“None of us could know where we would be tomorrow”: stories of Ukrainian women who had to leave home twice because of the war

War takes away the places people consider home: sometimes it’s a city, village, territory, sometimes it’s loved ones, and sometimes it’s the place where they grew up. Due to Russia’s war with Ukraine, many Ukrainians were forced to leave their homes: 6.5 million fled abroad, and nearly 5 million moved internally in search of safer places. 

Many had to leave their homes twice, first in 2014 and then again after February 24, 2022.   

Lisa’s story

Hometown – Donetsk

“15 years old is a very bad age to experience war,” Lisa tells her story. “You are just starting to explore and learn about the world as an adult.”

When Russia first invaded Ukraine, Liza was finishing 10th grade. During her last school bell, the Russians were already bombing Donetsk airport.

“My mother told me to go to Kostiantynivka (a town 50 kilometers from Donetsk – ed.) to my father and stepmother. It was supposed to be for a week. I packed a backpack, put two T-shirts and shorts. And in the end, I never returned home.”

“My friends joke that I am Cinderella. I met my war in such circumstances.”

Lisa moved to Kyiv when she was 17 to go to university: she planned to study film directing. Her father had already left for the war at that time. 

When Russia’s full-scale invasion began, Liza was living in Kyiv. “The whole 8 years before the full-scale invasion were a struggle for me to believe that I could do something and plan something again and that it would not be taken away anymore. When I was 15, I was ready to turn the whole world upside down; I was a very active and ambitious child. After 2014, I realized that I could lose everything very quickly,” Lisa says.

At the beginning of 2022, the girl did not believe that a full-scale invasion would begin until the last moment and distanced herself from all the news as much as possible. The morning of February 24 began with a call from her friend, who asked for advice on what she should do now. At that time, Russia was already firing missiles at Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.

Liza says that the first thing she did after this conversation was to call her mother, who stayed home and had not left Donetsk since 2014. Liza describes her mother as a rational woman who would not panic for no reason.

“The first thing my mom said to me: ‘Lisa, I think we’re going to have to go to our relatives in Portugal.’ At that moment, everything broke inside me. I wasn’t worried about having to leave everything behind and run elsewhere again. I just knew what it was, and I didn’t want other people to know and see it. And I felt so sorry for everyone because it will be long and brutal.”

On February 25, Liza went to Kremenchuk to visit her friend, and her mother went to Ivano-Frankivsk. After that, Liza’s friend suggested that they leave Ukraine together.

“I realized that to survive all this with minimal damage to my mental health, I had to stop trying to control everything. None of us could know where we would be tomorrow. I thought, ‘Okay, wherever life takes me, I’ll go’”.

In mid-March, she crossed the Ukrainian border. Lisa spent several weeks in different European countries and then moved to Berlin, where she stayed for eight months.

“When I was there, and people asked me how I was doing, I always answered that Berlin was great, but I felt terrible not being in Ukraine. I felt sick being here, in comfort and safety, and my friends and family were under rockets. Abroad, I constantly monitored the news, following all the alarms.”

“I was very worried about my family. I wanted to ensure that if something happened to them, I could be there as soon as possible. I had friends in Germany, but my family in Ukraine was more important to me.”

After 8 months in Berlin, Liza returned to Ukraine. She currently lives in Kyiv.

Martha’s story

Hometown – Donetsk

“I remember walking with my dog and finding a white towel with the words ‘Let us take the bodies back’ on it. I don’t know whose it was, but the towel was so white and untouched that it looked like a soldier had just gotten here,” says Marta. She was 40 years old when the war started.

Marta’s house was located about a kilometer from the Donetsk airport. According to her, even when the shelling was ongoing in 2014, everything continued to work except for public transportation. Marta walked to work, and when she returned home, she plugged her ears to avoid hearing the constant explosions.

Marta decided to leave Donetsk after most of her friends had fled the city. She lived in Lviv for 4 years and then moved with her partner to Mariupol to be closer to her mother.

“In Mariupol, I worked at Azovstal as a laborer on the factory railroad. When it all started in February 2022, we were told to go home. The next day, there was no electricity in our neighborhood. Gas and water were still on for a little while.”

Marta survived a month under siege in Mariupol. At that time, 4 people lived in her apartment: she, her partner, his sister, and his mother.

“When there was no water, we started taking bottles and going to wells and streams. On the way, we sometimes saw dead people, also with empty bottles.”

Marta lived in a 9-story building that had already been damaged by shelling. Her apartment was on the 4th floor, which made her feel safer, as rockets usually hit the upper floors. People whose houses had been burned down or bombed moved into the basements of their building.

“It was a long way from our neighborhood to the center and we didn’t know what was happening there, and there was no Internet at that time. My partner sometimes took the dog and went for a walk to see what the situation was. I don’t know how he wasn’t killed. Snipers often killed people on the streets.”

On March 24, Marta’s partner went to his grandmother’s house and did not return. His mother went to look for him and also did not return home. Marta said that she spent a week looking for her family, asking the Russian military if there had been any forced deportations, and looking at corpses in the street. Marta was staying with her partner’s sister.

“Then a Ukrainian soldier came to us and told us to pack our things because the front line had reached our house. We had 5 animals, so we took almost nothing. Only documents and them.”

This is how Marta lost her home for the second time because of the war.

Later, she found out that the occupiers were forcibly evacuating people to filtration camps in the Donetsk region. Her partner ended up in one of these camps. Marta and her partner’s sister voluntarily went to these camps to find their relatives. 

According to Marta, in the camp where she was, the conditions were not too bad. People often brought hygiene products, clothes, towels, and even animal food there. In the camp where her partner was, the conditions were much worse. They were hardly fed properly and often only given some pasta. Later, he told Marta that people were dying there, especially older people, either from the conditions of the camp or from everything they had been through. He also fell ill during his stay there.

Marta says that many Mariupol residents could be recognized by their coughs, as most had to spend a month in cold basements. After a week in the filtration camps, Marta finally came to Donetsk to visit her mother. Marta says that she was too scared to stay at home.

“In Mariupol, I accepted that I was going to die and was no longer afraid of anything. I had sleeping pills. I thought that if I were wounded, I would take them to just fall asleep without pain. But when I lived in the camp without bombs and explosions, this fear came back again.”

Marta says that at the time, many international volunteers were helping refugees, both financially and by transporting them to other cities and countries. The woman left Donetsk through Russia and then went to Estonia. In the new country, Marta found a job, rented an apartment, and currently lives there. Her mother still remains in Donetsk.

“I am very scared that I may never see her again.”

Ukrainians all have one thing in common: they have suffered from Russian aggression. Millions have lost their homes. Many of them don’t even know if their childhood house is still there, while others have watched it being destroyed or have found themselves under the rubble of their own walls after the Russian shelling.

These are just two stories out of millions of untold ones.

Source: Ukraine.ua