Stella Liptak has spent four months on the Ukraine-Hungary border volunteering to support desperate and vulnerable refugees fleeing Russia’s brutal invasion of their homeland.

The Australian humanitarian support worker, who had previously worked with asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island, was in Europe on family business. When the war in Ukraine broke out, she felt compelled to help.

Using the skills and experience she gained working with some of Australia’s humanitarian and refugee settlement agencies, Stella organised the delivery of donations of food, medicine and clothing and then worked to support refugees with mental health issues, children who had suffered trauma and people released from institutions.

After returning home to see her family, she’s now going back to continue the work.

“I went to Europe for family reasons but in February the war in Ukraine broke out. I saw there were thousands of refugees being created by the conflict and I just thought I should do something,” Stella said.

“I had worked with refugees, I had skills and experience in mental health support and where I was in Croatia was just a five hour drive from the Ukraine-Hungary border, where there were people in need.”

Stella Liptak

Before the COVID pandemic struck, Stella has worked for several years on refugee support programs on Manus Island and Nauru. She was then invited to work with former Manus Island asylum seekers in Port Moresby.

“The contract in PNG finished and we handed the work over to local practitioners whom we had trained. After returning to Australia, I went to Croatia for urgent personal reasons,” Stella said.

“Then in February the war in Ukraine broke out. I felt I should help because I had skills and experience that I could see could be useful,” she said.

Stella began by organising a small relief effort herself; collecting donations of food, clothing and other necessities from Croatia and arranging three vans to transport the goods. She also worked to support Ukrainian refugees already in Croatia.

“I also collaborated with the local community in Croatia which was organising medical supplies to be sent to a children’s hospital in Lviv,” Stella.

At the Ukraine-Hungary border Stella became linked to a local hospital and relief centre called Karpatya Haz, in the Carpathian Mountains.

“Basically I stayed there some time, working as a volunteer supporting refugees arriving from Ukraine and also helping to train Ukrainian volunteers,” Stella said.

“The centre was a charity run by local doctors and they asked me to work with the kids arriving because I had some experience of working with children experiencing trauma and children with special needs.”

After a few weeks Stella returned to Croatia to arrange the delivery of more donations before returning to the Ukraine border.

“I worked with other organisations and NGOs o the border delivering mental health support to clients,” she said.

Large organisations such as the Red Cross and the France-based Order of Malta were delivering health care and other services as thousands of Ukrainian refugees poured across the border.

“Things were a little chaotic. There were doctors there but very little in the way of allied or mental health support. So I was asked to deliver some that and anything else that was needed like case management and social work,” Stella said.

“We were working on call for 24 hour shifts in camp on the Hungarian border that had been set up with shipping containers.

“It was very ad hoc in terms of the assistance provide, because the war had started so suddenly. We even had Japanese doctors from an organisation called AMDA working alongside us.

“At any one time we might have 300 refugees in what was a tiny village as they transitioned through.

“We were doing whatever was need. People with particular skills were asked to do whatever was needed. I trained a set of volunteers, I also transported a group of refugees to Croatia and helped them settle, find accommodation and register them,” she said.

After four months volunteering, Stella returned to Australia but she plans to return.

“My family is here and we had a family even that I needed to return for but I’m going back to continue working with the people who need help,” she said.

Stella plans to stay until Christmas and has been tentatively offered a paid job with an NGO working with Ukrainian volunteers.

“Even if the job doesn’t happen, I’m still going back. I feel like I have an unfinished project to set up to support people,” she said.

Stella said she had, at one point, planned to go into Ukraine to continue her work.

“My husband and family had been monitoring the situation and they said ‘no, don’t go’, so I didn’t. But there was plenty of work to do in Hungary,” she said.

“My daughters are grown up but they didn’t want me in danger in Ukraine.”

Stella says she felt a moral responsibility to help people fleeing the Russian invasion, saying several factors pointed to why she should.

“I was thinking I was so close to where I could help people, there seemed to be nothing organised in the way of a response and I have Hungarian ethnicity, so I am familiar with and comfortable in Hungary,” she said.

“I could see no-one else doing anything and there seemed to be no mental health support.

“Also I studied Russian and I understand some Ukrainian – it’s not perfect but people found it useful.

“The first thing humanitarian agencies think about is making doctors available but psychological support can be just as important – and I knew I could help with that.

“At the time people were donating money but I thought ‘I’m here, I can donate my skills’,” she said.

Stella, who migrated to Australia from Croatia 26 years ago, said she could identify with the Ukrainian refugees she was helping.

“Coming from that part of Europe, I understand the experience of migration. We’ve had lots of wars and lots of migration,” she said.

“I also saw when I got there that people wanted to do something, they just needed someone to move them.

“With my experience in working with refugees, I thought I could do that and when we started, it expanded so much. So many people in Croatia and Hungary wanted to help and started organising donations. It was inspiring to see.”

Asked about the political dimension of the conflict in Ukraine, Stella said it was a not factor in decision to get involved.

“I don’t care about politics. In every conflict there are villains and victims on both sides,” she said.

“I don’t think about politics, just the people who need support. They will be recovering longer than the politicians will.

“I have skills and experience and I just thought I should do something.”

Stella said that intellectually disabled and other previously institutionalised people who were forced to flee because of the conflict presented unique challenges.

“In every conflict there are people no one takes responsibility for. People who are institutionalised are just released and there is no one there to support them. And this can lead to issues around human trafficking,” she said.

“In Hungary, we had a lot of these vulnerable people who needed support. Part of my work was to assess them assess the risks they faced and then help them find some sort of ongoing support.

“Many of them didn’t really know how to protect themselves and needed support in crossing the border. Often they needed one to one support because they didn’t understand the process involved.

“I worked with the Red Cross and other NGOs supporting some of these people, guiding and supporting them at the border and keeping them out of the hands of traffickers,” Stella said.