Waking to explosions. The scramble to find a passport. A harrowing train ride sheathed in darkness to evade Russian forces. Hope for a “warm corner” to shelter in. Each refugee’s story is filled with grief and a striking communality—a shared distress perhaps inescapable when more than a million people are forced to flee their homes and face harsh realities at eastern European borders over the span of a few days.

One refugee, snarled for two of those days in a quiet panic of cars inching toward the Polish border city of Przemyśl, was Irina Lopuga. She and her husband had ample time to talk, no longer about dreams to buy their own home or tour Egypt but about survival. “We talked