Fleeing the war

Created: 03/04/2022, 19:12

By: Nicole Kalenda

Solidarity with the Ukraine: Neuried's futsalers around the two Ukrainians Pavlo Stohniienko (front right) and Anton Smolniakov (front left) set an example before their latest game.

© TSV Neuried

The parents are safe, but Anton Smolniakov is very worried about his friends.

The 31-year-old comes from the city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, which has been under heavy fire from the Russian army for days.

Pavlo Stohniienko hopes to hug his sister and two nephews this weekend.

Neuried

– Anton Smolniakov and Pavlo Stohniienko both play futsal at TSV Neuried.

You have lived in Germany for years, work and are fully integrated.

Last Thursday, Smolniakov's mother Lidiia (61) called her son and said the war had started, she heard bullets.

Father Ivan (59), who fought for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, is disabled.

Without outside help, the two had no chance of reaching Kharkiv's main station, 25 kilometers away.

Anton Smolniakov tried every conceivable channel to find someone to take her there in the car.

It wasn't until Sunday that a friend succeeded.

At the time, his parents sought shelter from the bombs in the basements of high-rise buildings and a school.

They couldn't stay in their apartment on the eighth floor.

"Happy to See Heaven"

Arriving at the station, they boarded an evacuation train.

After five sleepless nights, they drove 20 hours to Lviv (Lemberg) near the Ukrainian-Polish border, then another 15 hours until they were met by their son and son-in-law last Wednesday at the German-Polish border.

The system administrator and his brother-in-law had organized a car and filled it with relief supplies.

The helpers who brought the donations to Ukraine took the parents with them on the way back.

"The first thing my mother said was that she was happy to see the sky," says Smolniakov.

The parents stayed with his sister, whose three small children distract them.

Smolniakov cannot come to rest.

Many friends from school and university are threatened or on the run.

He tries to help from Germany to the best of his ability.

“In Kharkiv it's just hell.

My school no longer exists, my university no longer exists.

There is nothing more.”

Pavlo Stohniienko came to Germany in 2013 at the age of 18, a year before Russia illegally annexed Crimea and the beginning of the unrest in Donbass.

"I thought, I'm young and still have my whole life ahead of me and can achieve more in Germany than in Ukraine," he says.

Stohniienko comes from Cherkasy, 160 kilometers south-east of Kyiv on the south bank of the Kremenchuk reservoir.

He trained as an insurance salesman, works in the profession today and has also completed a bachelor's degree in management and digitization.

In 2014 he was in Ukraine for the last time.

"Sometimes I already feel like I'm at home here."

Mother and little brother stay

He met his wife Tetyana, also Ukrainian, by chance at a meeting he actually didn't want to go to.

"We hit it off straight away," he says.

Tetyana's family lives 150 kilometers from Kharkiv.

"The grandparents don't want to leave the country, and the parents don't want to leave the grandparents," says Stohniienko.

His own family lives in Uman, almost 200 kilometers west of Cherkassy, ​​where the Russian army has not yet advanced.

It is rural there, no important infrastructure that can be expected to be shelled.

That's why his mother and 17-year-old brother Petro "deliberately decided against fleeing to Germany.

You feel safe.”

Stohniienko's sister Anna (31) and her two boys (13 and 11), on the other hand, have left Uman and are on their way to Germany.

They had been trying to get on one of the westbound trains since Wednesday evening, but they were so full that the doors didn't even open when they stopped at Smila station.

They finally managed to board on Thursday and reached Lviv overnight, from where they wanted to cross the border by train.

"She gets in touch every few hours and says how she's doing." Stohniienko doesn't yet know whether it's in Poland or at any German train station, only that he will pick her up and take her home.

He hopes it will be so far on Saturday.

"It is important that she is brought to safety for the time being and comes to rest."

Registered as an interpreter

The apartment in which he and his wife live is small.

Efforts are already being made to find a home for Anna and the boys.

He thinks it is likely that Anna, like him and his sister Mariia (29), who lives in North Rhine-Westphalia, will stay in Germany.

"It will result in many Ukrainians settling here because they no longer have anything there." Stohniienko continues: "It is admirable how the Germans are getting involved." is coming” and to help with the integration.

He himself and his wife have volunteered as interpreters.

So far they have not been used.