Ukraine, a family after the hell of Mariupol/2

( A 3-part story of what happened to a family fleeing the war in Ukraine) “We understood that if we had stayed we would have died for sure, but if we had tried to leave there was a chance of survival”. The woman, her husband, five children and elderly mother understand that it is time to escape from Mariupol after more than a month and a half of living in the basement, without water and without gas. There are twelve of them in the old vehicle that was supposed to take them to safety. “As we continued, bombs fell next to us. Planes flew every two or three minutes. Our car was LPG but we had filled it with gasoline from somewhere. I have never prayed so much in my life. We had deleted everything from our cell phones so that there were no photos of the war or the bombings. At the Russian checkpoint they checked them: the Russian soldiers are afraid that these images will reach Russia.” After leaving the car, the Ukrainian family walks seven kilometers on foot. It is cold, an icy wind blows. They reach the village of Melechino, from there some friends take them to another village, Urzuf, where they spend the night. The next day they find a bus headed first to Berdyansk, then to Zaporizhya, which is willing to take only women and children: “I didn’t want to leave my husband, but by a lucky coincidence the volunteers gave us a lift to Berdyansk. Here we stayed in a school, we hadn’t washed for a month. For ten days we lived with the hope of humanitarian buses, which never arrived, there were only a lot of Russian soldiers .” Early one morning the whole family manages to get on a minibus to Melitopol. The same scenario repeats itself: the city is occupied and there is no way to get on a vehicle to leave. The owner of a hotel hosts them for free, but in the same hotel there are also some Chechens. The woman is afraid : “Then I remembered that my husband and I had worked with a famous screenwriter, I called him, and he and other people helped us leave in a convoy of vehicles”. The road to the last checkpoint is mined and the roars of new bombings can be heard: “The children’s lips turned blue with fear when they saw these new explosions. I kept thinking ‘we left hell to blow up here on a mine’ . But God saved us again. When we entered the territory under the control of the Ukrainian army, we kissed everyone we saw, we hugged everyone who was there. It was such happiness! We were all crying! After leaving Mariupol we tried to get out of the dead end for sixteen days. Then we arrived in Lviv by evacuation train, volunteers met us and brought us here to Caritas-Spes.” (The text is a summary of the article published on the website of Caritas-Spes Ukraine, from which the photograph is also taken)