Wonder in Kharkiv
An incredible story of one family's survival against all odds and path to Austria. The names in this story have been changed at the family's request.
About a week ago, I received a text message from Anastasia, asking if I might be interested in her family’s story. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I receive such messages fairly regularly. Although she said March 1 and Kharkiv, the penny didn’t drop for me immediately. She had written in Ukrainian. I read her message again. “Only 3 of 60 people survived,” she wrote. My god, I thought. After we spoke by phone today, Anastasia sent me this video. It is her family seen running from their Honda at the end of the clip on CCTV. By some miracle, she and her sister and her thirteen year old son, Pasha, survived being just meters away in their car from an incredibly powerful and lethal Russian missile strike, right at the heart of Kharkiv. The family were driving to rescue their grandmother in Saltivka (one of the hardest hit regions of Kharkiv, in the city’s northeast, closer to Russia), and make an attempt to leave the city. But I’ll start from the beginning.
Anastasia is 43 years old, and originally from Sumy oblast. She is a trained nurse by profession. She was living in Kharkiv with her sister and her 13 year old son, Pasha, when the war began. They had moved to Kharkiv when Anastasia’s eldest son, Alexander, had enrolled in a military university. Anastasia was the first Ukrainian I have spoken with who said things felt different before February 24, 2022. In the summer of 2021, the cadets noticed there were more funerals. A rocket was discovered at some point in fall 2022, and then it was disappeared. By the end of 2021, Alexander warned his mother “I fear there will be a war”. By the time 2021 rolled into 2022, talk of war was not out of the ordinary.
On February 23, 2022, the family ate dinner together. Anastasia’s mother, aged 73, was visiting from her home in Sumy region. At 10:30pm, Alexander received a call to report back to the military university. Something was up. After midnight, Anastasia called her son. He said, “Mama, they gave us weapons and uniforms.” She went to fill up the family car with gas at 1am. At 4:20am, she heard the first explosions from within their apartment. Anastasia recalls screaming “WAR!” so the whole building could hear. Everyone else was in shock. “Bookh, Bookh” she recalls the sound of explosions all around their apartment building. By 6am, the family had gone to seek cover inside the deepest Metro station, Universitet.
By February 25, the Russians had entered Kharkiv. There was constant fire and shooting. Day and night. Locals had moved into the subway station and were living in it as a bomb shelter. Anastasia called Alexander, and asked him, how many days will this last? “One day, ten days, one year? No one knows.”
Anastasia’s elderly mother lasted three day in the subway station, and then said she wanted to go back to the apartment, bombs or no bombs. Pasha, 13, had a broken arm which was in a huge cast. For the first three days, there was nothing: no water, no food. Finally, someone delivered some bread to the residents taking cover in the station. Anastasia recalls the adults gave the bread to the kids first. There was a schedule of men volunteering to be in charge at the station, to patrol and guard the entrance. Pasha signed up to help and patrol, even though he was so young and in a heavy cast to his shoulder. Next to the subway station was a military hospital. Anastasia took Pasha there and asked the doctors to shorten his cast, so that he could be more mobile should the family decide to flee. They cut some of his cast off.
The dorms where Alexander and his fellow cadets lived were bombed. The university had already housed the future officers at various locations around the city as a matter of safety, to hide them from a targeted attack. Anastasia did not know where he was.
On March 1, Anastasia, her sister, and Pasha decided to go to their car and try to drive to Saltivka to pick up her mother, who had only lasted a few days in the subway bomb shelter. They wanted to pick up granny and drive out of Kharkiv. They set off early in the morning, once the Metro was opened again. They drove by the city administration building. Ahead of them was a grey car. He drove fast and cut them off. Anastasia had to brake. He must have seen the missile approaching. At 8:30am on March 1, an enormous missile hit the building and the square. You can see the moment of impact it in this CCTV video here. The family seen running from their dark car at the end of the video are Anastasia, her sister, and Pasha.
Anastasia cannot remember much from the moment of impact. She remembers a wall of fire, a feeling of being lost, a feeling that she might lose consciousness. She screamed “Pasha! Pasha!” until he answered, “Mom, I’m ok.” They all ran out of the car. But the documents were still in the car. Her sister turned to run back and get them. Soldiers screamed at her not to do it, there will be a second missile. Her sister managed to grab the bag, and they all sought safety in the Metro station. An ambulance was called. Pasha was bleeding from his ears from the impact of the explosion. Anastasia couldn’t feel anything, but she looked down, and saw that her arms were all cut up. She felt as if she might faint. She asked for water. When the ambulance arrived, the doctors told her they must take Pasha to hospital. She hadn’t understood how seriously he was injured until the medics arrived. The operation lasted two hours. Doctors removed debris and glass from Pasha’s shoulder and neck, which had been badly cut open. Anastasia remembers they sewed up her arm injuries without any painkiller, yet she didn’t feel anything.
In the recovery room, following his surgery, Pasha lay next to a woman who had been hit in the stomach, and a tank driver who was badly injured. There was another man who had heroically lost both of his legs as he threw himself in front of two women, saving their lives in the process. He didn’t speak. Pasha was medicated for his pain. They could hear the bombers flying outside, a first, a second, a nearby explosion. Anastasia dragged Pasha’s bed into the corridor. They were on the second floor. Exposed. Journalists asked for interviews. They declined.
Anastasia and Pasha were moved to the cellar. It was filled with small children. A doctor came by on his rounds, asked why Pasha wasn’t dressed properly. Anastasia explained he had no clothing left; it had all been blown off. The doctor took off his own clothes and gave them to Pasha. After four days in hospital, Anastasia decided it was enough. She was a nurse. She could care for Pasha’s wounds and bandages, and remove his stitches on her own. The CT scan showed he has suffered a contusion. There were bits of glass still stuck in his neck. Anastasia felt the war would not end soon. She called her sister, said she and Pasha were leaving the hospital.
The taxi driver knew which part of the city would be bombed when. Anastasia had no idea how he knew this. Kharkiv was being bombed non-stop, day and night. By March 4, the family had returned to the subway station. Two hours later, Anastasia’s sister said: we must leave. It was impossible to walk on the city streets. It was far too dangerous. A group gathered, and decided to walk through the subway tunnels to reach Kharkiv’s central train station. A man, Pasha, and six women. Someone explained how to shout warnings to each other like “a hole ahead” to keep each other safe in the dark tunnels. They set off at 10am. It took them two hours, with one change of path at another station. There was food at that station, but the “locals” would not share with the group. They kept going.
At the central train station, at noon, there was total chaos. Anastasia and Pasha only managed to push through when they showed soldiers Pasha’s injuries, explained he had just had surgery, had to be evacuated. The three of them pushed through to the train. The train was “something with something” Anastasia recalls, people packed in like mice, quiet, no light, no food or water until they reached Poltava. In Poltava, volunteers passed bottles and sandwiches through the windows, but you couldn’t drink much, as there was no toilet. If you had to pee, you had to do it between the trains. They disembarked when they reached Vinnytsia. At the station, they asked paramedics to change Pasha’s bandages. They barely knew how. Anastasia kept a close eye. No one wanted to let them on the next train to Lviv. Anastasia’s sister started screaming until soldiers let them through.
In Lviv, they arrived to a sea of millions of people unlike anything Anastasia had ever seen before. They held each others’ arms not to get separated in the huge crowds. It was freezing cold outside and they had no jackets. They had fled, after all, from the subway station, with nothing. They found a policeman and explained Pasha hadn’t slept in three days, they needed help. After waiting five hours outside (which Anastasia says wasn’t that long, relatively speaking, compared to the chaos they were surrounded by), a taxi took them to a kindergarten that had been transformed into a refugee shelter. They all collapses on the mats. Finally, no more explosions. Finally, no more screaming. Finally, sleep.
The next day Anastasia’s nephew, her sister’s son, picked them up with his car. He and his wife were already in a little village just near the Romanian border. He knew people there. He drove them to the little border town, and they spent a week there. Anastasia called Alexander, but didn’t want him to know what had happened to them, not to worry him. She also had no idea about his own location. That was now a military secret. He told his mother: we are being sent to war, no more university. At that moment, Anastasia realised the war will not end anytime soon, and she must keep going west, for Pasha’s sake. She calls a neighbour who emigrated to Germany years ago. She asks if they might go to her. “No.” The neighbour claimed she had no space for her old friends.
Grandmother is still in Kharkiv, in Saltivka. The nephew’s mother-in-law is in Oleksiyivka, another part of Kharkiv. They make a plan to get the two grannies on an evacuation bus to western Ukraine. They are finally all reunited. Even the family cat has made the journey. Friends from Kyiv said, “what about Austria?” Anastasia remembers, “I had no idea about Austria. I was just an ordinary nurse. I had never had the opportunity to go anywhere or see anything.” The friends gave her the phone number of Alexej, a volunteer in Austria of Slovakian heritage. They called him, said they planned to drive to Austria, in the car driven by the nephew’s wife. Alexej agreed to meet them in Vienna and find a place for them to stay for the first days.
Anastasia remembers the border crossing. Hearing the police speaking German. Their uniforms. Being taken into another room for fingerprints. She was frightened they might be taken to some kind of camp. The German language and stern officials bring back memories of old war movies and history books for many in the post-Soviet world. Alexej put the family up in a hostel, and then helped them find a temporary apartment, through another volunteer. For three days, Anastasia woke up near the Danube and imagined she was in Australia. She pulled out Pasha’s stitches herself. 14 in total. In his ears, neck, eyes.
Word arrived that kind Austrians had offered the family housing in a small town near Wiener Neustadt. An extremely kind and generous local doctor got to know the family, and immediately took an interest in their health and their fate. Pasha began attending local school. In June, the local doctor arranged for Pasha to have another surgery, to remove the remaining glass and fragments in his neck. He sent Anastasia a photo of what was removed. The doctor is a kind soul who himself is housing six Ukrainian refugees. Neighbours have been very helpful to Anastasia, including giving her some much needed part-time work.
We arrived with nothing, Anastasia says, bluntly. I had to ask the Red Cross for underwear. The local Catholic church raised €300 so she could buy a jacket and some clothes for Pasha. Meanwhile, Alexander was promoted to senior lieutenant. He may soon be sent to Germany for training on the Patriot system. He is 23. A grown man. An officer. Plans to marry his sweetheart soon. Anastasia is very proud.
Anastasia’s sister and mother returned to Ukraine. Her sister to Kharkiv, her mother to their hometown in Sumy oblast. But her mother recently suffered what sounds to be a stroke, and was paralysed on one side of her body. Her sister is now with her mother.
At the end of our conversation, Anastasia says to me a phrase that will be forever ingrained in my brain, “Each person has his or her own war.” And it is so true. “Each of us has our own baggage, big or small. We, for example, truly arrived with nothing.” By all measures, Anastasia, her sister and Pasha, are lucky to be alive. I remember watching that CCTV video from Kharkiv on March 1, hours after it happened, and thinking my god there are ordinary people driving those cars, and we are watching the moment they died on camera. 3 of 60 survived, Anastasia repeats. 3 of 60.
After our conversation, Anastasia sends me many photos and videos from the family archive. We agreed I would not share them here to protect their identities. Her older son is proudly serving his country. I see a video of him riding on a tank with rap music playing in the background. She asks me not to share it. Of course. He looks older and far wiser than 23. Her younger son is lucky to be alive. A broken arm, a near-death experience, a horrific evacuation, and now a new life in small town Austria. At 13. It boggles the mind.
Anastasia does not complain once. Not a single time. She tells me a dozen times how grateful she is to Austria, especially to the kind doctor. I explain I cannot name the doctor in the article, he might not like that. She understands. But please thank him, she says.
I have to pinch myself once I start to comprehend what kinds of stories are on the receiving end of all the Hofer cards we are sending out. Because prior to these conversations, I have a Telegram chat with messages like could we please have a card and I write back yes of course waiting list please give me your address. But imagine what could be behind those thousands of conversations. Ten months have passed. There has been some time to process and reflect. I think we will hear more and more stories now. It is a true honour to translate and share them with you all.
Thank you, Anastasia, for trusting me with your family’s story. All the best to you and Alexander and Pasha. And all the Ukrainian families just like yours, fighting and praying for a bright future in a free Ukraine.