As the war approached Odessa, Anne listened to her friends’ pleas abroad and fled to the Netherlands. A month later, as she tried to reassure her son on the phone as Russian rockets shook the Black Sea port city around him, she decided to return. “I couldn’t glue it,” she says. “I had to go home.”
The 50-year-old mother passed through a crowd of women and children at Przemyśl station in Poland on Wednesday afternoon to board her train. “I don’t care what happens to me,” says Anne. “If something happens to my family, why should I live?”
As the war continues and allegations of Russian war crimes reach the international community, it is difficult to see why anyone would risk returning to Ukraine. But since Russia’s invasion on February 24, of the more than 2.5 million people who entered Poland, it is estimated that about 502,000 have returned. Official figures provided by the Polish border guards show that between April 4 and 10, a total of 117,129 people entered Ukraine from Poland.
It is not possible to know which of these numbers are civilians, as the figure includes aid workers and other staff, but volunteers at the border in the Polish village of Medica say they have seen an increase in numbers over the past week. For men, travel may be necessary after Ukraine called on men aged 18-60 to fight.
Displaced Ukrainians line up in front of an information center near Lviv station, where volunteers are helping them with accommodation. Photo: Valeria Mongeli / Guardian
For a week, the Guardian spoke to women at two different stations on either side of the Ukrainian-Polish border to find out why they were returning home. They gave a number of reasons, but many, like Anne, were motivated by a desperate desire to be with loved ones again. They were grateful for the support of their European hosts, but their love for family and home pulled them back.
“We saw about 200 people waiting in line to go to Ukraine that day. Sometimes there is an influx of people who go out, “said Ralph Jacko at a World Central Kitchen booth in Medica.
Jim Clayton of the non-profit organization Siobhan’s Trust, which distributes pizzas to people at the 11-day border, says he has seen a certain increase in the return of Ukrainians. “In a way, it’s good, but it’s also scary. It is difficult to know whether they are returning to a dangerous situation. “
Travelers are sitting in the waiting room at Lviv Central Station. Photo: Valeria Mongeli / Guardian
The fear of living in the besieged country is still very real. “If you’ve heard the news, you know,” said a mother who passed her two young children through passport control at the station. Her parents need her care in eastern Ukraine, she said, although she is eager to return to Poland.
In the blue-and-yellow sleeper train to Odessa, smartphones illuminate carriages with calls to relatives until the blinds close to avoid the train being spotted by the Russians. Checks by armed soldiers and Ukrainian civilian agents delayed the first stop in Lviv by two and a half hours.
In Odessa, Anne will join her son and his wife, along with his father-in-law, whose home in Kherson was destroyed by Russian shelling. The last time they were together was drinking wine hours before the invasion, on February 23, a Soviet holiday known as Men’s Day. It feels like a lifetime now, says Anne.
“I dreamed that my son hugged me and said, ‘Please don’t leave me again,'” she added. “The atmosphere of my presence can help.”
Julia, 30, at the bus station in Lviv. She could not find a job in Poland, so she returned to Ukraine with her two children. Photo: Valeria Mongeli / Guardian
The same train took 57-year-old Tatiana to Kolomyia, western Ukraine, where her mother had moved after their apartment in the northeastern city of Kharkiv was shelled. She briefly accompanied her daughter-in-law and grandson to Poland before returning to care for her mother and other elderly residents. Her Ukrainian friends in Germany are also returning to regain the sense of home they lost in fleeing the war.
While Tatiana’s 27-year-old son is in Odessa, her older son, 34, has been out of reach for weeks. “He’s a front-line medic,” she said. “I don’t know where he is and he can’t call because of his security. All I can do is pray for him every day. ”
Irina, 29, was in Poland only one night before returning to the train. She took her daughter for biometrics so that the 10-year-old could get a passport and apply for a visa for the United Kingdom. Then, she says, they will move from Ternopil in western Ukraine to a host in Warwick, England.
“It was so difficult to return to Ukraine,” she said. “I have to take care of my baby. I don’t want her to feel anxious and crying all the time. If the Russian army does not come to this part of Ukraine, there will be more missiles or something.
Her daughter plays with someone’s pet terrier, while videos of Russian atrocities are broadcast among adults.
Tatiana K., 58, from the western Ukrainian city of Khmelnytsky, was being treated at a Kiev hospital when the invasion began. Her medical records were lost in the cataclysm as the hospital was forced to close. She now travels around Ukraine for up to 12 hours to visit a cancer doctor in Poland.
Temporary shelter for women and children at the train station in Lviv. Photo: Valeria Mongeli / Guardian
“I didn’t believe in the possibility of a war in Ukraine until the last day,” she said, looking exhausted and touching her bandage with a biopsy. “Now I don’t know what to think.”
A few days later, at Lviv station near the Polish border, returning refugees awaited train and bus connections with eastern Ukrainians, heading in the opposite direction after the horrors of a strike at Kramatorsk station in Donbass and an expected Russian offensive in the region.
Near the train station, 30-year-old Julia got off a bus from Krakow with her two children and her sister. Before boarding the next bus to her hometown of Ternopil, she recounts how old Polish women cried out of sympathy for Ukrainians during her one-month stay in Krakow. “But I couldn’t find a job [in Poland]and without work is difficult. It’s easier to be here, it’s home. ”
59-year-old Lyudmila at the bus station in Lviv, on her way home to take care of her sick husband. Photo: Valeria Mongeli / Guardian
Returning from Poland and now in a minibus to the western city of Kamianets-Podilskyi, 59-year-old Lyudmila curses at Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I would never have believed that the Poles would help us and the Russians would kill us,” said the grandmother, who spent half her life in the Soviet Union. “We do not need to be liberated by the Russians.
She has returned to care for her sick husband while another grandmother, Helena, travels from Milan with her daughter and 10-year-old grandson back to their home near Kyiv, which they left two weeks earlier.
“Many people are returning to Kyiv and Kharkiv because they have heard that it has become calmer,” said Elizaveta Sokolova, a volunteer at the station. “They want to be in the country where they were born.”
Uniformed soldiers crowd around a truck at one end of the station. “It’s very dangerous,” said a soldier who asked for anonymity. “A lot of people are coming back, but they have to wait longer. It’s too early.”
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