Irina and Nestor, Rovne area 23.02.2022 Dinner with family, few words about state of emergency, absolute denial of the possibility of war…
24.02.2022 regular mid-week morning, I am hurriedly preparing for work. I pick up my phone and see several messages on my Viber work group: somebody heard explosions in Luck, multiple people heard the sounds of war planes, bombs in Ivano-Frankovsk…
Text message from a friend that his family is evacuating from Kyiv… I woke up my husband to tell him that the unbelievable possibility of war had just become a reality. I woke up my son and I couldn’t speak-I just showed him the news… I kept running around the apartment not knowing what to do. We called our parents who live near the airport in Rovne. My mother, who has worked for half a century in a military hospital, was called into work. She had no idea what to expect, as it was the first time when she would go there during a war. I used to work in that same hospital until a year ago. We occasionally had emergency drills, but we never dreamed they would be useful one day. We decided to move to our parents’ home taking just a few belongings, as they had a cellar where we could hide in case of an attack. We got into the car. Several of our neighbors were loading luggage into their vehicles. Nobody spoke-just a few nods… The street was silent, strangely silent, but filled with unspeakable fear. I wanted to stop at a gas station, but the lines were neverending. When I tried to buy bread-I was faced with huge lines once again. And again, everyone was silent, quietly aware of what we lost-we lost our world…
We started by converting the cellar into a bomb shelter. We gathered water, candles, chairs, food, warm clothes, medical kit. And the bombs came, came to the airport in Rovne and to our city, bringing destruction everywhere. The staff in the military hospital including my mother is traumatized-by the dead, by the wounded, by the lives unnecessarily lost when they should be thriving.
The constant waiting became our new normal-turning off the lights, reading the news and not fully comprehending what day it is, because it is neither a week day nor a weekend, but another day of war. And the fear set in – fear of bombs, fear of sabotage units, fear of signs on the sidewalk and absolute terror at the news from Czernhov, Kharkiv, Suma, Kyiev, Mariupol…
We started to collect clothes for the refugees from those areas, to donate blood, to collect donations.
I called a friend of mine in Moscow and asked her to start protests against this murder and this terror. She responded that her husband was a police officer and that he would loose his job at best… And they have 2 children…
My heart and soul are thorn for the people who are in much worse situations than us. Messages from western Ukraine that things are quiet provided some comfort, although sometimes they arrived hours late, as the networks were down. And then goodbye letters began to arrive, but I had no strength to read them harboring hope that I would not have to.
The nights were filled with sleeplessness and endless questions: what will happen next? How can we stop it? How can I take my son to a safe place? How can we leave my husband and my son’s father? How can we leave my mother who categorically refuses to leave her home, because she is ready to sacrifice her life in war so her children and grandchildren do not have to suffer? How can we leave a life that made us happy? And how can we go on believing that everything will work out?
We arrived at the border-such a clear line in our life: before the war and after the war. It was just a series of stops and polite questions: passport please, where are you coming from, where are you headed… We crossed the border quickly-just a day earlier people were waiting for days, not even hours. And now, I monitor air raids at home from my phone…and pray that my loved ones are fine… I look up and see traces of an airplane over the Polish territory, but nobody here is scared, because they do not live in the state of war.
My birthday is coming up a few days from now, and I reflect on my trivial wishes and desires before the war. I do not care what term is used to describe this time in Ukraine: „special operation,” „Military conflict,” „war.” We just want it to end.
