Joel Carillet

This is a picture of a teenager standing on the train to Poland shortly before it departed Lviv. It's an awkward age. Not in the normal sense of teenage awkwardness, but in the sense of you are just shy of the age when you'd be required to stay and perhaps fight for your country, where the government might demand it. Since you're not quite there, however, you're standing on a train with a lot of women and younger kids, going to safety. Your parents, not the government, and not yourself, are determining what you do.

A couple weeks after I took this picture, I was in the Polish city of Lublin, talking with a 16-year-old Ukrainian boy-almost-man in his temporary shelter. He had a question for me.

"Do you think I'm a refugee?" he asked.

The first thing I want to say in reply to that serious question, I told him, is that he was now what he was a couple months ago and will be for the rest of the days of his life: a person, just like everyone.

But once he crossed the border into Poland he was also a refugee, just like a couple million others who had made the same journey since the war began.

But the word described his situation, not his personhood.

It's not the same by any means, but I told him how much I bucked against the word "pilgrim" when I was about to walk the Camino de Santiago. That's what people who walked it were called, but it felt like I was having to wear someone's out-of-style, hand-me-down clothes. I preferred to be just a "traveler", or to not have to be called anything at all. To wear this label "pilgrim" took some real getting used to. But in the end I embraced it.

"Do you wish you were a couple years older?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. He would have stayed. He would have fought. He would have been a soldier, not a child, not a refugee.

Like that line that runs between countries, age 18 is a kind of border, and which side you are on can make all the difference.

(Lviv, Ukraine - March 5, 2022)