Taisia never thought a day would come when she would need Russian so badly. It was an intimate language she spoke only at home.
She was born in Bucharest, but her parents, originally from the Republic of Moldova, gave her a bilingual upbringing: she spoke Romanian to her mother and Russian to her father. “I was easily switching from one to the other, without even realizing it,” says the 15-year-old.
When Russian troops reached the Ukrainian border, neither Taisia nor her parents thought a war was possible.
“It was too extreme an idea. You can’t conceive of something like that happening,” she told me. But since the morning of the invasion, the teenage girl became fearful.
“I was afraid for my country and for my parents,” Taisia explained.
“Moldova is younger than my parents and I want it to remain independent. When I heard what was going on, I feared we would be next. We are such a small country…”
On March 3, Taisia went to the Gara de Nord Railway Station with her high school magazine staff to assist teenage reporters with translation. When she saw how few Russian speakers were there and how packed the refugee trains were, she decided to come back for the weekend and wear the orange vest of a volunteer translator.
She didn’t quite notice how her ten-hour shift went by, running back and forth, from one car to another, from one platform to the next, asking at every turn, “Ukraine?”. “I was in autopilot mode, looking for solutions. I wasn’t thinking about how I felt, I wasn’t taking pictures.”
She recalls how in the early days overcrowded trains would arrive with 400 refugees on board, many travelling standing up. They were trying to sort them into categories using color cards: purple for single man, red for mothers with children, yellow for single person not in need of assistance.
“But it wasn’t as easy as it seemed. This system was quickly abandoned. They were men with children or other relatives, without mothers. Where do you assign them? Others simply didn’t have a clue. They were unable to reply, still in a state of shock. Others, in their haste to flee, had left behind their Ukrainian papers, they had Uzbek, Azerbaijani passports, and to get free assistance required a proof they were from Ukraine. They hadn’t thought to get their Ukrainian papers in all that rush. Many were just asking us when they could get off the train. They were thirsty, they were hot. We the translators could not make any decisions. We knew as much as those fleeing the war”.
When she thinks of wartime luggage, the first image popping into her head is raffia bags, “filled beyond capacity and ready to burst at every turn”. Another image is of people she saw wearing layers of clothes – sweaters, three jackets, coats. “Whatever didn’t fit into the luggage, they had on” says Taisia. “Most of them didn’t even have suitcases. They grabbed as much as they could, especially blankets – as it had been very cold on their route towards the border. If they weren’t staying in Romania, they would get more children’s products to last them during their travels as far away from the war as possible.”
Taisia spent about four weekends at the Gara de Nord Station. When she would return home after 10-12 hours of running around, it seemed like she had accomplished nothing. “It was an emotional burnout. There were some volunteers working 24 hours a day, with no sleep at all. I would have been lost if it wasn’t for my parents who would come and take me home and object when I wanted to skip school. While I was at the train station, I didn’t think about myself. I was trying to act logically. How can I help these people?”
Although her role was only to translate, on more than one occasion Taisia would make an effort to get a free seat on a westbound train. “At first most of them wanted to leave Romania, to be as far away as possible. The coach buses were overcrowded, and some people had flight connections to catch in Vienna, for example. They had spent thousands of Euros and were terrified of missing their flight.” Driven to despair, some people would offer her money for a free seat. It took a lot of negotiation and even swapping places with non-emergency travelers to get the problems solved. Many refugees were distressed as they were unable to exchange their money. She remained with each one until a solution could be found.
Almost a month of volunteering later, the refugee flow had slowed down and the situation was being managed much better. Taisia answered a call from a high school teacher and has been working at an educational center for refugees aged 1 to 16 since spring. She works there after school, 5 to 8 p.m., and only then does her homework. “I am the only student there who is not a refugee and who also speaks Romanian. Teenagers are very resilient. We sometimes talk about the war, but they are always smiling. They try to laugh and live their lives as close to normal as they can.”
“With the invasion going on, I’ve made some conclusions of my own,” says Taisia. “I have come to realize many things about my own culture. For one thing, we speak Russian because we were forced to do so. It unites us with many other peoples also under oppression. I’m glad I can speak it and help.”
Story collected by Ana-Maria Ciobanu for the Museum of Abandonment, as part of the Suitcases of Abandonment campaign. Project funded by CARE through the Sera Foundation, Care France and FONPC.
