Chapter 4
Yulya had called her brother in Warsaw from the NATO base, and he wanted her to come to Warsaw as soon as she could.
Her children were anxious to see their aunt, uncle, and cousins.
She was still waiting to be processed and get her refugee number at the base, and said she didn’t think it would be more than a couple of weeks.
It was unsettling being there, living out of their bags, sleeping on cots in big, noisy, crowded halls, but there was also something comforting about being with people who were in the same situation.
It was going to feel strange going out in the world again, having nothing, with no money accessible to them, dependent on her brother’s charity.
He could afford to help them until she could go back to Ukraine and her job, but no one knew how long the war would last. According to some political and military experts, it could go on for months or even years, which was horrifying, and she hoped it wasn’t true.
She got her refugee number a few days later, after standing in line behind hundreds of women for three hours, and she got numbers for the children too.
The refugee aid volunteers helped get her train tickets.
The Polish government was providing free railroad travel for the refugees, and she got tickets to Warsaw for the following day.
She went back to find the children. Daryna and Pavlo were playing with Tatyanna and the dog outside. She was still heartbroken over Vlad but the children were a good distraction. Max was enjoying life in the shelter, and playing with other dogs. There were many among the refugees.
“I got the train tickets for tomorrow,” she told them when she found them.
It was wonderful not having to wonder if they had been bombed, or were in danger.
She had to get used to not hearing the sound of bombs exploding, or ambulances and air raid sirens.
The silence at night seemed strange to her now.
As soon as she told them about the train, she saw the look in Tatyanna’s eyes.
She didn’t say anything, but she looked panicked.
Yulya and her children were the only friends in the world she had now.
She tried to look happy for them and not let them see how sad she was for herself that they were leaving.
She had known from the moment she met them that they would.
Their goal was to reach Yulya’s family in Warsaw, where they would wait out the war and return to Ukraine when it was over.
Yulya consulted with Daryna and Pavlo before they went to dinner. They both loved their mother’s suggestion, and when they got to dinner, Yulya quietly asked Tatyanna if she would like to stay with them in Warsaw. Tatyanna’s eyes came alive immediately, but she instantly held herself in check.
“You have enough to deal with, and you’re staying with your brother and his family. I don’t want to be a burden to you or to them. He and his wife might not like it.”
“They’re very easygoing, they’ll be fine with it.
You can share a room with Daryna, if you don’t mind.
It’ll be fine, Tatyanna, I promise.” They talked about it all through dinner with Tatyanna trying to be reticent and polite, and finally they convinced her.
She had very little money and nowhere to go, and when she left the base, the refugee organizations would have to find free room and board for her.
Going to Yulya’s family was infinitely simpler, and they weren’t strangers anymore, they had become friends.
She had nowhere to go in Kyiv when she went back.
The ballet school and dormitories were severely damaged and would have to be rebuilt, and Vlad was gone.
She was alone in the world, like millions of others now.
The number of refugees fleeing Ukraine was climbing daily from two million to three to four.
One-fifth of the population had felt the merciless bombings in Ukraine, and in many cities a large percentage of the residents had been killed, although no one knew the precise number since so many bodies had to be buried in mass graves, and many hadn’t been identified.
The murder of so many civilians was part of the war crimes being committed.
It was no accident that schools and hospitals and refugee centers and shelters were being destroyed, and entire residential neighborhoods, like in Mariupol.
The Russians denied targeting civilians, but the number of women and children being killed and hospitals and schools being bombed told the truth, along with the mass graves.
Tatyanna went to ask the refugee volunteers after dinner to help her get a ticket on the same train as Yulya. Many of the refugees weren’t going anywhere yet, because they hadn’t figured out where to go, and who to stay with. Yulya was making it easy for her.
Tatyanna lay on her bed thinking of Vlad that night.
She still couldn’t believe that she would never see him again.
It was what she had been afraid of when she left.
As it turned out, that last kiss at the station was the final one forever.
She would never feel his lips on hers again, or his arms around her.
Her eyes filled with tears every time she thought about it.
But she had a home to go to now, and a family to stay with.
It was a lot to be grateful for. Yulya and her children were the only friends she had in the world.
—
Sasha and Anton’s days were endless at Kyiv City Clinical Hospital No.
8. Injured victims were brought in day and night by ambulance, while others just got there on their own.
It was one of the front-line hospitals for war wounded.
Military injuries were also treated in the field hospitals in tents.
The maternity ward was still functioning and Sasha spent most of her time there.
But as soon as she finished her own work, she went to the emergency unit to help Anton.
The halls were crowded with injured people.
He spent his days and nights in the operating room.
They had pulled in doctors from everywhere they could, even retired ones and medical students, to help them with the waves of injured they were seeing.
Some were severely injured, as Yana had been, irreparably, and others were treated for minor burns or needed stitches from flying glass when their homes exploded from the bombs.
It was a constant flow of devastated victims caught in the jaws of war.
One woman in her sixties with a cut on her foot from broken glass was carried in by her grandson.
She had a heart attack right in front of Sasha and her grandson, and couldn’t be revived.
She had lost her husband and her home in the past two days, and didn’t survive it.
Sasha sat with the grandson trying to comfort him.
He was sixteen and had lost his parents several years before and lived with his grandparents, both of whom he had now also lost. Sasha called a Red Cross volunteer who had been at the hospital since the war began, to assist the people who had been left homeless.
There were millions of them, displaced by the war.
She asked him to help the sixteen-year-old boy find a place to stay.
He was trying to be manly and brave but he couldn’t stop crying, as the Red Cross worker led him gently away, and his grandmother was taken to the morgue.
Sasha’s heart went out to him, as it did to so many every day.
She checked with the head nurse as to who was next on the long list of people waiting.
The nurse pointed to a blond woman who looked to be in her early fifties.
She had a nasty cut on her arm from a piece of glass that had flown from a window, after a bomb exploded a few blocks away from her apartment.
The woman had a good haircut and a handsome face, but an angry, bitter expression, as though life had cheated her of something, and Sasha noticed that she was carrying an expensive purse, wearing high heels from a luxury fashion brand, and had dropped a fur jacket on the gurney.
She looked as though she was going somewhere.
Sasha was surprised when she said she was forty-seven.
She looked five or ten years older, and unhappy.
She commented on how crowded the emergency unit was, and how severe cases were mixed with minor ones as hordes of people crowded the halls.
Sasha noticed that the woman was wearing a diamond wedding band.
She looked as if she was the wife of a successful man.
As she examined the arm, Sasha asked if she worked and she said she didn’t, and inquired conversationally if she had children, and she said she had a son. Sasha didn’t ask where he was.
She checked the wound to make sure there was no glass left in it, and got what she needed to sew it up, and as she started she saw tears in the woman’s eyes.
“Thank you for taking care of me,” she said sadly.
“I feel guilty bothering you when you have all these terrible cases to take care of. I saw the boy’s grandmother die.
What happens to a boy like that? I heard him say he has no parents, and now his grandmother is gone and he said he had nowhere to live.
” She looked kinder when she spoke of him.
She had seemed somewhat haughty and arrogant at first, but Sasha’s gentle, modest, quietly competent style had mellowed her, and Sasha knew the cut on her arm must be hurting. It was very deep.
“He’s one of millions like him,” Sasha said quietly as she worked. “He’s only sixteen, so they’ll find a family for him to stay with. Are you planning to stay in Kyiv?” Sasha asked her, and the woman looked vacant for a minute.