Iliana Monárrez opens her eyes as wide as she can and says that something lit up inside her.
She has a hard time putting it into words, but it's like a
switch
has been flipped.
And from there she entered a state of mind that would allow her to come out of the war in Ukraine alive and be able to tell this story.
Monárrez is sitting in a gas station cafeteria north of Bucharest, the Romanian capital.
It's Saturday night and a few kilometers from there a concert is being held at the national stadium with more than 50 invited artists for the benefit of the victims of the war in Ukraine.
Major radio and television stations broadcast the event, and people pour in and out of the service station in a nervous country, where the conflict is still far away but omnipresent.
There are many cars with Ukrainian license plates, many people are heard speaking in Russian and Ukrainian in recent days, and suitcases and backpacks appear and disappear.
In the last two weeks, Romanian soil has been the territory of passage for hundreds of thousands of people fleeing to the west, towards a new life.
And their stories are hidden behind small details: in the pets that accompany their owners during the flight, in millions and millions of hryvnias that run through exchange houses, in hotel rooms.
Iliana Monárrez also has hers.
On February 24, very early in the morning, Monárrez and her Ukrainian husband, Nicolai Berestok, were excited.
They were going from Kharkiv, the city where they lived, to kyiv, the country's capital, to pick up their passport at the Mexican Embassy.
It is a train trip that until 18 days ago lasted five hours and the plan was to come and go by train that same day.
They left the house at five in the morning and took the subway to get to the station.
When they arrived, strange sounds began to be heard, in the distance.
"When we were on the train we heard the first explosions," says the 47-year-old Mexican.
They did not know it at the time, but her route covered the two most important points in the Russian invasion strategy: the two main cities of the country.
They also did not know that the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, had declared war on the same day and at practically the same time.
But when the rumblings became more frequent and the first news reached cell phones, they realized the magnitude of the situation.
-"What do we do?
If you want, we better go, ”said her husband.
- "No better not.
Because I don't have a passport.
Let's go and come back, better, "she replied.
"That was the last day we could be there," says Olga García Guillén, the Mexican ambassador to Ukraine.
"She picked up the passport and so I told her, 'Hey, stay,'" she recalls.
But Monárrez and her husband could not stay.
Her son Tadeo, 20, and her mother-in-law, 62, had stayed in Kharkov and leaving them alone was not an option.
“When we returned there were no longer any taxis and out of sheer
fluke
we managed to grab one, there was no light and everything was silent,” he recalls.
“She was mortified, very worried about my son and mother-in-law, but luckily they were okay,” she adds.
It was hard to think that something like this was happening in Kharkov.
Monárrez moved out in 2019 after marrying her husband.
They met at a seminar in Cancun and it was love at first sight, but when she offered him a move to Ukraine she didn't know what to expect.
The city surprised her.
"Ukrainians are serious at first, but then they become a lot like Mexicans, they are very familiar, very loving, very direct," she says.
Kharkov is a city of students, with good and cheap universities, and that made it a multicultural center open to the world, but without the hustle and bustle of the big metropolises.
All in all, it is the second most populous city in the country, with 1.4 million inhabitants.
It is very close to Russia.
Many families have members of both nationalities or worked on both sides of the border.
Russian and Ukrainian are spoken.
And that is why when his son Tadeo was accepted to study Pedagogy and arrived last December, he was overjoyed.
“I have spent the best years of my life in Kharkiv,” he says.
The turn of the war was dramatic.
"It's terrible because the bombing is happening day and night and you can hear it so close that you don't know if the next one is going to be your building," laments Monárrez.
His family lived in Saltivka, a housing complex that would be the equivalent of Tlatelolco in Mexico City, and which has suffered air attacks from bombs and missiles.
The basement became a bunker and was filled with children playing and elderly people discussing politics, although little by little some were choosing to take refuge in the apartments of friends and acquaintances on the lower floors.
Rumors spread that the Russians were marking the buildings they were going to bomb and some septagenarians went up to the roofs to make sure there was no paint.
His family also set up their own bunker in a long corridor that had walls and ran through the entire apartment.
“Heavy bombardments began in the city.
First, in the monuments and government buildings and then in the residential buildings”, he says.
That marked a before and after that even changed the sound field of the conflict.
“Whew, woof, woof!”
Monárrez imitates the noise of the missiles: "It hits the building and then you hear the noise."
"Dad dad!
Dad dad!
Fuaaaa, fuaaaa, fuaaaa!”
"It escalated to the point that they began to send missiles that dropped small bombs," says Monárrez.
"That was already terrifying," he adds.
They had wanted to escape since the second day of the war, but there was no way out.
Suddenly, an acquaintance of her husband told her that she had already managed to cross to the western end of the country and that her car was available in the center of the city.
The keys, however, were held by someone else, near the Akademika Pavlova metro station.
She was more or less a 20-minute walk away, but the risk was too great and they didn't dare until another friend was able to take them.
"There was no other way: either we stayed here and died or we tried to leave," he says while holding his gaze, "and then we left."
They picked up the keys, saw several people standing in long lines to buy what they needed, and went to where the car was.
Ten minutes later, the local news reported a shelling at Akademika Pavlova.
"We knew immediately that they were bombing exactly where we had been," he says.
When they finally reached the car, a Chrysler Cruze, Monárrez had to take the wheel because her husband doesn't know how to drive.
"All my life I had considered myself a very cowardly person, but at that moment I felt like a badass," she says.
"At that critical moment of life or death, I entered that state of mind that I was telling you about, of absolute control."
Monárrez headed back to her home in Saltivka to pick up her son and mother-in-law.
Just then, there was an attack on a building next door and they had to vacate his house.
Her husband's mother took Buddy, her little dog, and she ran off as best she could.
Tadeo rushed downstairs too, losing his passport as he ran from the fire.
Finally, they got into the car and took to the highway on March 2 to pick up Victor, another Mexican who was trapped in Kharkov, and leave the city.
“I asked him if he could pick me up, but he couldn't hear a thing and then the call was cut off,” says Víctor.
"I was standing for 30 or 40 minutes without knowing what was going to happen and suddenly I saw them, they picked me up at the southwest exit of the city," he recounts.
It was the first time they met in person.
"We saw him running with his backpack and literally behind him you could see all the smoke from the bombings, we yelled at him and he climbed as best he could," recalls Monárrez.
“I know it sounds like a
Rambo
movie , but that's our story,” she says, still emotional.
Monárrez drove the car through the pumps only with the gasoline that was left in the reserve.
"I don't know if it was a thing of God or what it was, but I drove about three hours until we could get to a gas station and the car didn't stop," he recalls.
Starting from the gas station, Victor took the wheel.
They were given just 20 liters of fuel, enough to reach Dnipro, 200 kilometers south of Kharkiv.
On that journey, the only thing the five crew members ate was one cookie each.
But in Dnipro they were greeted by Martín Corona and his wife, Cynthia Juárez, two Christian missionaries from Mexico who had lived in Ukraine for seven years and knew the towns and ranches of the area like the back of their hand.
"We had already helped other people to leave Kharkov and we had traced the route from where the Russians had been attacking," says Corona.
“When they arrived, we saw them nervous and we tried to make them the most Mexican food possible: we put a chicken in the oven and opened a can of chiles,” recalls the missionary.
The next day, as early in the morning as they could.
They had a hotel reservation in Haisin, a small town of almost 26,000 inhabitants in the center of the country, but it was not enough to free them before the 9:00 p.m. curfew.
"What do we do?".
They arrived just before running out of gas in Novoarjangelsk, a small town of 30,000 inhabitants.
The owner of a restaurant offered them a place to spend the night, although she was very embarrassed because she had no beds or blankets to give them.
There was no heating either, but sleeping together on the floor was better than sleeping outside, where it was colder.
"If we stayed in the car, who knows what would have happened," says Monárrez.
The route that Corona had traced was agreed with Miguel Ángel Uribe, an official from the Mexican Embassy in kyiv, and led to a Catholic seminary in Kamenets-Podolski, where there was a Mexican priest who could receive them and give them shelter just two hours away. from the Romanian border.
Every step they took was monitored in real time by WhatsApp and meanwhile, multiple diplomatic efforts were made to get Tadeo out without a passport.
"We always do everything we can do, despite the adversities of a war like this," says Uribe.
"They never let us down, it's very different when they only say 'you can' to when they really grab you by the hand and say 'we're with you, we're not going to leave you alone,' they raffled it off for us," explains Monárrez, moved. .
The seminarian received them on March 6, and the next morning, five people and a dachshund arrived at the gates of Romania.
It was there that Nicolai, who could not leave the country due to martial law, and Iliana said goodbye: “he gave me a hug, a kiss and turned around”.
“Everything you leave behind is very bastard, your husband, your house, your life: you leave everything behind,” she says before pausing.
Behind a photograph of four people fleeing the war, there is a husband who had to take refuge in a seminary in western Ukraine to help his compatriots and who tells you that if you are fine, he will be fine .
A Christian missionary and a Catholic priest who helped you devise an almost miraculous plan for your escape.
The house and the friends who were left behind without knowing if they are still standing after the bombing.
And the adversities that you probably won't be able to forget.
"We were saved by a miracle," says Monárrez at the gas station, as night falls.
About three blocks away is the refugee shelter where she is staying in Bucharest, the last stop before flying to Mexico on Tuesday, and a beauty salon where she got a haircut.
It was probably the only luxury he allowed himself since they arrived in the Romanian capital a week ago.
"Before I had long curly hair, but now with all this I was mistreated a lot," she confesses while showing the photo gallery of his phone with photos from a few months ago and now.
"Cutting my hair is my way of saying that I want to fit in, reintegrate back into life," she says, as if reconnecting with that
switch
that saved her life and that she wants to turn on again to move forward.
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