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Professionals in Poland find new calling: Helping Ukrainian refugees

Professionals in Poland find new calling: Helping Ukrainian refugees

WARSAW — Six weeks ago, Aleksandra Petrykowsa was a transactional lawyer in Warsaw on the fast track: She was a managing partner at a firm by her late 30s, who had spent her spare time studying for a Ph.D.

When war broke out in Europe, she walked away from all of it.

On the chilly February day that Russia invaded Ukraine, Petrykowska was in Venice and recalled feeling devastated that she wasn’t closer to home to try to help. Within days she was back in her Warsaw apartment, housing a Ukrainian woman and her child as refugees began pouring over the border. That was just the start.

“I quit everything,” said Petrykowsa, who has stopped working in the corporate sector altogether.

Throughout Poland, an army of citizens has stepped up to offer spare bedrooms, spare cash and spare time to the roughly 2.5 million Ukrainians who have fled to Poland so far, offering more than any other country. But some Poles have gone further, putting thriving careers on hold indefinitely and throwing their professional and financial futures into uncertainty as they dedicate themselves full-time to helping Ukrainians.

Aleksandra Petrykowsa.NBC News

It’s a wartime twist on an economic trend on display during the past two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, when large numbers of dissatisfied workers in disparate parts of the world resigned and looked for more fulfilling ways to spend their time, in what’s been dubbed the Great Resignation or the Big Quit.

For Petrykowska, these days an average morning might include registering Ukrainian children for school, shopping for refugees staying in her home, finding apartments in which to place other new arrivals or arranging for helmets, food and medicine to be shipped to those still in Ukraine.

“I don’t know any other way,” she said. “We have our families, our professional lives and everything. But these are our closest neighbors, and somehow I believe if we would be in the same situation, another nation and people would behave like…

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