Train of Hope

During the first weeks of the war, we Russian-speaking Ukrainians went through all the stages of accepting that a real genocide of Ukrainians was taking place in our land, in our homeland.

Waking up on the morning of February 24 at 5:00 to a call from my grandmother saying that the war had started. And here comes the first stage - denial, when you do not understand to the end, or rather do not want to believe it, that a peaceful life is over, and you need to prepare for hard and unbearably difficult days of all life.

After the last couple of days we reached the next stage - anger. Under the constant bombardment of a peaceful city, you begin to blame yourself and others for not leaving, and the fear of being shot in your home. And on the seventh day your feelings are aggravated, you maniacally walk around your apartment and there is no safer place for you now than a corridor or an air-raid shelter, which you still have to run to.

You may ask how to move from the stage of dispersion to the final stage of acceptance. Very simple, you have to wait for the high point of your apocalypse. For me it was fighter planes flying by my house, dropping bombs on my school # 150. After a while, the hope of salvation dawned. That it was necessary to go somewhere far away here and now.

There is a saying: "Jump into the last carriage". Not knowing the schedule we went to the station, a big risk was to leave the center of the railway. We drove my mother, one of us took the risk to take us to the platform. When we arrived at the station they gave us the train to rescue us, and we were rushed into it together with a column of people. The train was an evacuation coach. They started to let women and their children in, and the women left their bags and baby carriages on the platform in order to get into the wagon. I managed to help the mothers squeeze past the men and managed to get into the wagon myself. There were two conductors accompanying us, who helped my grandmother to board as well.

In one place there were 4 people, the shelves designated for luggage were occupied by the same people, and we slept on them one by one. Before we went it was necessary to distribute all the people, this was done by our conductors. All have equal rights in such a train, but there were people who put one place their bag so as not to limit themselves. Thanks to our conductors from the jug, sat everyone and gave water and tea. So we hit the road to the western Ukraine. Upon arrival we had a lot of non-indifferent people-volunteers to offer refreshments, water and hot food.?

In western Ukraine people who see what is happening in their homeland very close to us help in any way they can. We were warmed, fed and helped to go further.