Illustrated by Katia Didyk
Aliona, her husband and her daughter Eva are from Zaporizhia. She was a merchandiser before the war. At work, she went to different outlets every day, talked to people a lot. Aliona did not believe that war could start in the 21st century.
In Zaporizhia, air raid sirens could be heard day and night. There were explosions. Checkpoints have been built in the streets. “Something was blown up in Verkhnia Khortytsia (a place in Zaporizhia) — it was scary, we heard and saw it. The siren caught us in the street, we were running to the shelter and saw an explosion,” the woman recalls. Her family went to a bomb shelter set up at the school every day since the beginning of the war. Sometimes they waited bombings out at home.
Aliona and Eva left Zaporizhia on the seventh day of the war. The husband insisted on this because he was worried about his daughter. The family also worried that bridges across the Dnipro may be blocked or blown up. And in order to leave the city, Aliona had to cross two bridges.
“We wanted to stay, we wanted to be together with our entire family, with our parents. But my husband sent us to Lviv, where it’s safer,” explains Aliona.
“Of course, my soul aches for my husband, my family, my city. But my kid could not get a rest in Zaporizhia, she needs to relax at least a little bit. She’s just eight, a second-grader.”
On the way to the train station, Aliona and her daughter were stuck in traffic jams for a long time. They were worried about whether there would be an evacuation train. There were many people like them at the station. At first they planned to go through Kryvyi Rih, but the train was overcrowded, and they were redirected to another one, Zaporizhia—Lviv. It took them 24 hours to get to Lviv.
Now Aliona and her daughter are staying in a shelter organized by volunteers at the Lviv Sports Club. There, for the first time since the beginning of the war, Aliona could feel safe and get enough sleep.
The ladies took just a small bag and a backpack with them, in which they packed their papers and clothes. A friend who had arrived here earlier with her three children helped them find the shelter. Today, Aliona and her daughter Eva’s day goes like this: they stay at the shelter shelter, meet other displaced people, go out for a walk.
Aliona’s husband is a volunteer in Zaporizhia. He is helping to rearrange a hospital to make it safer in case fighting breaks out. Volunteers have sealed the windows and filled bags with sand to block the passes.
Aliona does not make plans, and she has no idea where to go next. The fact that her child is here helps her withstand the situation. The woman admits: “I left only for the sake of my daughter, so that she would be calm and so that she wouldn’t see all of this, wouldn’t listen to the constant air raid sirens. Otherwise I would have stayed. Zaporizhia is my hometown, my home.”
