Hands of hope reach out to women and children with desperate tales of their escape

AS the train from Ukraine pulled into platform five at Zahony railway station on the Hungarian border, a dozen police boarded and began to process the refugees, family by family.

- David Cohen

One of the first to get off, her face gaunt and stricken, was Ekataryn Velychko, 35, a mother who had escaped from Mariupol with her daughter Anastasia, eight, and son Radion, five.

“I have come from hell on earth,” she said. “For weeks we were in the basement with no water, no food, no electricity and no gas. My house is destroyed, the city is 90 per cent destroyed. Most people cannot get out. My children are completely broken.”

She was followed by a heavily pregnant mother, Anna, also 35, with her son, Dima, seven, and her weeping mother Valentina, 70, three generations looking shattered after a 36-hour ordeal fleeing their city west of Kyiv. “We were living in the basement under constant bombing for 10 days,” said Anna. “We saw horrible things. Mothers giving birth to their children in the basement. I didn’t want it to happen to me.”

As family after family crossed the tracks towing their luggage, other refugees passed in the opposite direction. They had arrived from Ukraine three hours earlier and were boarding an onward train for Budapest. Many, like vet Natalia Shulhan, 36, and her daughter Sonya, seven, were calm, despite, in Natalia’s case, having been on the road for a week after fleeing Chernihiv, a city near Kyiv surrounded by Russian forces.

Natalia said: “Our train from Kyiv to Chop and across the border into Zahony took 17 hours. Sometimes it stopped for hours in the middle of nowhere and we were scared we would be bombed. My daughter is terrified and has been crying so we’re trying to get as far from the bombs and Ukraine as possible. The Russians behave like Nazis, like animals, I hate them. We are going to Budapest and on to Austria.”