‘Doctor Clown’ lifts the spirits of children under shellfire
T‘I always have my nose on. The kids love it. They are resilient. It’s very easy for them to bounce back into childhood’
here are three things Jan Tomasz Rogala never forgets when he drives at full pelt into Ukraine’s worst conflict zones – a helmet, flak jacket and his bright red clown nose.
In his previous life before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb 24, the 55-year-old Pole was a professional hospital clown, working with child cancer patients and their families in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
Since then, his alter ego has taken on a new life – whisking his brightly coloured “Doctor Clown” van into conflict hotspots and trying to cheer up terrified, exhausted evacuees as they emerge from the cellars of their destroyed homes while speeding them to safety under shellfire.
“When people are living under stress in the basement, they are fearful, tense, dirty, and then you are able to lighten the situation and say something funny. I always have my nose on,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
“The kids love it. They are very resilient. It’s very easy for them to bounce back into childhood and, of course, when the kids laugh then adults relax, and they laugh too.”
Despite the lighter moments, Mr Rogala’s new mission – driving along perilous roads looking for telltale columns of black smoke and the sound of incoming artillery – has been petrifying. “Twenty to 30km before we get to this danger zone we stop and we put on body armour and our helmets. I call my wife and say this is the time to pray. That’s how we prepare,” he said.
Along with a team of volunteers from the local CF Pomogaem Charitable Fund, and using buses funded by donations, he has helped extract thousands of civilians trapped in towns and villages near front lines in Kharkiv in the north and the Donbas region in the east. But even his blue van, which is decorated with smiling cartoon children, has been unable to escape the indiscriminate fury of the Russian military. He recalls one heart-stopping moment when their vehicles were shot at in the town of Rubizhne, Luhansk.
“They saw us and began shooting our convoy with mortars, within just 20-30 metres of the bus,” he said.
“We had two big buses trying to turn around ... and the whole time we were hearing ‘boom, boom, boom’. We left the buses and ran behind a burning building,” he said. “I know for soldiers it’s normal, but I’m a clown.” In the early days of the war, evacuation teams were largely bringing out families with young children, taking them to shelters or train stations for onward journeys to western Europe. But the focus of their work has changed to rescuing elderly, frail and disabled residents who have been left behind – some without families, others who have been too scared to abandon homes they have lived in their whole lives for an uncertain future.
Fear of losing their identity and dignity was holding many civilians from fleeing war-torn towns even as they ran out of food and water and hid in their basements for months as shells ripped apart buildings around them, explained Mr Rogala. “Maybe their life is threatened but at least they are somebody there.”
In one of his most recent rescue missions he found an elderly woman sitting alone with two plastic bags and a walking stick at a bus station in Kramatorsk, the closest main town to the Donetsk front lines in the Donbas. She was from a village close to Izium and her neighbours had brought her to the station. “She was very calm. A picture of peace and trusting. I have no idea why – she just knew somebody was going to help her,” he said.
Other stories are even more heartbreaking. One woman who had lived for two months in a cellar in Severodonetsk, the city at the centre of one of Ukraine’s fiercest battles, died of natural causes in the evacuation bus.
In the same city, other elderly and disabled people had been sheltering in a church that was hit eight times by Russian strikes. “There was a disabled lady in Severodonetsk who fell off her wheelchair and nobody came for five days – no drinking, no eating – and then finally a neighbour found her, broke down the door, carried her to the church and we took her,” said Mr Rogala, choking back tears. Escaping conflict zones is just the first step of an difficult journey for evacuees. Since the start of the war, a CF Pomogaem shelter, set up in a school in the village of Volosske, in the fields surrounding Dnipro, has been a temporary refuge for thousands of families heading westwards. Now about 60 elderly residents remain at the shelter, which partners with Save the Children and other international charities. Kateryna Yukhymchuk, the Pomogaem director, said it was becoming harder to find a long-term home for them.
The shelter provides food and medicine and tries to keep spirits up with concerts and teams of clowns, but the people stretching out on makeshift beds in the school gym, surrounded by the little they could salvage from their homes, looked dejected, lost and disorientated. Nadezhda Dmitrievna, 92, fought back tears as she said she wanted to go back to Severodonetsk, even though she was forced out in early April by gunfire on the streets.
“I have nobody. I have nowhere to go. I just feel like dying,” she said.
On a nearby bed, Stepan Olesiyuk, 86, said he had been in Volosske for 56 days. The former coal miner escaped from Lysychansk with an envelope holding photographs of Maria, his late wife of 52 years, and his son, Ihor, who died several years ago. “This is my wealth,” he said, holding mementoes of happier times.
Nobody could have predicted the carnage, Olesiyuk said. “When I was a child during the Second World War, 40 German soldiers slept in my house before going out in the morning to the front. There were tanks on the left and on the right, and they were shooting and the house was shaking,” he said. “But I still didn’t see such atrocities as I have seen during this war.”