Lyudmila (77)

April 25, 2022, Bratislava. Day 60 of war.

She sat on the bed and looked very tired. She did not experience the shelling, she ran away fearing what was happening in the neighbouring towns. She did not want to wait until the Russian occupiers came to her town. She couldn't run from them. She wouldn't be able to do it physically anymore. She is half Russian, but her own family does not believe her. She no longer planned to travel, nor did she have an international passport. The war drove her to Slovakia.

“We spent 2 weeks in Lviv, it was difficult there. First we wanted to go to Germany via Krakow. There were very caring volunteers in Krakow, they even gave me a wheelchair. They provided us with accommodation at the main station, there were fold-out beds on which we could sleep. My friend was promised accommodation in Germany, but they did not finally manage to arrange it. Another friend helped me find this place. When she called me that they had a vacancy for me, I immediately got on the train and set off. We had all the necessary comfort on the train, the volunteers helped us with the tickets, they gave us food, so much humanity was around us! They also tried in Lviv, but the influx of people was so great that it could not be managed.” 

“My friend has already found a job here. She is a music school teacher, she was supposed to have her first lessons today, so she will tell me about her experiences. I also wanted to have health insurance here, but I haven't registered yet with the Foreign Police. I don't know yet if I'll stay here, so I didn't go there. I'm glad I have a place to sleep, a place to take a shower. Before, I spent the night in various places with dogs, cats, parrots, the conditions were really difficult. This is where I have real comfort for the first time. However, I am still wondering whether or not to go to Germany. I would also have insurance there, I will need health care because I am not feeling well. I have problems with my legs, I will have to deal with it. I have friends in Gesen, but they have already accommodated 5 people from their family and I do not want to intrude. Maybe I'll stay here. I didn't even have a foreign passport, I didn't plan to travel anymore.” 

“I came from the Donetsk region from Pokrovsk, which is still Ukraine, but now the Russians are going to take over the whole area. I had to leave quickly, it was no longer safe there. We heard about it from the mayor, from the news, from the president. They begged us to leave. There were 12 of us in one compartment on the evacuation train, but we managed to reach Lviv safely. Nobody knows what will happen, that's why the trains are so crowded.” 

“We lived very well at home. I'm also a music school teacher. I worked for 52 years, but now I'm retired. We lived a peaceful life. Even in 2014, the horrors that took place around us didn’t affect us. I saw planes flying over our town. In other towns, the Russians dropped cluster bombs, fortunately that didn’t happened in our town yet. The city is empty anyway. Everyone left so as not to interfere with the city's defense forces. People left everything there. They left  with only the clothes they were wearing. Those who stayed say we ran away unnecessarily, but fear is fear. Humanitarian aid is flowing into the city, medicines are available, the situation is better than at the beginning, when the town panicked. We had our houses, our lives, everything. I didn't think I would experience this in my age. We did not believe that the war would begin until the last moment.” 

“Thanks to Russia, whole family ties are being torn apart. I'm half Russian. I have a large part of my family living there, but the relationships have been broken. They are people without their own opinion, they only believe in what is said on television. It's a shame and it hurts that it must have turned out like this. What's next? It’s different when you are 20-30 years old, than when you're retired. We have neither health nor strength anymore. I traveled a lot when I was young, I was active, but now I'm just sitting here depressed and I don't want to go anywhere.” 

“I come from a fully Russian-speaking region and I support the changes that have begun to take place there. In schools, we had to start writing curricula in Ukrainian. It is our official language. When I went to the Carpathians to get a treatment in 2014, everyone asked me how I could go to "Bandander" (a derogatory name for western Ukraine). However, my experience was very positive. When people there learned where we came from, they asked us what was going on in our region, they took care of us, they wanted to help us. Putin managed to unite the west and east of Ukraine. They are lying about us on Russian television. Nobody believes us, we are just Nazis and stupid people who destroy everything themselves to them, they say it’s (the war footage) just a video montage. The Russians are telling us not to believe it, that this is just propaganda. What kind of propaganda? I experienced it myself, I saw the destroyed people from Mariupol sleeping on the floor, they told us everything!” 

“We had almost everything at home, both water and electricity. It was better than in 2014, when we were disconnected from the water for several months and we had to carry it home from wells. Now that they were bombing water reservoirs and other strategic places, we had power outages, but they were able to fix everything right away. In other cities, they were worse off. The city of Mariupol, for example, no longer exists.”