Mr. Rogers, the children's television personality, famously said in an interview that his mother, during any sort of crisis, instructed her son to "always look for the helpers. . . . If you look for the helpers, you will know that there is hope."
Kristofer Kalas, a trained pastry chef and owner of the tiny market Hello Oma in East Hampton, has become one such helper in war-torn Ukraine, where he is helping women and children get out of the country.
Mr. Kalas's wife, Galla, is Ukrainian. They met six years ago when she was visiting New York City and have split their time between East Hampton and Ukraine for the last five years. She was there with their 6-month-old child in mid-February as a Russian invasion began to look increasingly inevitable. Mr. Kalas was in the United States and went there to help evacuate them.
They went from Ukraine to Germany, then Sweden, and then to Portugal, where Ms. Kalas remains. Mr. Kalas flew to Poland on March 4 and, after organizing an ad hoc group of volunteers and procuring a couple of vehicles, crossed back into Ukraine days later. He is there now, "to try and get people who are in tough situations out of them, to a safer place," he said over the phone last week. He estimated that he had helped evacuate 40 to 50 people over the past couple of weeks.
He is close to the capital of Kyiv, but wouldn't say exactly where. "I don't think anywhere is particularly safe in this country right now," he said. In happier times, it would take eight hours to drive from Kyiv to Lviv, "the closest large city to the border with Poland." Now, that trip "typically takes at least three days and can take as much as five or six days," he said.
"There's curfew all over the place. We have from 6 or 7 in the morning until 6 or 7 at night to operate. Then we have to shut down," he said. He has witnessed "not just small arms fire, but some pretty heavy stuff."
To get across the country, each evacuee needs nearly a week's worth of food. Even if someone can get out of the country, once they're in Poland, new problems emerge. The border town, "not much bigger than Hicksville" and six hours from Warsaw, is full of "hundreds of thousands of refugees," said Mr. Kalas. "You can't get hotel rooms, supermarkets are empty, resources are thin." For fleeing Ukrainians who do not speak Polish (less than one-third of Ukrainians do, according to kyivpost.com), having to navigate the next moves is difficult.
"The agencies are doing a phenomenal job at the border crossings, but it's an impossible problem. It's like the number pi, there is just no ending," he said. "At the border, there's just not enough space."
"The journey is just insane. It's mind boggling," he said. For a young, healthy person, it's difficult. "What if you're a 75-year-old man or woman, or a single mom with an infant? It's extremely tough."
Mr. Kalas has no military experience. He is scared, but resolved to the situation, one which, he said he could not plan for anyway. "Originally, I thought I might try to come for a week or two, maybe three, and see if I'm useful at all." Once on the ground, he realized the extent of the need and now believes he will be there for many months. A visit to his market's website, hellooma.com, this week, featured a pop-up window saying the business is for sale, and a donation box pointed to volunteerua.com to help his humanitarian efforts on behalf of Ukrainians.
"I'm not returning to the U.S. any time soon," he said. "There's a lot of help that's needed."
"I'm pretty optimistic about Ukraine's chances of winning. There's going to be a lot of help needed after that happens. If for some reason that doesn't happen, there's still going to be a lot of help needed."
He worries about the news cycle. He's afraid this is the hot topic of the moment but like other humanitarian crises, a year later, the American public will move on, even though people remain in dire straits. The best thing Americans can do, he said, is to send financial aid and call their representatives. "I still believe in American democracy as much as it's been hurt over the last decade. I still want to believe that if enough of us do this thing, that it will make a difference."
There are moments in life, maybe the birth of a child, or the death of a parent, when an obvious new chapter has begun. New lessons are learned. In the two very long weeks Mr. Kalas has spent on the ground in Ukraine he says he has "received confirmation that one person can make a difference. That's important in a realm where everybody passes the buck and says, 'I'll let somebody else take the reins on this one.' "
"The amount of people protesting in Russia, in Switzerland, in the U.S., and in Spain, that's all a sign that people are believing in themselves and making a change when their government isn't acting fast enough."
"For me, it was my kid that made me want to come back here. We left, and we were safe, and it was my kid that encouraged me to do it," he said.
Mr. Kalas was in downtown Manhattan when superstorm Sandy hit in October of 2012, the closest thing to the "pandemonium" in Ukraine that he had experienced previously. He noted that even though Sandy occurred in a couple of the richest states, in the richest country in the world, people still struggled.
Contrast that with Ukraine where "You've got two times as many people . . . but with fewer resources."
"Imagine Superstorm Sandy, but everyone's shooting at one another," he said. "It's like that."
