60 minutes overtime
our story this week is about refugees leaving ukraine hundreds of thousands
of ukrainian women and children compressed in these railroad cars and brought out through
poland and other bordering countries from ukraine we went to a picturesque town a thousand years
old called jimmish it is about eight miles from the border with ukraine in southeastern poland
this is a major rail center and so most of the trains that are coming into poland from ukraine
are passing through zhemish and so we had an opportunity to stand on the platform there and
watch as many as five or ten trains come in every day tell me about your journey here um
the ukrainians coming out of the war zone are virtually all women and children because ukraine
is holding on to its military age men one of the things to keep in mind when you see all these
women and children coming off the trains is that they've left a lot of people behind they've left
their husbands they've left their sons who may be of military age who did you leave behind venus
foreign
and very often we spoke to a lot of people who had been forced to leave their parents because their
parents were elderly and couldn't travel and so there's a great deal of anguish among the refugees
that we spoke to about the people who haven't come out who have you left behind cinema by
foreign
great
on the platforms at the train station we found people from all over the world i hadn't realized
this but it turns out ukraine is a destination for medical schools dental schools etc for people to
come in from africa latin america asia etc and so a large number of people that we saw being
evacuated from ukraine were not ukrainian citizens at all we spoke to one young man who was an iraqi
who was studying at a ukrainian dental school what was your journey like
it was hell it was tiring i've been imagine standing for three days um
no access to normal things like hygienic products food water half the time
like totally we haven't been to a toilet for four days like what can i do as a human being
we got nothing until we actually reached the polish side where we got some help and obviously
you can see all these nice people helping us it was nice to see honestly at least somebody cared
i'll tell you what struck me about the scene at the train station in gemish in other
refugee crises that i've covered in afghanistan iraq sudan other places around the world
i have found that war refugees are almost never welcome in neighboring countries this berm marks
the border between syria and jordan the refugees that we ran into were coming across the top of the
berm and turning themselves into the safety of the jordanian border officers here sometimes they're
grudgingly admitted i was astonished watching the polls bringing these ukrainians in making sure
they had a meal to eat the moment they stepped off the train hot coffee they were even passing
out free sim cards so their cell phones would work in poland all of this organized in advance
as you're watching these thousands of people coming into the train station every day
what strikes you is that this is the first week
only one large city in ukraine has fallen and so what happens next what happens next week and
the next the polls in my estimation have done a remarkable job handling this on such short notice
but of course the the really difficult test probably still lies ahead of us