My name is Irina, I am 29, I am from Odessa, and when the war reached our doorstep I was a perfectly happy person, because my most cherished dream had just come true. The man I loved had asked me to marry him. My Adryusha. We celebrated in a restaurant owned by a friend, we laughed a lot, we danced. No sign of trouble, no cloud over our sun. We thought things were settling down. We thought it was alright. We thought we were safe and the times of uncertainty were behind us. Little did we know they were already looming over us.
At night, when we were already peacefully asleep at home, when our dance-weary feet were resting under the blanket, I woke up to a sound that sounded like an explosion. My intuition told me what it was, but my brain refused to believe it. I screwed my eyes shut, praying to fall asleep again. There came another explosion, then another, then another…
When the situation became clearer, I started to call my parents and relatives living in one of the villages near Odessa. My mother refused to believe the war had started, and it hurt me so much to repeat it for her. It only made it more real. On the phone, I heard my grandmother crying – she always worries so much for me. Now she had a solid reason to worry. For all of us.
After calling everyone in my family, Andrey and I started to pack our bags. We were sad, concerned, just a few hours after our celebration, which now felt like it had been months before. It was still winter, so we packed mostly what we definitely needed: boots, jackets, sweaters. Things to keep away the cold, to keep our feet dry. We didn’t know what would come next, so we tried to be ready for anything. We took all the food out of the fridge and down into the basement, in case we had to hide there. We didn’t even know if that was the right thing to do. But we kept preparing. We took down a mattress, a blanket, pillows, medicine, two ski helmets in case we got stuck there. We also moved our cat Lisa to the basement.
We spent three more days in Odessa, hiding underground every time there was an airstrike. Tension was mounting. I refused to eat, I couldn’t even sleep. My fear was constantly fuelled by social media, which was full of videos of explosions and photos of bomb craters and victims. You didn’t want to see it, but you couldn’t not look.
We decided to leave early in the morning. Our bags were already packed. We checked again that we had all we needed in the suitcases: clothes, documents, money, first-aid kit. We couldn’t sleep, we didn’t say a word to each other. At 5 a.m., we were ready to go.
Me, Andrey, his daughter Sophia, Andrei’s mother Svetlana and his younger brother Alexander. And three cats. All in one car. Heaped on top of each other, frightened, but harbouring no ill feelings – that is how we started our journey.
In total, it was a twelve-hour drive. Seven times we were stopped at checkpoints.
They examined our car, our documents, our luggage. Overall, though, I can say the trip went well, without too much trouble. At least given the context. We reached the border when it was already dark. Nothing felt real.
Some moments from this story are fuzzy in my mind. It’s like they happened to someone else. Maybe it was the exhaustion, or the stress, or the fact that the brain tries to forget shocks.
At any rate, I’m glad we’re here, safe.
Irina is part of the second group who attends intensive Romanian classes at Seneca AntiCafe, provided for Ukrainians by the SNK Grants. She wants to write the continuation of this story directly in Romanian.
Testimony collected by Ștefania Oprina for the Museum of Abandonment, for the Abandonment Baggage campaign. This project is financed by CARE through the Sera Foundation, Care France, and FONPC.