Chapter 8
Despite knowing she had made the right choice for her children, and that Symon would never have let her stay, Yulya was tormented late at night, second-guessing the decision to leave Kyiv, with her parents still in Ukraine and not being able to help them, and the hardships for her children having become refugees.
Even in optimal family-supported conditions in Warsaw, the adjustment for her kids was huge.
Separated from their father, far from their homeland, attending a new school in a foreign country, learning the language, and now with no idea as to the whereabouts of their father, whether he was dead or alive, was traumatic for them, in spite of the loving home provided by their uncle and aunt.
Yulya was worried about not having a job, trying to decide if she should get one now, but not knowing how long they were staying, whether they would be permanent or not, made it seem complicated.
And a lot depended on whether Symon had died.
If he was alive, she would want to go back to Kyiv as soon as possible.
If he was dead, she didn’t know if they would stay in Warsaw, and her parents needed her too and refused to leave their homeland.
In the meantime, she was dependent on her brother for money, which was embarrassing.
He didn’t expect her to find a job yet. She had no home to go back to when the war ended, and all of her possessions in Ukraine had been destroyed by bombs.
It was hard to feel secure anywhere. She was a woman without a country, a home, or a husband now.
It was a clean sweep across her life, and not so clean a sweep.
She worried constantly about the suffering of her parents in the ever-increasing violence and deprivation in every city in Ukraine.
Mariupol had been decimated and the population was under siege.
Kharkiv, Kherson, and Sumy were under heavy attack.
Kyiv, the capital, and its suburbs were being pummeled, and Lviv near the Polish border was under violent attack now too.
Missiles were being fired and civilians being targeted, in grave danger even in the humanitarian corridors that had been agreed to, where fleeing civilians, almost all women and children, were fired on and murdered.
The tragedy seemed endless. Many of the refugees, waiting in other countries for the war to end, were suffering from survivor guilt.
And most of them wanted to return to Ukraine eventually.
There was fierce competition for menial jobs.
Higher level jobs, like Yulya’s had been, were even harder to find, and employers didn’t want to hire people who might leave in a few months, when the war ended, as they hoped it would.
It was unimaginable that it would continue at fever pitch, and their worst fear.
The Ukrainian refugees wanted to go home as soon as feasible.
It was anyone’s guess when that would be and the war would end.
Some people guessed it wouldn’t go on past six months, others thought a year.
It had been two months, and conditions continued to worsen.
Some said it might go on for years, which was hard to believe.
It was entirely a random act of luck as to who got out of Ukraine safely and who didn’t.
One car filled with women and children would get through a checkpoint, and the next one would be fired on, killing innocent passengers, even pregnant women and their unborn babies.
Living in the midst of it was horrendous, but life for those who had fled successfully to other countries was not easy either, although nothing compared to the hardships of living through a war at home.
But at least some died in familiar surroundings, not as strangers in a foreign land.
Yulya’s circumstances were better than most people’s, thanks to her brother and his wife, and she felt deeply guilty because of it, knowing that others had to struggle much harder.
She had met a group of refugee mothers of young children, and was helping to organize them, so that they had a network of women in the same situation to reach out to, and weren’t struggling alone.
They gave each other powerful emotional support and encouragement.
The mental aspect was even more important than the physical.
Not losing hope was vital to their survival wherever they were, in the front lines in Ukraine or thousands of miles from home.
Tatyanna was more typical of the refugees, having no family, no job, no money, no possessions, and ultimately, whenever she went back, no home.
Materially, she had absolutely nothing. With Poland being one of the main exit points from Ukraine, the Poles were the best set up and the most organized to welcome the refugees.
Other countries such as Romania and Germany were meeting the challenge too.
Some of the refugees had gone farther afield, to countries farther into Europe.
—
Iryna felt isolated in Madrid. She was alone most of the time, had no job and no friends, and was living in a tiny apartment.
Her son worked all the time and sometimes she didn’t see him for three days when he was on duty at the hospital.
She spoke not a word of Spanish, and she didn’t speak French, German, or English either, which many of the refugees did, especially if they had been in the workforce before the war.
Iryna found a hairdresser she liked, and a nail salon.
She went to both sparingly, but they were among the few luxuries she allowed herself to indulge in.
But from a beautiful home in an extremely fortunate life previously, she had sunk to poverty-level living quarters and total financial instability, and it sank her spirits from the moment she woke up every day.
It was sometimes hard to maintain the relative perspective of the life being led by those who had not fled, who had either chosen to stay or simply didn’t have the means to leave.
The Ukrainians were dealing with a torrent of bombs being unleashed on them every day, their homes destroyed, a total lack of basic supplies and medicine, and starvation had set in, in every city.
The enemy was keeping them from being able to get food, and people were eating anything they could scavenge, sometimes even half-rotten food.
And water was in increasingly short supply too.
They didn’t have even the most basic comforts or what they needed to survive.
Petro and Oxana were suffering severely from it, although they never complained, but they were experiencing severe weight loss, and some days they both noticed that they felt dizzy and confused from the lack of nourishment.
They admitted it to each other, but never mentioned it to the others in the shelter, and they made every effort to boost everyone’s spirits.
Between the daily trauma of bombing raids, and the severe lack of food and water, and the extreme cold with no heat for months, many people said they felt disoriented, which in some cases was simply the brain’s way of protecting them from the reality of what they were living through, so they could go on for another day.
—
As Nikolai, the director of the ballet, had told her to, Tatyanna showed up on time for class at nine o’clock every morning, and on the third day, the secretary from the front desk at the ballet building came to her classroom, beckoned to her and asked her to come and see Nikolai when the class ended.
Tatyanna didn’t know if she was in trouble, if they were going to let her dance with the ballet, or if they had some menial job for her.
She was shaking when she went to Nikolai’s office after class, nervous about what she was about to hear.
The teacher of the advanced class she was taking had already spoken to him the day before. Her impression of Tatyanna’s talent and training was the same as his. She was a spectacular dancer. He told Tatyanna that after inviting her to sit across his desk from him.
“Our problem is that we are completely at maximum numbers for the entire dance company. In fact, we’re even a few dancers over our limit.”
“I understand,” she said softly. “Do you think I could teach?” They had thought of that too, but had no shortage of teachers at the moment either. In Tatyanna’s case, he had a gem on his hands and nowhere to put her.
“I had another idea. We got a letter from the Ballet de l’Opéra national de Paris two weeks ago.
They want to place one of their ballerinas with us.
Her whole family is here. We’ve already committed to help her.
They’re recent refugees from Kharkiv, and there are too many to relocate them.
The ballet in Paris suggested an exchange.
They would send their young dancer to us—and we hear she’s quite good, Bolshoi-trained—and they are offering us a place in their dance company if one of our dancers wants to come to Paris.
I’m sure several would, but they have ties here, children, husbands, parents, and the French company doesn’t want anyone with strong ties here who would only go to Paris for a short time to seize the opportunity, and leave in a few months or a year if any of their family had a problem.
It makes sense. And we’re finding that many of the refugees, maybe even most of them, want to go back to Ukraine as soon as they can when the war ends.
” It was understandable. Four million people had fled the country when the bombs started raining on them.
But when the war ended, many of them would want to go back.
And everyone still wanted to believe it would end soon.
Tatyanna was staring at him after he spoke.