Chicago's large Polish community is shocked and worried after missile crossed into Poland
CHICAGO (CBS/AP) -- The Chicago area is home to one of the largest Polish populations outside of Poland – and fears are escalating in the wake of the latest developments in the war in Ukraine.
Earlier Tuesday, a missile crossed into Eastern Poland and detonated, leaving two Polish citizens dead.
The Polish foreign ministry said earlier the missile, which landed in the Polish village of Przewodów, near the border with Ukraine, was Russian-made, but President Andrzej Duda was more cautious about the origin of the missile. Duda said that officials did not know for sure who fired it or where it was made. He said it was "most probably" Russian-made but that is being still verified.
On Tuesday night, President Joe Biden convened an emergency meeting of world leaders in the wake of the missile explosion. Afterward, he told reporters that it was "unlikely" that the missile had been fired from Russia, based on its trajectory.
As CBS 2's Chris Tye reported, it has been an unsettling night for many of the one third of all Polish immigrants to this country who settle in the Chicago area. They have been checking in with loved ones in Poland who are unsure of what's next.
Tye visited Andy's Deli & Mijolajczyk Sausage Shop, at 5442 N. Milwaukee Ave. in the Jefferson Park neighborhood.
"It hasn't touched that close to home," said Andy's Deli general manager Jacek Żak.
Everything from the products and signage to the staff at Andy's is Polish to the core.
"It was shock," Żak said. "I was getting phone calls. I was getting, you know, stuff from the employees saying: 'Hey, this happened, this happened – is it really true? Can you find out? Can you turn on the news? What's going on?'"
The fact that a missile killed two Polish citizens has raised fears that Russia's war in Ukraine could spill over into NATO territory.
"All of the border countries - Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Poland, and so on – they've all worried about about a spillover," said DePaul University history professor Tom Mockaitis, "and you know, it is still a real possibility."
The possibility of escalation is there. But Mockaitis doesn't expect it.
"If they continue to fire dangerously close to the border, then we're talking about a more serious kind of situation," he said.
Filip Bug heads the Polish American Student Association at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He said his relatives back home are expressing "a lot of unease."
Bug said his relatives are asking, "What if they keep moving west, and what if we're next?"
That has been the central question for Poles since the start of the Ukraine war. The war has been creeping closer than any of the 70,000 Polish immigrants in Chicago would like.
"A lot them were thinking it may happen in the future but, but nobody acutaly thought it would actually occur," Żak said.
With President Biden, again, said it was "unlikely" that the missile was fired from Russia, Polish leaders raising their country's level of military preparedness. But they are not addressing whether the strike could have been a targeting error, or if the missile could have been knocked off course by Ukrainian defenses.
Local Poles are waiting for clarity on these matters before deciding how to display concern and support.