Hampshire millionaire hits the road to help ferry refugees out of danger

Volunteers’ frantic search for pregnant woman among refugees

- David Cohen and Lucy Young

ON THE day that the number of refugees fleeing Ukraine passed two million, Maarten Roelofs from the Netherlands was focused on finding just one of them — a woman, who is 33-weeks pregnant and could give birth at any moment. At the thronging Medyka border crossing into Poland, Maarten and his neighbour Hans van Wyk split up to cover the exits, holding up hand-made signs that said “Ellen” and peering urgently into the faces of the exhausted women streaming endlessly towards them.

The men had driven 15 hours from Haarlem and arrived at 9.30am yesterday. Hans, 47, an event manager, had never met Ellen and only had a photograph to rely on. But Maarten, 49, who owns a digital design company, knew Ellen as the wife of a former employee who had fled Donetsk and then Kyiv, and whose husband had desperately turned to him for help.

“Maarten sent out a WhatsApp to our street group and asked if someone could accompany him on a 15-hour drive to bring Ellen to safety,” said Hans.

“I thought, yes, I can do that and so I took off work. We have been here a few hours and it is dramatic and heartbreaking. I cannot imagine the stress of leaving homes and husbands and, in Ellen’s case, being heavily pregnant with her first baby and having to flee bombing not once but twice.”

They were just two of a growing but indeterminate number of people who have travelled across Europe “to lend a hand”, often to save friends of friends or people they barely know.