It has been close to a month since Russia has invaded Ukraine and the war has caused millions of Ukrainian citizens to flee. Most of them went to Poland. As the children entered the train station in Poland one man stood out more than anyone else.
41-year-old, Tomasz Grzywiński, and his girlfriend came up with a great idea to help bring joy to Ukrainian Children who are scared by what is going on in their home country. They decided to make sandwiches and hand them out. Tomasz stated, “Sandwiches is a good idea, so my 7-year-old, our friend, Weronika, my girlfriend, all started making 100 sandwiches and we brought them all to the train station.”
But they thought to themselves that they could do more and so they all went out and bought over 100 dollars worth of candy and bought a costume that Tomasz would be wearing. So he put the dinosaur costume that he had bought on and walked around the train station handing out candy in his costume.
Grzywiński told CBS, “Some of them run and grab the candies — how much they can grab and run away. Some of them, really scared to take one piece of chocolate and they look at me and say, ‘Can I have It?’ and I’m like, ‘Come on, take more, take the lollipops or whatever you need.”
So there he is, in his dino costume with a bucket of candy bringing joy to the scared children of Ukraine. “The kids need smiles,” Tomasz said. “They stay at the train station for like two days sleeping on the floor. It’s devastating.” “It was deeply touching, I seriously started to cry for 10 minutes because of what I saw there, but luckily I’m in the costume and they don’t see that,” Grzywiński said.
“I hope 100 dinos are going to go from every city and do it because the whole point is to get the kids to smile,” Tomasz Grzywiński said. “Even this one moment for them could change the trauma and do something positive. There needs to be some positive news during this war.”
While he was doing all this, he didn’t know that a woman was taking a video of him. He soon went viral and was shocked by how many people saw what he was doing. He then contacted the woman who had taken the viral video of him thinking she was helping the refugees but soon realized that she was a Ukrainian refugee with two children herself. He found out that she was bouncing from place to place wondering where to go next. He knew what he had to do.
“I’m going to pick you up from the shelter — I call my mom, ‘Mom do we still have a free room because there’s a family and I really want to help them,'” Tomasz said. The woman and her children are now staying with the Grzywiński’s.
Many more volunteers are stepping up and bringing smiles and spreading joy around these shelters that the Ukrainian refugees are staying at.
