On Tuesday afternoon, for the first and only time since he moved to Przewodów, a small town bordering Poland, Father Bogdan Wazny said mass to an empty church.
Just an hour earlier, a Russian-made missile had fired from Ukrainian territory, killing two of its parishioners and shattering the illusion that geography and international law would protect the villagers.
“The physical border here also separated us mentally from the war [in Ukraine]. We’ve always felt that way,” Wazny said the day after the missile landed. “We’ve never felt the danger here.”
Now, however, fear, horror and a sudden swarm of police and military kept the faithful at home as news of their personal tragedy began to bounce around the world, transmuted into a geopolitical crisis.
Location of the missile attack on the Polish village
The nightmare that Kyiv and its allies had been warning about for months had become a reality: the war in Ukraine had spilled over the country’s borders and put this sleepy village just four miles from the border , in the international spotlight.
“We’ve talked about it before, but it was never a serious threat,” said Justine Mazurek, who was born in the village 71 years ago. “Of course, I was aware that the war is going on, but I never heard any explosions.”
A day later, he says he still can’t believe two men he knew well were killed by a missile. “People are afraid, but they still haven’t had enough time to talk to each other, to process it.”
Within hours, US President Joe Biden and Polish leaders said they believed the missile, although Russian-made, had been fired by Ukraine in self-defense. This reduced the fear of the climb, but did nothing to ease Przewodów’s pain.
The town is small enough that everyone knew the victims. It has a registered population of 900, but only 600 live there; like areas of eastern Poland, has lost many of its young people to migration.
“We bumped into each other all the time and now they’re not here anymore,” said Mazurek, after attending the mass where Wazny prayed for the dead: parents and faithful devotees who were killed while working at a grain selection center .
One was married to a woman who worked at the school, so overnight principal Ewa Byra went from overseeing the education of 71 students to organizing psychological support for a traumatized community.
“We [in Przewodów] managed to calm down after February 24 [when Russia invaded Ukraine] despite the fact that we live next to war,” Byra said. “Emotions had calmed down and we managed to cope. But yesterday’s event reawakened those emotions.”
The school, where a sign reading “Safety Above All” hangs in the main hall, had already closed the day the missile struck, but was empty again the next day, with parents too scared to send their children to classrooms for just one day. a few hundred meters from the site of the explosion. “It was too fresh. This is a very hard experience for them,” Byra said.
It has already begun connecting the children and their parents with psychologists and trauma experts, who have come from larger cities nearby. “Psychological help has started today,” he said, describing an online meeting to connect people with the first basic support.
Byra expects the recovery to be tough for a community now living with the reality that war has crossed the border once, and may do so again. “We are trying as much as possible to keep life normal; the children’s feelings are the most important thing.”
He was also the host during the evening of journalists, as part of an overwhelming influx in the city, where the country roads are swarming with military and police cars. Police had cordoned off a large swath of land around the missile site as investigators scrambled to figure out what happened.
The missile landed shortly before 4pm local time on Tuesday as light fell from the sky. By Wednesday morning, the remote village had become world famous, swarming with journalists and police.
“Unfortunately, for this tragic reason, everyone will remember Przewodów. We would have preferred our village to have remained dark, and these two were alive.”
Additional reporting by Mariusz Cieszewski