A truck full of gifts left Rzeszow, Poland at dawn.
Two hours by road, with a delicate frontier in the middle: the destination is Zovka, a town in the Lviv oblast in the Ukraine, where the great feast of Saint Nicholas, the 'Santa Claus' of the East and of the northern Europe, and its load of gifts for children will not be stopped even by the war.
"We have prepared gifts for seven hundred children, toys, sweets, pencils, markers and notebooks for school and even fruit to keep up the tradition", says the head of the Rzeszow Red Cross Maciej Maruszak.
The toy truck for the feast of St. Nicholas
There are emergencies every day, delicate interventions, from the treatment of the sick and injured to the organization of food aid.
But if he calls Sister Mateusza of the Dominican nuns in the Lviv region, everything stops.
They, the nuns are the guardian angels of the little ones who arrived in Lviv because of the war, especially from the east and south of the country where the Russian offensive has sown death and destruction.
And every time they want to do something special for the little refugees, they ask for help from their friends in red jackets who live just across the border in Poland.
And so the volunteers arrive wearing a white beard and a shiny cloth suit to show those children that Saint Nicholas has also arrived in this 2022, the most difficult year for Ukraine in modern history.
And that, like every year, on December 6, gifts are unwrapped, fruit is eaten, as tradition dictates, scribbling sheets with new felt-tip pens.
Attention to children in the Podkarpacki region in Poland, the closest to Ukraine, declines from nine months to three hundred and sixty degrees.
There are the little orphans who "were welcomed and protected" in the town of Stalowa Wola, as reported by the mayor Lucjusz Nadbereżny and those who are treated in the medical hub of Rzeszow airport and then transferred to the major pediatric centers in Europe .
There are seven hundred Ukrainian teachers hired by the PCPM foundation to make the children feel at home, and those who in September received a backpack full of all the things needed to attend school.
Then there are the psychiatrists and psychologists who assist the abused children and who "only after six or seven meetings are able to talk about the trauma suffered".
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