million crossings into Poland from Ukraine. That features a number of crossings forwards and backwards by some folks and others who left shortly for different international locations. However Poland, based on Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, is now sheltering round two million Ukrainians, down from greater than 5 million final yr however nonetheless greater than the inhabitants of Warsaw, the Polish capital.

Some far-right politicians, Mr. Morawiecki mentioned in an interview on Tuesday, “try to create noise and animosity between Poles and Ukrainians” however “they failed.” As an alternative of being a burden or a risk, he mentioned, the inflow “will strengthen Poland demographically” and “enrich our tradition.”

“I want Ukraine properly, but when individuals who got here right here wish to keep, they are going to after a while have everlasting paperwork and can have the ability to keep and can make us stronger from many various angles,” the prime minister mentioned.

Rebuilt from ruins after 1945 amid seething hostility to Germans, Russians and Ukrainians, Poland has accommodated way more refugees from neighboring Ukraine than another nation. Germany is subsequent with about one million.

Poland’s response to the refugee state of affairs in Ukraine has received plaudits from the European Union and has given its right-wing authorities extra clout, offsetting its earlier repute as a troublemaker due to what the bloc’s govt arm in Brussels views as strikes to undermine the independence of the Polish judiciary and discriminate towards L.G.B.T. folks. However long-running disputes with Brussels nonetheless rumble on.

Within the early days of the battle, these fleeing the battle in Ukraine, principally ladies and kids, surged into jap Polish cities throughout the border. However as hopes of a swift finish to the preventing pale, almost all moved farther west, wanting to discover a place to stay and work.

Refugees, largely depending on the charity of strangers for meals and shelter, at the moment are usually residents fending for themselves. Few have everlasting residency standing however many have jobs with Polish firms and kids in Polish faculties. All have entry to Polish well being care and different providers.

The size of change in Poland is especially evident within the western metropolis of Wroclaw (pronounced VROTZ-waf), the previously German metropolis of Breslau. Ethnically cleansed of Germans after 1945 and repopulated with ethnic Poles, a lot of them refugees from misplaced territory in Ukraine, the town lengthy boasted that “each stone in Wroclaw speaks Polish.”

Now, native officers say, greater than 1 / 4 of Wroclaw’s inhabitants speaks Ukrainian and or Russian, and round 20 % of college college students are from Ukraine. It has greater than a half-dozen grocery shops and two supermarkets run by Ukrainians that promote principally Ukrainian meals, like Kyiv cake and patriotic bins of sweet known as “Every little thing Might be Ukraine.”

The presence of what officers put at round 250,000 Ukrainians in a metropolis that earlier than the battle had a inhabitants of 640,000 has not gone down properly with everybody.

At a soccer recreation within the Wroclaw stadium in October, a bunch of followers hoisted an enormous banner studying: “Cease the Ukrainization of Poland.”

However this, mentioned Radoslaw Michalski, the official coordinating Wroclaw’s refugee response, mirrored solely a “marginal fringe.” He mentioned the general public had primarily rallied to assist Ukrainians, an outpouring of generosity he in comparison with the grass-roots mobilization throughout catastrophic floods that engulfed the town in 1997, a calamity featured within the Netflix collection “Excessive Water.”

“As occurred throughout the flood, folks mobilized spontaneously to not struggle somebody however to assist their metropolis,” he mentioned. Within the early days of the battle, greater than 4,000 Wroclaw residents volunteered to assist Ukrainians arriving by rail.

“No one coordinated issues at first,” Mr. Michalski mentioned. “It was spontaneous.”

New arrivals by practice in Wroclaw from Ukraine, which peaked at 12,000 on a single day final March, have slowed to a trickle of round 20 folks a day, mentioned Yurii Matnenko, who oversees a reception middle at a station run by Fundacja Ukraina, a charity that has shifted from specializing in discovering Ukrainians shelter to serving to them discover work and navigate Polish forms.

“Everybody thought the battle would finish in a month or two however now sees this didn’t occur, so they should get jobs,” he mentioned.

Most Ukrainians say they ultimately need to go house, a need inspired by the federal government in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, which presents on-line studying for refugee kids to allow them to sustain with the Ukrainian curriculum.

Veronika Goncharuk, who arrived in Wroclaw in April from Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine along with her husband and three kids, is retaining her choices open, enrolling her two sons and her daughter in a Polish state college and in addition in on-line Ukrainian courses.

However she mentioned it in all probability made extra sense “for the sake of my kids” to settle in Poland as a result of “with a neighbor like Russia, Ukraine won’t ever be at peace.” Her husband has discovered a job as an electrician.

For the second, the household lives at no cost in a single room at a former faculty dormitory.

The kids have realized Polish, although Anastasia, 10, lamented that her solely pal at college was a fellow Ukrainian lady, Katya, who bought sick lately and left her friendless in school. Polish classmates, she mentioned, do not choose on her for being Ukrainian however “go away me sitting alone. I actually miss Katya.”

Igor Czerwinski, a Polish language instructor at a Wroclaw college that has taken in 150 Ukrainian college students along with 250 Polish pupils, mentioned he had heard grumbling from fellow workers members in regards to the pressure introduced on by the inflow of foreigners.

An ethnic Pole born in Kazakhstan, he speaks Russian in addition to Polish, attends an Orthodox church in Wroclaw stuffed with Ukrainian worshipers and celebrates the “constructive vitality” dropped at the town by so many refugees hungry to succeed. Ukrainians, he mentioned, are amongst his finest college students.

Because the battle grinds on, Ukrainians in Wroclaw are now not fleeing for his or her lives however, usually helped by Polish-speaking compatriots who emigrated earlier than the battle, making an attempt to cool down. On the metropolis’s civil affairs workplace final week, two Ukrainians from Odesa bought married in a ceremony presided over by a Polish clerk assisted by a Ukrainian translator. Each the bride and the groom discovered work at a battery manufacturing unit and, based on the bride, Elena Poperechna, “have determined we need to stay in Poland.”

Grzegorz Hryciuk, a historical past professor on the College of Wroclaw, mentioned the inflow of Ukrainians mirrored the arrival in Wroclaw greater than eight a long time in the past of a whole bunch of 1000’s of ethnic Poles from misplaced Polish territories in western Ukraine, previously jap Poland.

Many of those Polish refugees, he mentioned, harbored a deep hatred of Ukrainians, whom they blamed for massacres earlier than and throughout the battle, in addition to hope of returning swiftly to their former properties in and round previously Polish cities like Lviv. Slowly although, “they adjusted to actuality,” the professor mentioned, and made new lives in exile.

That sample is now beginning to repeat, solely with ethnic Ukrainians as an alternative of ethnic Poles, elevating questions on whether or not and the way lengthy cities like Wroclaw and the Polish state can deal with a drastic demographic and ethnic shift. Poland, which resisted taking in folks from the Center East and Africa in 2015, has principally welcomed Ukrainians, who, mentioned Professor Hryciuk, profit from the truth that “of their look and customs they aren’t that completely different from Poles. They don’t seem to be an different.”

There’s nonetheless some concern that the inflow may create a gap for extremist nationalist teams to the proper of Poland’s governing Legislation and Justice occasion, itself a deeply conservative political pressure that campaigned up to now on guarantees to maintain out foreigners.

However Przemyslaw Witkowski, an professional on far-right extremism from Wroclaw who teaches at Collegium Civitas, a personal college in Warsaw, mentioned Poland’s excessive nationalist fringe was at the moment cut up over the battle and refugees from Ukraine.

Ultrareligious teams like one known as Confederation, he mentioned, look to Russia as a bulwark towards secular Western values and denounce the “Ukrainization” of Poland, whereas teams with neo-Nazi, pagan leanings assist Ukrainians “as a result of they’re white, they’re Slavs and they’re towards Russia.”

Neither, he added, has gained a lot traction with most of the people, partially as a result of “it’s arduous to create severe rigidity when folks have jobs.” The unemployment price in Wroclaw is below 2 %.

Lukasz Kaminski, the director of the Nationwide Ossolinski Institute, an establishment selling Polish tradition that moved from Lviv to Wroclaw in 1945, mentioned the nationalist supreme of a wholly Polish Poland was now completed.

“Every little thing has modified due to the battle,” he mentioned, describing the inflow of Ukrainians as a return to Wroclaw’s roots within the Center Ages as a “blended land” of Germans, Poles, Jews and different ethnic teams. “Single nation Poland was all the time synthetic — towards our historical past and towards our previous expertise,” he mentioned.