Hadassah Helps Heal Ukrainian Refugees

Blog by Hadassah International Executive Director, Jorge Diener, April 2022:

My father was the last of his generation in our family to pass away. Bernardo Diener was born in Buenos Aires to Polish parents who escaped right before the Holocaust. A couple of days before my father died, I had my last chance of interacting with him. Right after landing in Buenos Aires from my hometown in Tel Aviv, I spent a full day talking with him in Yiddish, the language I heard as a child from my grandfather, a lower-middle class tailor who was born in the small town of Tomaszow Mazowiecki in southern Poland. I received notification of my official Polish status. For me, Born and raised in Argentina, I became Israeli by choice; while they lost the land where they lived, but not by choice.

Who could have told me as I was saying farewell to my father that a few months later I would be returning to Poland. This time with Poland as the place of shelter for millions of children, women and elderly displaced by the madness of a brutal war.

Hadassah Helps Rescue Ukrainian Refugees

Today we face the largest humanitarian catastrophe in Europe in generations with almost four million refugees having crossed Ukrainian borders – mostly into Poland. I was privileged, as Executive Director of Hadassah International, to come to Poland with a medical humanitarian mission and play a leading role together with my colleagues from the Hadassah Medical Organisation in Jerusalem and Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organisation of America.

In the beginning, we humbly came to do a quick needs assessment on the ground. Having established a connection with the Medical University Hospital of Lublin, about three hours from the border, we were able to see how the landscape in Poland had already dramatically changed.

Hadassah’s initial medical team from Jerusalem consisted of internal medicine and trauma/orthopaedics doctors. They initiated a collaboration and training with the Polish doctors who suddenly needed to absorb millions of new patients in an already stretched public health system.

Hadassah’s expertise proved to be critical in sharing knowledge that can be instrumental in dealing with this new situation. With a war that keeps unfolding in unprecedented and unexpected scenarios, the team of Hadassah trauma experts brought with them the trauma protocols that they have created in Israel for mass casualties, including how to act during potential radioactive, chemical and biological attacks.

The Hadassah team quickly understood that while we were building capacity at the back end in Lublin, the real immediate medical needs were right at the border. Together with Dr. Yaarit Ribak, the Hadassah internal medicine physician who now is considered the pioneer of our medical mission, we drove all the way to the border.

While driving, it was apparent that we were getting closer and closer to the border. Military trucks carrying supplies, minivans with logos of humanitarian aid organisations, ambulances and buses coming to pick up refugees escaping the Russian attacks.

But nothing prepared us for the saddening live images of thousands of refugees in transit at the largest refugee centre on the Polish Ukrainian border in the small town of Przemysl, right next to the Medyka border crossing, where over fifty percent of all Ukrainians have entered Europe.

In what used to be a shopping mall, several aid organisations from Poland and around the world had set up an amazing relief platform, providing temporary bedding, food, clothing and arrangements for moving into other destinations in the country and beyond.

Walking into that refugee centre for the first time, it immediately became apparent to us how we could help. In an improvised Polish Red Cross paramedics room, we met our partners from the Israel disaster relief NGO Natan and jumped into treating patients. Dr. Ribak was called into the main room where about two thousand people, mostly women and children, were lying next to each other in camp beds, sleeping bags and mattresses. These people were escaping heavy bombardments, mothers who had taken their babies from shelters where they were no longer protected, grandmothers who stood in crowded trains for days to put the bombing behind them. I will never forget my first impression of seeing their faces, their lost eyes and confused expressions.

After treating the first refugee, a suspected Covid patient, work started very quickly. A team of four doctors, including pediatricians and two nurses landed the next day and started staffing the Hadassah Clinic 24/7 in cooperation with Natan and the Polish Red Cross. Since then, as I conclude my third week in Poland, four delegations of Hadassah healthcare professionals have travelled from Israel for rotating shifts.

To date, our team of Hadassah experts have already treated over 3000 patients. I am proud of being part of an organisation that can give a response to one single patient but also to a world that is bleeding. Every second, a child in Ukraine is losing their home.

As I see what is happening now in Ukraine and by extension in neighbouring countries such as Poland with the refugee humanitarian crisis we see unfolding, I know I have so much more to do.

I also believe that everyone has the human responsibility to help the suffering people in and from Ukraine. But for those of us who justifiably claim to be the living memory of the Holocaust, we can’t see the destruction of lives and livelihoods of an entire nation, remain indifferent and NOT ACT.

Hadassah is doing what is right for humans, for humankind and for humanity. Because this is who we are.

Editor’s Notes:

This is an excerpt of a blog by Jorge Diener first published in the Times of Israel – click here to read the full story.