Even as the bombs began to fall, Yevhenia Khomenko did not want to leave her home in Kiev, Ukraine. “I’d rather die there,” said the 94-year-old. But eventually it became too much, and her daughter convinced her to leave the house she’d known all her life.
When Khomenko was a child, she lived through the Great Famine of Ukraine – a famine that killed millions of people, driven by Josef Stalin. Years later, she fled her home during World War II because her country was targeted by Adolf Hitler. She now had to flee again because of an invasion ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Russian attacks reminded Khomenko of the bombings, shootings and violence during World War II, she told DailyExpertNews.
The bombs then, as they are now, were unpredictable, and she remembered running everywhere to escape them. Khomenko returned to Kiev after World War II to help rebuild the city’s main square, she said. Now she fears that the city will never be the same – and that, given her age, she may never return.
Her 73-year-old daughter Raisa Makhnovets is also concerned about that fate. Through tears, she told DailyExpertNews how difficult it was to persuade her mother to leave Kiev, and how their efforts to do so quickly turned into a “horror movie.”
They had no other family in the city and spent two days in an air raid shelter before attempting to flee the country by train. The station was overrun with others trying to do the same.
“I just couldn’t believe it was actually happening. The train station was scary,” Makhnovets said, speaking in Russian, as many Ukrainians do, and translated by DailyExpertNews. “So many people with their kids and stuff, just really terrifying. The first train left without us, then the second. It was so cold to wait there overnight. There were even newborn babies.”
Makhnovets said it took about 20 hours to get from Kiev to Lviv, in the western part of Ukraine, and then all the way out of the country. She and her mother were then able to fly to the United States with a visa they had obtained years ago. They reunited in Sacramento with five generations of their family, as a great-great-grandmother and a great-grandmother.
In Sacramento, Khomenko noticed the peace in the skies of California.
“It hurts my soul, in front of my house, where I lived. But here it is quiet, I hear nothing. I have a house and I want to go home. I want to be in my own house. But circumstances forced us to come here. Just go where necessary so as not to see the war,” she said in Russian.
Her feelings are now familiar to those of a lifetime ago, Khomenko said, but in her youth she didn’t understand war as well as she does now.
Then she told DailyExpertNews, “I wish you a good life and that you don’t have to endure what we went through. I hope for friendship between us and all peoples.”
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