A resident of Lutsk, Alena Romanenko, lost her hand while working in Poland and was faced with the indifference of local employers to Ukrainian guest workers.
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She spoke about this in an interview with the Volyn 24 TV channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
According to her, in November she left for the outskirts of the Polish city of Poznan and got a job in a laundry: “To earn a penny, so that there would be something to live on, because in Ukraine it is impossible to buy anything for such a salary.”
Her job was to monitor the safety of the laundry and load it into the washing machine, which often broke down. One day during her shift, she noticed that the laundry was twisted into a knot and began to pull it out of the machine.
“I saw the knot, took it away, the sheet ran into it, I wanted to pull it out and she dragged my hand. But it didn’t drag in quickly, but gradually. I screamed very loudly. After some time, the girl I was working with ran up. While she was looking for someone to tell, although there were a lot of people there. While this machine was being turned off, my arm was pulled all the way up to here (points to the elbow - author). An ambulance arrived, rescuers arrived, there were a lot of them,” says the girl.
The girl's hand was trapped in the washing machine for about an hour because rescuers were waiting for the laundry owner to arrive. Upon arrival, he did not allow the rescuers to cut the car with an angle grinder: “The rescuers arrived, he climbed onto that car, wanted to cut it, an ambulance arrived, they injected me with painkillers, but they did not help, the pain was incredible. When the rescuer wanted to cut this machine, the owner of this laundry said this cannot be done... My hand was in the machine for an hour... There was a foreman at work, but she didn’t come at all.”
The girl complains - despite what happened, the owner of the laundry did not provide her with any help and fired other workers from Ukraine, threatening them not to testify:
“This laundry owner came to me three days later and they forced him because I worked for him. He came once, but not to provide any help. He said we will help in any way we can. But only words conveyed this to me... They removed several witnesses, firing them from their jobs, and one girl was kicked out and sent to Ukraine so that she could not testify, and the entire laundry team was intimidated,” says the victim.