History of a family from Odessa. Raisa Ivanovna Nikityuk is 74 years old. Anna Barvinskaya is 35 years old. Andrey Barvinsky is 42 years old, and their son Artyom is 7 years old.
My name is Anna Barvinskaya. I am a 35 year-old mother who lived with my family in Odessa. At five o’clock in the morning on February 24, 2022, I was woken up by the sounds of explosions outside of my home. I did not understand what was happening. Ten minutes later I heard the sounds of rocket shots nearby, and then another explosion that caused my entire house to tremble. I woke up my husband, 42 year-old Andrey Barvinsky, and we turned on the TV. The news was not reporting specifically what was happening, only that there were explosions occurring in many Ukrainian cities. Andrey and I didn’t learn what was happening in our country until 7:00 a.m. when the president officially announced that Russia had attacked Ukraine. Not long after the announcement, I called my 74 year-old mother, Raisa Ivanovna. She did not live far from us and I asked her to quickly gather her things and to come stay with us which she did.
Our family lived on the outskirts of Odessa and we were not able to hear the air raid alerts when they went off in the city. We were only alerted to air raids by phone messages from friends and family closer to the city center telling us that we needed to take shelter. Our family, including my 7 year-old son, Artyom, would then leave our apartment and had to wait out the air raids between two strong walls near the entrance of our apartment complex because the bomb shelter was too far away and there was no basement in our apartment building. There was no other place for us to hide. While we were in Odessa, we lived from air raid to air raid. My husband was the manager of the grocery department at the shopping center in our city. Once the Russians attacked the grocery only filled orders for the military, packing and sending them what was needed. My husband had to work very long hours and my mother, son and I stayed at home very afraid, not able to go anywhere.
It began to become increasingly difficult for us to get food and the basic supplies we needed to live. By the third day of the war there were very few products left for people to buy in the stores. Bread was delivered once a day and people had to stand in line for over an hour to get one loaf as they were not allowed to buy any more than that. Prices were going up too and I noticed that the cost of water had risen twice in a very short period of time.
When the shelling of civilians from the side of Transnistria with vacuum bombs began and we learned there were a lot of these bombs on the border and that they were all for shelling the civilian population, we decided we needed to leave. There were free trains from Odessa to Uzhgorod. We stood in line for 4 hours. The train station was in complete chaos. No one understood where the trains were leaving from, children were crying, and women were screaming. It was incredibly scary. The fact that you were standing in line did not give a guarantee that you would get on the train. When the train arrived, a crowd of people started running, shouting and pushing each other. Some men tried to bribe the conductors with money so that they could board the train but the conductors would not accept it. The conductors said that children were to go first and then women and older people. In desperate attempts to get on the train, some women threw their children onto the train and then said that their child was already onboard. I did the same thing because I was also desperate to get on the train. I saw some women who this did not work for as their children got on the train but they could not. I saw one child get dropped off the train to be returned to his mother who could not get onboard. I don’t know how many parents lost their children by trying to save them.
We were lucky to get on an 8:00 a.m. train to Lviv on March 4th. The train was very crowded. Compartments that were meant for 4 people were filled with 12. People were even packed into the train corridors. We arrived in Lviv the next day and while we had escaped from Odessa we did not know where we should go. I wrote to all my friends and relatives trying to find a place that would be safe. Someone told us about the Hummingbird Effort Foundation so we found trains that traveled from Lviv to Poland. Once we got on the train it traveled for only 30 minutes and then stopped on the tracks for 3 hours. There were a lot of trains in front of us and Poland could only accept 8 trains per day. We did not know where we were going or how long we would have to wait on the train. We were concerned that food and water would run out. The passengers that had small children were worried that they would not be able to make formula for their babies because there was no warm water. As we moved slowly along, there were two stops at the border where you could get sandwiches and water but there was not enough for everyone.
For me, the most difficult part of the journey was to survive the night before the border on the train. The train stopped and the doors were not opened. We did not understand what was happening or how long it would take. No one explained anything to us. There were no conductors. There was no water and there was not enough air in the cabin and it became hard to breathe; some people lost consciousness. That night was a serious test and we stayed like this until 7:00 a.m. when it was finally possible to get off the train. We then had to stand in line to have our documents checked. That is when the volunteers came. They carried food and we could eat warm soup. They gave us everything that we needed – water, clothes and even toys for the children. Volunteers asked us where we planned to go and helped us to get to the train, they carried our things and put us on the train, which took us directly to Gdynia. Traveling on this train was completely different than the last. In this train volunteers walked through the cars and talked to every person. They asked us “where you were going?,” “do you have somewhere to stay?,” and “what do you need?” They brought us food and gave us water. They took care of us until we got to Gdynia, where we are now. Our journey is over and now we feel safe.
https://www.viber.com/invite/e7532e7a0f9644dc4cfff1963beef2d39d632e68668a05f00727a6545dbcf292 This is footage of this grandma’s apartment
