My family of 6 fled Ukraine and spent 10 days traveling to Ireland. The journey showed us both the worst and the best of people.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with a Ukrainian refugee in Ireland who asked to remain anonymous to protect his privacy, but his identity and claims in this story have been verified by Insider. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
In such a situation, there's no time to think. You must make a quick decision and act. I'm the father of four children, and we didn't have a basement or a safe place to hide in. So I decided that morning to move my family from Lviv, our home city, to Poland. Lviv is in Western Ukraine and over seven hours by car away from the capital Kyiv. Lviv is a patriotic city and a, so we feared it would be one of Russia's main targets. We'd just built our home three years ago.
And each kilometer, a Ukrainian soldier would check our documents and ask who was in the car and where we were going. When they reiterated that I was not allowed to cross, the children would become upset all over again. I tried to reassure them that it would be OK.
As the invasion continued, I realized that there wasn't going to be an 'end' date anytime soon when we could return to our home. I'd initially thought we would stay in Poland because it's easy for Ukrainians to assimilate there, but there wereand more and more every day. I knew it would be hard to find a permanent home, jobs, or places for the children in school. We had to find somewhere else.
An older woman was in charge of helping refugees find places to live, and she introduced us to a mother and her children who offered us a home on the third floor of their house with our own bedrooms and bathroom. Next, we plan to find jobs and enroll our children in school.
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