ReportIn Bohumin, a city in the north-east of the Czech Republic, a train loaded with humanitarian aid takes the direction of Chop in Ukraine every day. And returns the next day with hundreds of Ukrainian refugees on board.
It is 9 p.m. this Thursday, March 4 in Bohumin, a small industrial town in the northeast of the Czech Republic, and an unusual tingling agitates the station. Dozens of volunteers line up to quickly load an old Soviet-era train with all kinds of products: blankets, toilet paper, bottled water, diapers and even hundreds of kilograms of dog and cat food… “Donations come from all over the Czech Republic”boasts Marketa, a 24-year-old architecture student who coordinates volunteers who come from local Protestant churches in particular.
On platform 2, at the same time, arrives in the other direction a train loaded with Ukrainian refugees en route to Prague. Since the beginning of March, the Czech association “The railways help” and the national company Ceske drahy have been organizing a real “railway bridge” for Ukraine.
Every night, a train leaves Bohumin for Chop, a Ukrainian border town 500 kilometers away, loaded with goods, and returns the following day with hundreds of refugees on board, the vast majority of them women and children… This operation , although interrupted on Sunday March 6 due to customs problems in Slovakia, the country through which the trains pass, has become the strongest symbol of the immense wave of solidarity observed since the beginning of the Russian attack in this country of Central Europe with a Communist Past.
In the train in which boarded The worldthere were a handful of Ceske Drahy employees in orange jackets that Thursday, four unarmed Czech policemen to check the identities of the refugees, Red Cross volunteers and three volunteers from Prague to make this twenty-day journey. four hours.
“We will try to send all these donations to the front”
Ivana Skalova, 50, consultant for an NGO, is Russian-speaking, she embarked to offer her translation services. “We Czechs don’t really like Russians. It must be said that we experienced Soviet tanks during the Prague Spring in 1968”, recalls this doctor of history. Tens of thousands of Czechs, including their conservative Prime Minister Petr Fiala, have also taken to the streets of Prague to support Ukraine in recent days. Nearly 60 million euros in donations have already been collected. And even the president with historically pro-Russian views, Milos Zeman, admitted to having ” deceived ” on Vladimir Putin with whom he had until now maintained warm relations.
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