Tetiana Herasymova was born on 6th December 1990 in Kamianske, Dnipro region. Tetiana is advocating for the human rights of people with disabilities in Ukraine. She is a wheelchair user.
Until 24th February 2022, the woman lived in Kamianske and was a project manager in the Fight for Right NGO.
“I WAS PREPARING FOR WAR”
In the Fight for Right team where Tetiana works, preparations for a possible full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began the day before, namely possible evacuation plans were discussed as well as data of the organisation’s members and emergency contacts were collected.
On the night of 23th–24th February, Tetiana packed a full emergency bag, expecting a full-scale invasion.
I saw an interview with Anton Herashchenko. He addressed the Russians in Russian, saying: ‘There are only a few hours left before the invasion of our land by your state.’ It was about midnight… maybe half past midnight, on 24th February. I realised that it meant something. So I took my backpack which was packed as an emergency backpack. I added in there the necessary documents, my passport, something that I always carried with me, took out my favourite sweater and put a warm sweater there. I just knew that it would be a backpack with which I would have to move somewhere”.
Tetiana was very scared because she lived on the 4th floor in a building without an elevator. She would have no way to get down to the shelter. Therefore, on 24th February, Tetiana and her mother moved to the private house of Tetiana’s aunt. But they stayed there only for one day.
“THE ONLY OPTION FOR ME
TO SURVIVE AND PROTECT MYSELF
WAS TO LEAVE THE COUNTRY”
Tetiana’s mother managed to buy tickets for the Dnipro-Truskavets train to Lviv for 25th February. The events of 25th February strengthened their intention to evacuate from the city.
The next morning, the news was getting more and more alarming… In Kyiv, residential buildings were already hit, and in Dorohozhychi, explosions started. People were in Kyiv underground stations, and we were constantly exchanging news with colleagues. We felt very, very anxious. I knew it wouldn’t end in a couple of days, so I had to make this decision and leave”.
The women went to the railway station on foot. At that time, there was already a huge number of people there. They wanted to get on trains heading to the West of Ukraine. Thanks to the fact that Tetiana and her mother had tickets that they had bought the day before, they managed to get on the train.
They took the two lower seats in the third-class carriage. But they decided to free one berth for other passengers. It was one of the most terrifying trips in Tetiana’s life.
Enemy planes were flying over us… At some point, a conductor came. She shouted for everyone to turn off the lights, to turn off the geolocation on our phones. But people still tried to light something up, to look at something. She just said: ‘You are endangering your children, other people’s children and other people. You need to respect each other, keep silence, light silence. We are now a ghost train’… It was scary because the children were crying in the dark, they were screaming very loudly; they did not understand what was happening. They were so afraid. At some point, the train almost stopped but still kept going. I mean, it was like tiptoeing, so smoothly and slowly, there was no this characteristic ‘tudukh-tudukh’ sound… It was like we were sliding on these rails very, very slowly. And I think at some point, everyone on the train just stopped breathing when it was going like that, because planes were flying overhead… We knew that anything could happen now”.
On 26th February, after 21 hours of restless journey, the women arrived in Lviv. There they were met by Tetiana’s colleague, Hanna Zaremba, and her husband. They went to the village of Rozdil, Lviv region, to stay there for a while. It was calm and cozy there.
However, at that time, I kept receiving messages from my colleagues: ‘Where are you? Are you already at the border? When will you be at the border? When exactly will you be at the border? You have to leave. You have to leave right now. You have to cross the border today.”
After lunch, the air raid started — the first and only one that Tetiana heard. While in the shelter, she finally decided to evacuate abroad.
Tetiana’s friends drove her and her mother to the Ukrainian-Polish border at the Krakovets checkpoint. The queue started 20 kilometers from the border.
As their friends had to return home before the curfew, Tetiana and her mother managed to find someone in the queue who let them into their car. In this car, they spent a long and cold night, having travelled only 500 metres.In the morning, they were advised to go to the crossroad where buses brought people to the border. The women did so. As it turned out, the crossroad was less than one kilometre away. There were many volunteers who provided humanitarian aid, fed and warmed people.
However, it was difficult to get to the evacuation bus because priority was given to families with small children. Tetiana sought help from people around. A man with a car was standing nearby. But he refused to help.
About ten minutes later, this man came back and said: ‘I probably wouldn’t forgive myself if I left you here. Let’s try to break through the checkpoints. Let’s not hide the wheelchair so that we have something to show at the checkpoint so that they let us through”.
They managed to pass all the checkpoints quite quickly. And in a settlement near the border, the driver of the car arranged for Tetiana and her mother to board a bus that was heading almost to the checkpoint.
