The order to evacuate on Monday afternoon ripped through Nysa, a small Polish city, drenched after days of heavy rains. Some people helped older neighbors into cars as they headed for higher ground. Others raced to the roadside embankment to try to prevent the surging river from overflowing.
Together, thousands worked through the rainy night, passing sandbag after sandbag along a lengthy human chain — including the city’s professional men’s volleyball team. By morning, the danger seemed to have passed and disaster had been averted, thanks in no small part to the heroic efforts of its inhabitants.
“Everything indicates that Nysa is saved,” Kordian Kolbiarz, the mayor, wrote in a euphoric Facebook post on Tuesday. “Yesterday’s ‘chain’ on the top of the embankment did its job!”
Nysa, near the Czech border, is just one community in Central Europe that has stared down the devastation of Storm Boris, which has been blamed for at least 20 deaths in recent days. Towns have flooded, bridges have been destroyed and dams have been breached. Thousands of people have been forced from their homes.
The rains have abated in parts of Poland, where at least seven people died during the storm, the Polish Press Agency reported on Tuesday. But parts of Italy were bracing for heavy rains. Some public services and transit options remained interrupted in Budapest, the Hungarian capital on the Danube, which is swollen with rainwater.
In Nysa, the 42,000 residents had been preparing for days, despite reassurances from the authorities. Many remembered the 1997 floods that killed more than 100 people in the region and displaced thousands of others.
Residents on Saturday had started filling sandbags and stacking them around vulnerable buildings, like the basilica. A hospital evacuated dozens of its most vulnerable patients on Sunday. On Monday, hours after Poland declared a natural disaster, Mr. Kolbiarz finally announced the evacuation.
“We were getting ready for what people were calling ‘the Armageddon,’” said Robert Prygiel, the president of the men’s volleyball team. “We were waiting for the wave to come.”
Mr. Prygiel had brought his players to his fourth-floor apartment to wait it out. But soon, they started seeing posts on social media that their neighbors were going to the river embankment to build a sandbag wall.
So the team, PSG Stal Nysa, decided around 7:30 p.m. to go, too.
“We are young, fit men — well, at least the players in my team are young, fit men,” said Mr. Prygiel, 48. “So we just got to work. We really wanted to fight for our Nysa.”
Alongside thousands of other residents, the team loaded sandbags into private cars, which then ferried them toward the growing embankment. But soon, it got too wet for cars to drive safely. So the players joined a human chain, which he said was easily 500 meters long (or about 1,600 feet).
Their arms ached. Their backs ached. They were exhausted. “We just kept going,” Mr. Prygiel said. “We did what had to be done.”
Several residents spoke with thick emotion about the ways the community came together.
They didn’t wait to get ready, said Piotr Fitowski, who lives in the Nysa area.
“We were taking turns sleeping,” said Mr. Fitowski, 34, who owns businesses in Nysa and is from the area. “The work never stopped.”
On Sunday, he waded through a torrent to rescue his dog, a German shepherd named Molly. Then, he picked up an older couple and their 13-year-old bulldog. The wife struggled to walk. So did the dog. As he was driving them, he heard that the bridges had been closed.
“I couldn’t help this lady,” Mr. Fitowski said, fighting to speak through tears. “I couldn’t help this dog. I had this deep feeling of helplessness.” (As it turned out, he got them to another bridge, where they were driven by others to safety.)
Medical staff were worried, too. As the residents were stacking sandbags on Sunday, a hospital evacuated about 30 patients, including pregnant women and people on ventilators, said Jacek Rydzek, the operations director of a neighboring heart clinic, the American Heart of Poland Group.
Mr. Rydzek also moved eight patients from his heart clinic to the upper floors of the hospital.
On Monday, he said, the hospital evacuated everyone. “We did all that we could to secure our patients,” he said.
Residents — many of whom have barely slept — are just starting to realize how close they may have come to disaster. Many are also realizing how heroic their collective actions were.
“We were fighting for everything,” Mr. Prygiel, the volleyball president, said, adding, “We were fighting for our friends, for our close ones, for our acquaintances. For Nysa.”
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