'I Was Ready To Die': Women Who Fled Ukraine Share Their Stories
EUROPE (CBS) – From Poland, Germany, and Kyiv, Ukraine, five Ukrainian women spoke on a video Zoom call with WBZ, recounting the last month – the scariest of their lives.
"Every day we heard bombing," said Nataliya Haidei. "Every day we heard missiles, the sound of missiles."
On their own time, when they were ready – from three days into the war until just three days ago – the women took whoever they could from their families and fled their war-torn homes. It's something they never had to do. "Now we understand that we were very naïve," Maryna Mykhailova said.
The women describe the constant smell of gunpowder and painful images of bodies on the street with nowhere to go. "The people were everywhere," Mykhailova said. "I mean you just go outside and you see people lying in the streets. Nobody could take them. There is no place to take them."
Mykhailova says at first the airplanes and bombs came every few hours, then every 30 minutes, then every fifteen. "You hear the sound of the plane, and you hear the sound of the bomb that it dropped and again… You're hoping that it's not you," she said.
Nataliya Haidei spent days in a basement bunker hiding with her two teenage children before she fled. "I was ready to die," she told WBZ.
Mykhailova communicated the same feeling. "I was ready to die, but my only request was to die at once, not to be wounded," she explained. "You know? Or not to become disabled. To die first in my family so I don't have to have the [emotions.]"
Anna Maymeskul of Bucha had just purchased a new home one month before the war started. She left it behind to flee to safety. "Now I have nothing again," she said through tears.
These women, albeit in different areas and on a different timeline, all describe the same experience of leaving the country: driving in a car marked with a white ribbon, with a handwritten sign alerting Russian soldiers that there were children in the car, so they would stay safe.
But one woman who spoke with WBZ hasn't left Ukraine – and doesn't plan to.
Halyna Marchenko of Bucha sent her youngest son away to the west of Ukraine as soon as the war started and has been separated from him for a month.
She's relocated in Kyiv, the capital city, with her parents, oldest son, and husband. She told WBZ that friends have begged her family to escape, but she's not willing to leave her husband and oldest son behind in Ukraine. "And we said no, no, no. We will wait," she said. "We will wait for victory. We will be here. It's our house, it's our town, it's our country. Why do we need to leave it?"
