A Refugee’s Tale. Halina. | Real story. All names are changed.
Foreign Policy Brief #176 | By: Yelena Korshunov | February 9, 2025
Featured Photo From: euronews.com
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Halina dragged heavy bags filled with humanitarian bean cans to the apartment door, her numb hand fumbling for the key in her pocket. Her feet ached with exhaustion. She had stood for hours in a crowded subway, clutching these precious bags of free food.
Once a confident businesswoman who had built a successful cosmetics company in Ukraine, Halina was now working as a home attendant in New York. The good news was that her surgery and chemotherapy were behind her. Now, she was in the final week of daily radiation treatments. “That’s it for now,” the doctor had said. Fingers crossed. She wondered if her hair would ever grow back —or if the war, the chemo, and the stress had stolen more from her than just her home.
Sometimes, Halina imagined that if she closed her eyes tightly, she would open them to find herself back in her sunlit house with cherry trees outside the window. But when she did open them, she was still here, in a small apartment in the Bronx. Her daughter Margarita would soon come home from school. Then Halina would leave for her evening home attendant shift. Later, her elder daughter, Sophia, would return from work. By that time, Halina would be too exhausted to eat dinner. The three of them would lie down together, talking—about school, work, soccer, their new life. About anything except the war.
Margarita is a high school senior. Last fall, when she arrived in the U.S. under the Unite for Ukraine (U4U) program with her mother and sister, she had joined the junior class at a public school while remotely completing her final year in a Ukrainian high school. The pressure was enormous—two schools, a new country, unfamiliar customs. The British English she had learned in Ukraine was not enough for fluent conversation or making friends. “Last spring, a counselor told me I had to attend summer school because I was ‘undocumented imigrant,’” Margarita recalled. “I told her, ‘I’m a legal refugee—we have visas.’ But the way she said it scared me. What if she got us into trouble, even though we’re here legally?” Fortunately, the principal and teachers were kind. Some students helped her, too. As a talented soccer player, Margarita had earned a full scholarship to a local soccer club and joined her school team. “That was the best part of starting life here,” she said. The practices and games felt familiar, like home. “But it’s hard to make friends. The other girls have known each other for years. Their parents drive them to visit colleges, and they talk about it. I have nothing to add.”
Halina doesn’t have a car. She doesn’t have time and money to take Margarita on college visits. She had to focus on her cancer treatments and work as much as she could. The family was barely covering rent and basic needs. New York is expensive, but at least there is work. Halina never told her former clients and employees in Ukraine that she was now a home attendant. On social media, she only posted pictures of New York’s dazzling skyline and festive holiday decorations. One day, she told herself she would go back. One day, she might even rebuild her business, ruined by the war.
The year they arrived in the U.S., Sophia had been a college senior—remotely. On February 24, 2022, the day Russia attacked Ukraine, all Ukrainian universities had switched to online learning. Campus life had disappeared overnight. No more lectures in packed auditoriums, no more coffee-fueled study sessions, no more lazy afternoons joking with friends. Everything changed. That damned day, none of them would ever forget.
During those many long months of war, air raid sirens froze their minds and bodies with fear. Halina, Sophia, and Margarita would wake in the middle of the night to the deafening howl and run to the cellar of their house, hearts pounding. Even now, sirens triggered Sophia’s fear. The blare of a fire truck or ambulance on a New York street still made her body tense, her hands instinctively covering her head. But at least now, after nearly two years under a peaceful sky, she could sleep through the night.
Sophia had earned her Ukrainian undergraduate diploma last summer. She dreamed of getting a master’s degree. How incredible it would be to study in New York. But she has no time. With their mother still recovering from cancer, Sophia has to work full-time commuting three hours a day, sometimes longer, to her work and back home. The salary was barely above minimum wage, but it was what the family needed. At 21, she had no time for friends, no boyfriend, no campus life. Maybe one day, in the future.
There is no fairy-tale ending to this story today. No Richard Gere lookalike had stepped out of a sleek Mercedes to rescue a pretty woman from poverty. This is real life—the life of one refugee family among thousands, struggling for survival, for food, for shelter. They had been wrenched from their homes, their comforts, their once-flourishing country beneath the bright blue Ukrainian sky. But they are alive and safe. They work, they pay taxes, they endure. And perhaps, one day, they will thrive again.
P.S. Yesterday, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has suspended the Unite for Ukraine (U4U) program following a new executive order on border protection.
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