Robert and Stacey Katz and their twins, Noah and Ava, exterior their dwelling in Hallowell. The household raised almost $4,000 in 4 days to purchase artwork provides for Ukrainian kids who’re staying in a refugee middle in Poland. Derek Davis/Workers Photographer
As Robert Katz watched reviews of Ukrainian refugees crossing into Poland by the hundreds, he was struck by a way of familiarity.
Katz, an artwork professor on the College of Maine at Augusta, had crossed the border between the 2 nations many instances throughout a fellowship after the top of the Chilly Warfare that introduced him to the distant Carpathian Mountains. Whereas there, he had explored his family roots in a small village on the Poland-Ukraine border and realized particulars of the lives of relations who had been killed by Nazis throughout World Warfare II.
The current-day pictures of girls and kids fleeing struggle, their husbands and fathers left behind to struggle, felt each linked to that private historical past and like nothing he’d seen earlier than.
At dwelling in Hallowell, Katz, his spouse, Stacey, and their kids, Shaina, Ava and Noah, considered all that these kids who’d needed to flee Ukraine had misplaced and what may be being neglected as volunteers rushed to maintain them secure and supply them with fundamental requirements.
The Katz household knew they needed to assist, even in a small approach.
Their concept was easy: increase cash to purchase artwork provides for refugee kids to assist them course of their experiences. They’d “present supplies for artistic expression, to discover colour and lightweight at a time of unprecedented upheaval, loss and darkness,” stated Katz, who’s a sculptor.
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In 4 days, the household raised almost $4,000 to purchase artwork provides for Ukrainian kids who fled their properties and are actually staying at a refugee shelter in Lublin, a metropolis close to the border in southeastern Poland.
The artwork provides had been delivered to the shelter two weeks in the past.
Katz is accustomed to the perilous route many Ukrainians have been taking to Lublin.
In his 1989 fellowship, he had joined a staff of wildlife biologists from the Polish Academy of Science who had been gathering knowledge in regards to the thriving wolf inhabitants within the Carpathians. He returned often over the following decade to make a movie and work on academic tasks to attach Maine college students with post-Chilly Warfare analysis being completed in southeastern Poland.
Katz had felt compelled to go to Poland when he first bought the prospect to discover the historical past of his mother and father’ households and attempt to study extra about relations who had been killed in World Warfare II. He knew little about his maternal grandfather’s household till he acquired a letter from a distant relative.
The relative stated that whereas Katz’s grandfather had left Europe previous to the Nazi takeover of Poland in 1939, his mother and father, cousins and siblings had stayed behind.
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“About your request for household historical past, I don’t know a lot, nonetheless I do know that your loved ones had many students and a pack of characters proper out of the work of our beloved Marc Chagall,” the relative wrote. “They lived not removed from the Ukrainian metropolis of L’vov. They had been, after all, all victims of financial oppression and had little or no probability. … When the German tanks rolled into their village, the Jews, younger and previous, turned fodder for his or her factories, or if inept or previous had been despatched to the gasoline chambers. The Holocaust consumed many members of our household,” the relative wrote.
Over seven journeys to Japanese Europe within the ’90s, Katz realized that just about the entire folks in his grandfather’s village died on the notorious loss of life camp Belzec, the place in 1942 greater than 434,000 Jews had been killed.
That historical past was on Katz’s thoughts when he selected the place to ship the artwork provides.
The shelter in Lublin was organized by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee within the Lodge Ilan, a stately yellow constructing with eight columns flanking the entrance entrance. It was constructed almost a century in the past as a yeshiva, or college of Jewish research, and was as soon as identified for having the most effective college students, lecturers and library. Throughout the Holocaust, Nazis burned the entire books and killed lots of the college students and college.
The Jewish neighborhood acquired the constructing again via communal restitution a decade in the past, and a dormitory on the property was became a resort. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the resort stopped reserving company and opened its doorways to refugees.
“This place had a historical past of this terrible horror to it. Now it’s been became a refugee middle and a spot of hope and security. There as a wonderful irony in that,” Katz stated.
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A lot of the refugees are ladies and kids who arrive with solely the issues they’ll carry of their arms, in accordance with a report from Nationwide Public Radio. On the shelter, they’re supplied with meals and medical provides, in addition to donated garments, strollers, diapers and toys.
Noah Katz, a 16-year-old junior at Kents Hill College, has seen firsthand the enjoyment that comes from changing misplaced objects for kids who’ve been via a traumatic occasion. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, he collected and delivered a whole lot of kilos of baseball gear to convey to kids who had misplaced all the things in villages close to San Juan.
Years earlier, Noah and his twin, Ava, had rallied their neighborhood to gather artwork provides to ship to elementary college students on the Wyola College on the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana.
In order that they knew go about elevating cash for the artwork provides. They arrange a GoFundMe web page and had been pleasantly stunned to boost almost $1,000 a day.
Cash in hand, the household turned to Polish Amazon to order the provides, which they found out can be simpler. Katz organized for the packing containers to be delivered to the house of a Polish wildlife biologist he had labored with years earlier than.
The packing containers had been full of “all the things you may think about,” Noah stated – coloured pencils, crayons, watercolor paints, paper and coloring books.
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“We had been making an attempt to get as many kinds of provides as doable,” he stated.
After the wildlife biologist delivered the packing containers, the Katz household acquired an electronic mail from the distribution committee in Poland, which stated it was “actually wonderful you had been in a position to pull this off.”
“We don’t view this as a monumental undertaking. It truly is simply making a small distinction within the lives of some kids,” Robert Katz stated. “We want that we might increase a lot extra money and get provides to refugee facilities throughout Poland. That is simply our small approach of sitting in our dwelling in Maine and with the ability to assist in a tangible approach.”
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