'Where is the music?' Quiet of Poland perplexes burned 4-year-old from war-torn Ukraine

Reporter Kristen Jordan Shamus and visual journalist Mandi Wright of the Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, are in Poland, near the border with Ukraine. They followed a group of U.S. doctors who traveled to Poland to treat Ukrainian children with burns and congenital abnormalities, the first such trip since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The doctors, from Michigan, Texas, Massachusetts and Missouri, operated on 20 children in the past week. Shamus and Wright this week will tell the children’s stories.

LECZNA, Poland — Four-year-old Yelizaveta Nadolniak lives in a fantasy world, where she’s been told the sounds of war in her homeland — bombs exploding, the air raid sirens — are simply the bass and timbre of rap music playing nearby.

The tiny Ukrainian girl with wispy blond hair asked her aunt, Ludmila Nativa, “Where is the music?” when they crossed the border earlier this month into eastern Poland, a country at peace, where the days and nights are quiet.

Yelizaveta, whose nickname is Liza, is among 20 children from Ukraine to undergo complex plastic and reconstructive surgery on burn scars, war trauma and congenital anomalies in mid-May in this small Polish town, about 20 miles from the border.

Doctors Collaborating to Help Children fill gap

These surgeries can vastly improve the quality of the children's lives, restoring their ability to bend their arms and legs, use their hands and turn their heads and prevent crippling deformities. But because they’re not life-threatening injuries, the kids can’t get treatment for them now in Ukraine.

A team of U.S. doctors from Michigan, Texas, Massachusetts, and Missouri — part of a nonprofit organization called Doctors Collaborating to Help Children — traveled to Poland on a humanitarian mission to fill the medical void.

Liza doesn’t remember much about the night of the fire, when she was burned across her torso, neck and both arms, Nativa said.

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Her family lived in an older home in a small village near Mykolaiv, the southern Ukrainian city that has been heavily attacked by Russian forces. It was soon after the war began when faulty wiring sparked a blaze that caught the entire family unaware, Nativa said.

Liza’s sister and another child were pulled out of the house before they could be badly burned, but when a window was opened to get the children to safety, it supplied more oxygen to the flames, she said.

“Tiny Liza was lying in bed at the time of the fire, so when they opened the window … the fire grew,” Nativa said. “She lost consciousness and luckily does not remember most of what happened.”

'I didn’t want to scare her that her skin would be cut'

On May 16, Liza underwent surgery in Poland to release the contracting scars to make it easier for her to turn her neck and lift her arms, but she didn’t know that’s why she was there.

“We didn’t tell Liza she was having surgery today,” Nativa said. “We told her that the doctor put ointment on her. … I didn’t want to scare her that her skin would be cut.”

When the nurses came to take Liza to the operating room, “I told her I lost my passport and had to look for it so that she would not be distressed with me leaving her side,” Nativa said.

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Whitney Roberts, a certified nurse anesthetist from Boston Children’s Hospital, brought a bag of small toys for the Ukrainian children, and gave Liza a heap of stickers and crayons, a mini coloring book and a small blue knit octopi with little nubbins for tentacles.

The toys are a distraction, Roberts said, and help put kids at ease before surgery. It worked for Liza, who held the stickers gleefully. Within minutes, she was sedated and ready for surgery. And a couple of hours after that, Liza emerged from the operating room, curled up with her feathery blond hair askance and bandages from her belly to her neck. At the foot of her bed, the toys Roberts gave her were piled up, waiting for her to wake.

Nativa rubbed Liza’s back, speaking softly.

“When she asks why it is painful, we will explain to her that she has a scar, but soon we will go home — once it is better,” Nativa said.

Zuza Nikitorowicz translated interviews for this story. To contribute to Doctors Collaborating to Help Children, go to dctohc.org/donations.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: US doctors travel to Poland to treat war injuries of Ukrainian kids