Chapter 5
The train from Medyka took four and a half hours to get to Warsaw.
It wasn’t as crowded as the train which had brought Tatyanna, Yulya, and her children there weeks before.
Many of the refugees wanted to stay at the camp for a while, with no plan for the future formulated yet, and nowhere to go.
Many preferred to stay closer to the Polish border and not venture into the cities.
Hundreds of thousands of people were coming over the border at Medyka.
The hangars at the camp were full. There was a constant hum of noise.
Yulya couldn’t sleep at night with all the movement and mass of humanity around her, and worrying about her parents and Symon.
There were raging battles in Irpin where her parents lived, and as far as she knew, Symon was in Kyiv, but the voluntary units moved around, in collaboration with the reserves and the regular army.
They were sent wherever they were needed, to execute precise operations, or guerilla warfare when appropriate.
There were women in both the volunteer units and the regular army, and they fought as hard as the men.
Their combined efforts so far were effective in stymying and stalling the Russian forces, who were as hungry and tired and out of supplies as the Ukrainians, but didn’t fight with the same passion.
The Russians weren’t saving their homeland from invaders and the Ukrainians outsmarted and outfought them much of the time.
The forests and the parks and the roads were littered with bodies daily, many of them Russian, and many Ukrainian.
The burial details were busy digging graves every day.
—
Tatyanna had as much trouble sleeping as Yulya, although she didn’t have a man in the war anymore.
She felt guilty for having fled, instead of staying to fight beside her countrymen and women.
She said as much to Yulya, who tried to help soothe her guilt.
But on the morning they took the train to Warsaw, neither of them felt guilty.
They were excited. Before leaving the base, all four of them had gone to thank the people who had helped them.
The welcoming response of the Poles for the refugees had been extraordinary.
They offered them everything from baby strollers to diapers to hygiene products and cosmetics, warm clothes and medical care, and priests circulated among the crowds, stopping to encourage and offer comfort and counseling to those who had lost their loved ones and their homes.
Yulya had lost no family members, but she still had parents and a husband in the thick of the fray, and she lived in terror of tragedy every day.
From what she was hearing about the battles and deprivation in and around Irpin, she didn’t see how her parents would survive.
Mariupol remained the worst-off city of the entire country, stripped bare of all nourishment, water, heat, electricity, and supplies, and practically razed to the ground.
The Russians were determined to obliterate the people and wipe the once lovely city off the face of the earth.
The crimes against humanity were too many to count, in almost every city the enemy had set their sights on.
—
When the train pulled into Warsaw Central Station, its passengers were looking around intently.
The Red Cross came to meet every train, with medical units and representatives from refugee organizations.
Locals waved signs offering free rooms to people who needed them.
As the mass of bruised and battered humanity came off the train, they were met with a warm welcome.
Olek, Yulya’s brother, had told her exactly where to meet him, and she and Tatyanna and the children made their way to the location he had specified.
Pavlo was carrying Max so he didn’t get stepped on or lost in the crowd.
It was hard moving through the masses with all their bags and bundles, and it was suddenly shocking to see normal life all around them.
People traveling, food stands and restaurants and bars and all the good smells that went with them, smiling children carrying dolls, couples laughing, book stalls, a flower shop to celebrate arrivals and departures.
All the minute moving parts of modern civilization, the things people take for granted every day that had brutally vanished from their lives and that they had been deprived of, with no food or water or heat, their homes destroyed and dead soldiers lying in the street.
And now they had to start again with whatever fit into one small suitcase and a garbage bag full of faded, torn, mismatched clothes, and if they were lucky, one spare pair of shoes.
The refugees looked at it all wide-eyed, remembering everything they’d lost, and having to start again with nothing except people’s charity and the grace of God.
It was a shocking experience for all of them, and Yulya and Tatyanna felt it too, as Pavlo and Daryna looked longingly at an ice cream stand.
Symon had given Yulya all the money he could when she left, money they normally would have spent for an evening of dinner and the movies for the four of them.
But lots of bank branches had been closed, and no one knew what was going to happen from one moment to the next.
Yulya had brought some gold bracelets with her to sell if she needed to.
Symon had told her to, although she loved them because he had given them to her for her birthdays and holidays over the years, but survival meant more now.
She was going to have to get a job if she didn’t want to live on her brother’s charity, which wasn’t fair to him and Nina, with four people suddenly landing on them, and she didn’t want to abuse their generosity.
He and Nina both had good jobs and a comfortable life.
Tatyanna had arrived with less than a hundred dollars of the money Vlad had given her in her pocket, and would have to get a job quickly too.
She had been thinking about it on the train, and was going to go to the Polish National Ballet to see if they had an opening she could audition for.
The Polish people were intending to be generous and hire the refugees for whatever jobs they could offer.
The four of them arrived at their meeting point and Yulya didn’t see Olek.
They set down their bags to wait for him, watching the other refugees swirl around them, and the agencies stepping forward to help them.
Yulya realized how fortunate she was to have family she could come to, to welcome them into their home.
It was why Symon had insisted that she go to Warsaw, and he’d been right, she realized now.
She would have shelter and loving support for herself and her children.
She was talking to Daryna when she looked up and saw a tall, handsome man wearing a down jacket and black turtleneck sweater and jeans pushing his way through the crowd.
Olek spotted his sister from the distance and waved at her, and she smiled broadly when she saw him.
He looked so healthy and clean and normal as he finally made it to them and threw his arms around her.
He held her tight for a long time and then looked down at her with tears of relief in his eyes. They had always been close.
“I’m so glad you’re here.” Olek hugged the children then and shook hands with Tatyanna, and they made their way out of the station to the garage where he had left his car.
It looked exactly the way Kyiv had looked before the world fell off its axis and everything went crazy, and now Ukraine was just piles of burnt debris and ashes and bomb craters in the streets with broken glass and bodies everywhere.
The two images were so dissonant that it was hard to absorb the normalcy of everything around them.
People were putting their suitcases in cars, they weren’t putting garbage bags in the trunk with the last remnants of their past life.
Yulya and Tatyanna looked at each other and smiled.
They were thinking the same thing. They had seen sights and heard sounds that no one should hear or see in an entire lifetime.
Their life had been a horror movie for weeks now.
It was hard to figure out what was real.
The normalcy of Warsaw or the shocking memories of Kyiv?
Yulya prayed that her children wouldn’t be irreparably damaged by all they’d seen.
Their exposure hadn’t lasted long but it felt like an eternity to the adults.
Yulya sat in the front seat with her brother, and Tatyanna sat in the back with the children and the dog.
Everything they had brought with them fit in the trunk.
The half-filled garbage bags looked pathetically small in the back of Olek’s SUV.
Yulya and Olek spoke quietly on the way into the city, while Tatyanna looked out at the scenery and the children laughed and teased each other as Max sat quietly on Pavlo’s lap.
“Have you spoken to Mama and Papa?” Yulya asked her brother, and he nodded and glanced at her.
“I did. They don’t say much, Mama just says they’re fine. How bad is it?” He glanced at her and saw the answer in her eyes.
“Very bad. I doubt they’ll be able to stay in their apartment for long,” she said quietly, since the children weren’t listening and were talking to Tatyanna. “They’ve been bombing the whole area. Their building was one of the last ones standing in their neighborhood when we left.”
“It’s hard to imagine,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road and trying to visualize it. It was the country where he had grown up. He was forty-four years old and had lived in Warsaw for twenty years after attending university there.