Betty Grinshtein stood on a train platform just over the Ukraine border, waiting for the next refugees to arrive in Poland. Out stepped an elderly man wearing slippers, struggling to walk.
“It was getting cold, and he didn’t have boots,” recalled Ms. Grinshtein, a Point Reyes Station resident who spent three months volunteering at the border last year. “He was shellshocked.”
Ms. Grinshtein was a volunteer for the Kharkiv and Przemysl Project, or KHARPP, which sent volunteers to meet refugees fleeing Kharkiv at the outset of the invasion in February 2022. Desperate Ukrainians boarded any train they could catch to escape the bloodshed, and the first stop across the Polish border was Przemysl (pronounced SHEH-mihsh-ul), a city close to Ms. Grinshstein’s hometown in eastern Ukraine.
If refugees arrived without a suitcase, KHARPP would give them one. If they needed clothing, volunteers would find some. Many refugees were planning to find friends and family in other European nations but had no way to get there. KHARPP would get them a train or bus ticket.
The elderly man who arrived in his slippers needed all these things. Just days before, he had slipped out to run some errands at a nearby store. He returned to find his neighborhood had been leveled by Russian bombs.
“I have nothing,” Ms. Grinshtein recalls him saying. “I lost everything. I lost my house, and I lost my wife.”
The man, who was in his 70s, was traveling to Germany, where he planned to stay with some nephews. He had stuffed what few belongings he had into plastic shopping bags.
“We asked him his shoe size, and we got him a pair of boots, a suitcase, a winter coat and some other clothes, including wool socks,” Ms. Grinshtein said. “He was very stoic. He was distant.”
“I just wanted to hug him and cry. But at that point, I’d been at the station for two months. I’d developed some coping skills.”
Ms. Grinshtein was born in Ukraine and lived there until she was 9 years old. As soon as Russia invaded her homeland 16 months ago, she began searching for ways to volunteer.
“The invasion filled me with a sense of injustice I’ve never felt before,” Ms. Grinshtein said.
“I felt in my DNA ancestral grief and rage, mixed with a strong desire to help.”
She was working a retail job at the Cowgirl Creamery at the time and couldn’t afford a trans-Atlantic plane ticket. She fired up her web browser and found a small nonprofit that looked like a good fit. Then she set up a GoFundMe campaign.
When the invasion began, Ms. Grinshtein had thought about becoming a combatant and fighting with the Ukrainian army. But she had no military training.
“I didn’t want to be one of those people who shows up unprepared, doesn’t have an assignment and gets in the way,” she said. “My training is in languages. I went back to help out, not fight a war.”
Ms. Grinshtein is trilingual—fluent in Ukrainian, Polish and English—and she has a linguistics degree from San Jose State University. Her language skills made her a perfect fit in Przemysl.
Like all volunteers at the station, Ms. Grinshtein wore a yellow vest that identified her as an aid worker.
“It takes a lot of strength to put on that yellow vest and offer to help people who are fleeing a war zone,” Ms. Grinshtein said. “If you’re standing there crying and can’t get it together, you’re not going to be much help. You’ve got to be calm and collected.”
Most of the refugees arriving at the station, nearly all of them women and children, wore grim but determined expressions. “Grandmothers were refusing help and hauling suitcases up the stairs. I’d ask, ‘Can I help you?’ They would say, no, I got it.”
Ms. Grinshtein forged close friendships with her fellow volunteers, including Charlotte Farrar, a Los Angeles native who was studying international affairs in Scotland when the war began.
“Betty possesses a few basic qualities that made her well-suited to volunteering: physical strength, language skills, grit and humility,” Ms. Farrar said. “When forced migration left people overwhelmed, untethered and emotionally strained, she would listen to their personal stories with a deep sense of empathy and kinship.”
A self-described hippie, Ms. Grinshtein, who is 45, moved to West Marin in 2014, not long after losing her mother to cancer. “I decided I wasn’t going to compromise anymore. I decided being in nature was really important, so I decided to just come out to West Marin and live out here.”
She took whatever jobs she could find. Before heading to Ukraine last July, Ms. Grinshtein was the last hire at the Cowgirl Creamery before the cheese company moved its operations to Petaluma. Her colleagues and friends around West Marin responded quickly when she set up her GoFundMe. Everyone wanted to help.
“Russia was murdering civilians, day and night,” Ms. Grinshtein said. “Each day was filled with news of bombings of civilian infrastructure, torture, rape and total destruction of whole cities.”
Most of her supporters gave small donations—just $5 or $10—but it added up quickly, and soon she had the $5,000 she needed to make the trip.
“A few people donated a couple hundred dollars, but most of the donations were really small,” Ms. Grinshtein said. “It all added up. People from all walks of life were sending me messages of support. It was so heartwarming.”
Among those who contributed was Christine Harper, a friend who lives in the Santa Cruz mountains. “We were all worried and concerned that she was going to a country at war,” she said. “But she needed to go, and we wanted to support her. She’s a can-do person. When something needs to get done, she just does it.”
Ms. Grinshtein is back in West Marin now, doing a landscaping job and raising money for the nonprofit she volunteered for. She’s making organic body care products and selling them to raise money for KHARPP, which has shifted its focus to rebuilding homes damaged by Russian bombs so that refugees can return home.
She’s producing small batches of sunblock, face cream, lip balm and gardener’s salve and calling the enterprise “Wilder West Botanicals.” A friend is designing labels, and a website is in the works. For now, she’s sending product to people who contact her by email, hoping to support the cause.
The invasion has dragged on far longer than Ms. Grinshtein expected when she set off for Przemsyl. “I knew once Russia invaded and the way things were escalating that it wouldn’t be over in a year,” she said. “But my optimism is holding up, because Ukraine is winning the war.”
Putin is a madman, she said, and one way or another, his days are numbered.
“Either Russia is going to have a coup, or the Russian people are going to come out in the streets and heave a peaceful revolution,” she said.
For more information about KHARPP, go to www.kharpp.com. To purchase Betty’s products and raise funds for the nonprofit, email [email protected].