We’ve lost a lot of things. We lost my father. I left my husband behind at the border. My heart is broken because I’ve never been without him. He’s a part of me, the biggest part of me, and now he’s not with me. There are no men with us.
On 23 of February, I lost my dad unexpectedly, aged 59. The next day the war began. While many people were leaving Kyiv, my husband and I were trying to sort out funeral documents from all over the city in order to bury Dad. We went from morgue to funeral agency to prosecutor’s office to registry office to morgue to funeral agency.
The siren was sounding all sides and tanks drove around the city. We collected almost all the documents, ordered a restaurant for a commemoration, but since the registry office was evacuated, and didn’t give us one final document, the crematorium refused to accept anyone.
I’m a Python programmer and I work for a German company, and they helped me leave Ukraine for Poland. We left Kyiv in a small Peugeot 307 car. There were nine of us, me, my mum, my sister, our two husbands, four children and two big dogs, including an elderly German shepherd. It was impossible to move inside the car. We drove for 16 hours to a village about 140km from Kyiv. We decided to leave the village later in the morning because it was dangerous, even there. Near the border with Poland there were a lot of cars and we couldn’t stay in the car for the next three – or five – days, so we decided to walk the last 17km to the border. We left at 4am – it was minus seven degrees. It was a hard trip around mountains and rivers. My kids were crying because of the cold. I wanted to cry too but but I couldn’t give up … it was my idea to go to the border.