South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Floridians respond to Ukraine borders
Volunteers assist with medical needs of refugees in war zone
There is the 78-year-old man whose apartment was bombed and missing a doorway. Using a makeshift “put-together” ladder, he tried to escape from a blasted-out window but plummeted two stories, hurting his head and fracturing his wrist.
There’s the eight-months pregnant woman who drove 36 hours to safety, arriving at the border crossing to Moldova dehydrated and exhausted.
There are the frostbite victims, and those injured from shrapnel. And there are those who have typically run-of-the-mill medical issues like diabetes and heart disease that have mushroomed into life-threatening problems because those people have run for their lives with only their clothes and ran out of medication long ago.
As Russia’s war on Ukraine intensifies, Dr. Zevi Neuwirth, an internist who lives in Bay Harbor Islands in Miami-Dade, is seeing it unfold.
A U.S. Navy reservist, he’s also a volunteer with Israeli-based United Hatzalah, a nonprofit medical service organization most famous for its rapid-fire response within Israel to terror attacks. Hatzalah is the same organization that responded to the Surfside condo collapse last summer as dozens of workers triaged people from neighboring buildings who had been evacuated, and tended to families who were in distress and in shock.
Here in Moldova, “I barely know my name,” Neuwirth confided Thursday, as dates and people start to become a blur in the days that don’t have a beginning and an end.
“We don’t have days, we have a constant,” he said.
He catches a few hours of sleep when he can, often in the back of an ambulance. He’s eating OK, sometimes meals made fresh from volunteers who have created a kitchen to serve thousands of people a day, or out of a boxed military-style Meals Ready to Eat. He can hear the bombing in the distance. To be safe, he is dressed not in scrubs like his peers, but with a bulletproof vest, helmet and eye protection.
“It’s emotional,” Neuwirth admits of what he sees and what he hears and what he feels. “It will hit me when I get back home.”
But he has no idea when that will be.
Russia’s unprovoked war on free Ukraine is now in its second week and thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed. More than 2.3 million Ukrainians have left their homeland, scattering across Europe, including Moldova where Neuwirth works out of a field station.
The war has drawn international outrage as civilians are targeted; Russian bombs fell on two Ukrainian hospitals in a city west of Kyiv on Wednesday, and the World Health Organization said it has confirmed 18 attacks on medical facilities since the invasion began.
Neuwirth isn’t the only person from South Florida to run to eastern Europe.
“Shell shocked” is how Mark Hattabaugh, of Cooper City, describes the Ukrainians at the border.
A pastor with The Pentacostals of Cooper City church and the senior chaplain of the Miramar Police Department, Hattabaugh is also a volunteer with Missouri-based Compassion Services International.
So when they called him for help, he flew to Europe last Sunday, returning home to South Florida on Wednesday.
The agency was desperate to get cash to the Ukrainians who were both fleeing and those who were staying in place.
And the agency also needed to get supplies from their office in Poland to restock their volunteers who were inside Ukraine.
Hattabaugh and four other volunteers each helped transport $10,000 per person, as well as Meals Ready to Eat, flashlights and headlamps.
He was far enough away on the Romanian border to not hear gunfire during the few days he was there, but he was struck at how cold he was and at how the refugees were able to stand up for days at a time to make the crossing in that weather.
For both levity and kindness, he made animal balloons for children as they made it across the border.
But he has bigger things to worry about: His agency has a shelter in Poland, and he frets out loud about young Ukrainian girls seeking refuge with strangers and then unwittingly get caught up in the sex trade.
He said the people who fled first have money and connections. Future waves of refugees will have neither.
“I’m holding back the tears,” he said Friday, his voice breaking. “I’ve never in my life seen anything like this.”
What has happened, it’s “pure evil,” he said. “Families have been separated forever.”
And it’s those types of families that Neuwirth wants to help. While most people crossing the border are healthy, some have crippling issues that have been aggravated or caused by the war. Medical supplies are plentiful as it gets flown in Israel, paid with donations to the nonprofit. And there’s an endless stream of need: concussions and broken wrists and “traumatic injuries” caused by missile attacks.
The day after the war started, United Hatzalah set up shop in Moldova at two border crossings at the bequest of the chief rabbi of the Agudath Israel synagogue in Kishinev. While so much international attention and aid was being directed to Ukraine’s neighbor of Poland as it dealt with a flood of refugees, people were also crossing to Moldova with not as many resources.
“We need help, there’s no one here,” the rabbi told United Hatzalah, according to Raphael Poch, an agency EMT. “We’re being inundated with refugees,” the rabbi told them.
Its famous synagogue, built in 1886 and purchased in 1991 after
Moldova gained its independence, has been closed for religious services as it helps with the crisis. Now it is a refugee center with Ukrainians in the halls and “every place you could put a bed,” Poch said.
So many of the refugees fleeing with no place to go are like “deer in the headlights. You can see the fear, the tears, the gratitude,” Neuwirth said. Some are waiting days to get in since the border crossing has a 6-mile line.
Neuwirth said he has the stamina to keep going “as long as I can make a difference,” he said.
But as the war rages there’s still hope it will end: “I hope I’m not needed soon.”
Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@sunsentinel.com or 954-572-2008 or Twitter @ LisaHuriash