“A spoon of honey in a barrel of tar”
Last days and weeks changed my general view on the world. The situation in Ukraine doesn’t look better by the day and my sister is still in coma in the hospital there.
From that perspective it is difficult to believe in humanity these days.
My nephew of 16 with his cat, my niece of 26 with her daughter of 2,5 finally got the chance to escape the city. My older sister decided to stay and care for the younger sister in the hospital.
To get to Warsaw took them 3 full days. The first part was the most dangerous because there are still military fights around the city. Last week they found a driver with a nice bus who collected money to bring people to different locations in Europe. After couple of days they found out that the driver was a swindler. He collected money from people showing pictures of a fake bus and never showed up. For a lot of people that was their last money.
The next day my niece convinced her friends to cooperate and they found someone with a car who would like to go to safer place. They had only one spare place in their car. But they convinced other friends to join them in a column of cars, there was a place for my nephew and his cat.
Day 1
The first part is the most dangerous and a lot of drivers don’t dare to try. Early in the morning they left their homes. They had to pass multiple Russian checkpoints and drive through completely damaged roads. There were more than 200 cars full of people leaving the city. The first 60 km were slow, tensed and dangerous. It took couple of hours to get out of the south region. At the and af the day they reached Kropyvnytskyi and found place to stay overnight.
Day 2
The second day through West Ukraine was much safer. They reached Khmelnytskyi by the end of the day. It was the final destination for the friends because they have relatives there. My niece with daughter and nephew with the cat stayed for a night.
Day 3
In the morning they went to the central station and found tickets to Lviv. By the evening they got there. Luckily there were still tickets for a bus to Warsaw and I could book them from here. The most annoying part was waiting more than 3 hours at the border. Through colleagues I found friends in Warsaw who were happy to shelter my family for couple of days before they can go further to Belgium (another 20 hours by bus).
Exactly 3 x 24 hours took the trip from Kherson to Warsaw with a small child and a cat almost constantly in a bench.
Meanwhile a lot of people are ready to help with anything we need for them.
It makes me very emotional to see how just “foreign Europeans” are ready to help whether “brother Russians” keep bombing the cities.