After fleeing the war in Ukraine, a mother and son get a chance to relax and heal at a Brooklyn summer camp

When a mother and her young son began walking from western Ukraine to the Polish border two days after Russia began bombing their country, they thought they’d be back home soon.

“We were thinking two or three weeks and everything would stop. Our plan was to go back,” said Maria Pikupovia, through a translator. She made the journey with Julian, then nine, and her friend’s daughters, six and seven, carrying only a backpack with a computer and water.

Now, six months later, they are still far from home — an exile made a little easier this summer by the chance to spend time at a camp in Brooklyn playing volleyball and swimming.

“The most important piece of camp to me was to be able to observe how kids have changed,” said Pikupovia.

She said at the beginning of the summer, the children were emotionally unstable, traumatized, and distant even from each other.

“Day after day they started building friendships,” she said. “They went through so much, they needed time to process and cope with this.”

With military planes flying overhead, Pikupovia and the children joined hundreds of others fleeing Ukraine on foot, including people who began driving, then abandoned their cars and walked when they realized it would be quicker than sitting in traffic.

“When we were walking it was siren after siren after siren,” said Pikupovia, 45, a physical education coach in their hometown of Sokal, near Lviv. The nearly six-and-a-half-mile trip took between eight and 12 hours, she said, as people were stopping to help each other.

Children in particular were having a hard time. “It was hard for them to be separated from their fathers,” said Pikupovia, her voice shaking. “It was impossible to see the ones walking with their fathers then get separated.”

Like most men of fighting age, Pikupovia’s husband remained behind in Ukraine, where he also works as a physical education coach and is volunteering to help care for special needs children.

“If needed, he will be deployed,” said Pikupovia. “But he is needed there because some of the kids already don’t have parents.”

After spending two months in Poland, mother and son went to New York to join Pikupovia’s daughter in Brooklyn, and eventually found their way to Camp Sunflower, named for the Ukrainian national flower.

This summer the UJA-Federation of New York and the J.E. and Z.B. Butler Foundation provided $250,000 in funding that allowed nearly 150 Ukrainian children to go to summer camps in New York for free and provided paid fellowships to counselors who were also refugees.

Of the several camps in New York, the Marks Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst welcomed the highest number of young Ukrainians. 70 children ages two to 14 spent the summer at Camp Sunflower, including Julian.

When Maria went to sign him up, she was invited to become a counselor when the camp learned of her experience as a physical education coach.

Along with handball and regular trips to UJA’s Staten Island campgrounds, the program was tailored to the specific needs of refugees, with English language classes, art therapy and psychological support.

“We really invest in this camp different experiences to make it a very balanced environment,” said CEO and executive Alex Budnitsky.

The mission of Camp Sunflower will continue throughout school year, with 30 Ukrainian children attending an after-school program at the Community House, 25 taking part in the teen services and four enrolled in preschool.

Next summer, Budnitsky expects 100 Ukrainian children at camp, and is planning through summer 2024.

“Crisis response was one thing, you have to be reactive, you have to move quickly,” said Deborah Joselow, Chief Planning Officer for UJA-Federation of New York. “Now that we’ve come to recognize that this will go on for a long time, the war, the trauma, we have to hold up these supports for a long time.”

On Aug. 19, the last day of camp, Pikupovia said all the children organized themselves to come together, line up, and say ‘thank you’ in Ukrainian.

Nearly a week later, Julian played on the roof of the building with oversized foam blocks, stacking them atop each other to make building-like structures. When they flopped over he would dismantle them and start again.

His mother watched him proudly. “As things are being destroyed, he is building,” she said.