Auto-biographies of Ukrainian war refugees. From forced migration to anchoring

This article aims to present the Ukrainian war refugees’ experience. Twenty-one interviews focused on autobiographical memoirs of Ukrainian war refugees were collected during the field research project in Poland and Germany in the summer and autumn of 2022. The text aimed to point out the peculiarities of Ukrainian refugeeism in the context of its specificity related to the evolution of the phenomenon of migration and forced migration over recent years in Central Europe. The content was analyzed for the fleeing and adaptive context of personal experience. It considers social ties, including family ties, which appeared in the interviewees’ statements. The studied material insights into the course of the war in Ukraine in 2022 from the perspective of civilians. It shows numerous and diverse examples of survival and adaptation activities under armed attacks, during the evacuation, border crossing, and anchoring in the places of their new residence. Due to the dominance of women in the sample, these examples can contribute to the analysis of the specificity of female migration, which differs from the previous profiles of economic migration in the region.