Six car rides, one overnight train, two flights, 62 hours. That’s what it took for Oleksandra Pyrozhok to get from her home city of Chernivtsi in western Ukraine to the home of her sister Svitlana Budzhak-Jones in State College.
Oleksandra relived her epic journey over cups of mushroom tea in her sister’s dining room the other day. She started in English, then switched to Ukrainian, pausing for Svitlana to translate.
Oleksandra left home at 2 a.m. on Feb. 27, the start of the third day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Though western Ukraine has been considered the “safe” part of the country, with most of the fighting taking place in the north, east and southeast, a couple of old airfields in the west were bombed during the first days of the war.
There was reason to fear there was more to come. Oleksandra, a realtor, began hearing about groups of Russian men renting apartments in Chernivtsi and spray-painting targets on streets and rooftops for Russian planes. Citizens were urged to cover them up. People watched tutorials on how to make Molotov cocktails and how to lay obstacles in the paths of oncoming tanks.
Oleksandra’s 55-year-old husband and 32-year-old son were required to stay and fight. The family decided that Oleksandra should leave. Her husband drove her and two neighbors, Tetiana and Olia, to the Moldovan border, 25 miles away.
I asked Oleksandra a dumb reporter question: What was it like to say goodbye to your husband, not knowing when or if you would see him again? She began to cry.
Across the border, a Moldovan man they did not know offered the women a ride, gratis, to the Romanian border. The checkpoint was not set up to accommodate pedestrians. But two men in another car offered to drive the women to a second checkpoint for entry into the European Union. Again, no charge.
The wait at the EU checkpoint was four hours. The border guards brought food — along with toys and baby supplies for families with children — to the cars waiting in line.
On the other side of the checkpoint were tables piled with more food, donated by local people. At one of the tables sat two elderly Romanian women with a sign in Ukrainian that said, “Free Food.”
Once in Romania, Olia went to the nearest airport for a flight to Switzerland. Tetiana called a friend in the town of Iasi, two hours away, who fetched her and Oleksandra and brought them home.
Meanwhile, in State College, Svitlana found a flight to Washington, D.C., leaving Bucharest at 7:30 the next morning. The problem: The Romanian capital was seven hours away from Iasi and the one overnight train was booked solid. Desperate, Oleksandra and Tetiana went to the station anyway, hoping for cancellations.
Bingo. They got the last two berths. Next, yet another good Samaritan drove them from Bucharest’s train station to its airport. Then, a flight on Turkish Air to Istanbul, a mercifully short layover, and another flight from Istanbul to Washington.
The odyssey was far from over. As refugees, the women had to submit to an interminable intake process that included an interview, fingerprinting, a DNA test and a medical examination. For much of the time, they were subjected to continuous television coverage of bombs falling on their native land.
Finally, seven hours after their plane landed, with Svitlana waiting outside the restricted area all the while after driving from State College, they were free to go. The sisters held each other and cried.
That was two months ago. Now Oleksandra helps with the housework and the garden while Svitlana, who has lived in State College since 2001 with her husband, Laird Jones, and their son Will, translates for CNN, Fox News and a consortium of Ukrainian news outlets.
Svitlana is also sending money to Ukrainian families with disabled children and helping launch a sister-city relationship between State College and Nizhyn, a university town about 70 miles northeast of Kyiv.
Twice a day, Oleksandra talks to her son and her husband. Svitlana talks to a friend in Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv and, with neighboring Bucha, scene of some of the worst atrocities of the war. Her friend’s house has no windows and intermittent gas and electricity. “It smells like death here,” she tells Svitlana.
For sanity’s sake, the sisters try not to spend every waking hour watching the news.
I had two more questions for Oleksandra before I took my leave. She gave the same answer to both. First, I asked her if she had second thoughts about having left Ukraine.
Then I said that I understood the impulse to defend yourself when you’re attacked, but with the death and destruction mounting the longer Ukraine stays in the fight, might it not have been better to have surrendered and hope to get your country back later, perhaps when Putin leaves the scene?
“That’s a very hard question,” she said.
Correction: An earlier version of this column misstated the number of hours it took Oleksandra Pyrozhok to get to State College from her home in Ukraine.
