“What you guys are doing here, this is not the job of a country that is showing itself that they are helping refugees coming from Ukraine,” she says. “We walked 50 kilometers to come here, you’re treating us like this.”
The police officer replies, “Because I told you, first mother and children.”
“What if I’m pregnant?” she responds.
Across the road, a First Aid tent has been set up with paramedics and two ambulances standing by.
Ikram Kaboury, 19, a medical student from Algeria who was studying in Kyiv, said the earliest she could get a train ticket heading west was four days.
So she took a taxi with a friend from Kyiv, the capital city, to the western city of Lviv and then walked dozens of miles to the border.
She said she thought the prospect of an invasion was a joke but realized she needed to leave when Russian troops started entering the country.
“I was really planning to be a successful doctor,” she said. “I slept, I woke up and … you’re not going to school, you have to go, you have to pack your bags. This is a feeling I can’t describe.”
She said she planned to stay in Poland for several days, then head back to Algeria and did not know what she would do afterward.
In the nearby town of Przemysl, dozens of people gathered outside a bus carrying refugees, holding up signs of cities they were offering to drive them to for free.
At one point, a man yelled out, “Germany!”