Leaving Ukraine

Solomiia snapped out of her feigned sleep and watched the two officers approach the car. They had finally made it off the rural road that backed up for miles, where the only illumination came from the thousands of car headlights shining in the dark. It was twilight, and the sun was setting on one of the longest days of her life. All day, they had slowly inched closer and closer to this moment.

‍

She squeezed her eyes shut, slipping back into her role as a sleeping child. Her parents had drilled it into Solomiia and her two siblings: pretend to sleep and stay silent when they crossed the border. The officers were less aggressive that way.

‍

One of the officers walked back around to the trunk of the family’s gray Volkswagen Passat. He began digging through their bags — five backpacks, crammed with items they deemed essential for the rest of their lives.  Her father’s, she learned later, held only a pair of flip-flops and underwear. Men of his age seldom made it past the border during wartime. The military needed them more than their families did.

‍

Solomiia heard the officer at the window murmur something. He wanted their passports and documents. Behind her closed eyes, thoughts churned in her mind about what comes next.

‍

“What if they weren’t allowed to leave at all? What if something happened now? What if they’d forgotten someone’s passport?”

‍

For more than 24 hours, Solomiia watched panic ripple around her. She smelled the heavy smoke from hundreds of cigarettes clasped in the fingers of fearful Ukrainians hoping to steady their nerves.

‍

“Are you their father?” the officer asked. Solomiia cracked open her eyes, seeing the officer gesture towards her and her siblings.

‍

“Yes,” her father replied.

‍

“How old is your eldest?” the officer asked, shining a flashlight on Solomiia’s face.

‍

“She’s 15.”

‍

***

‍

Solomiia Tkachuk grew up in the small town of Rivne, Ukraine, with her younger siblings, Roman and Zlata. It was the kind of place where people walked everywhere, and you had to drive to the next town for “good” shopping. When she was little, the family lived in a cramped two-room apartment. In the summers, while their parents traveled and worked elsewhere, the children would join their grandparents at the family’s house near the sea. During the long afternoons, Solomiia would invent escape room games with secret missions and codes to unlock boxes and doors.

​

“We would always mess around and fight, but it was usually me leading [Roman], doing whatever I would tell him to do,” Solomiia said, laughing. “He would always be the one to get in trouble.”

‍

On the 30-minute walk to her private school, Solomiia would go through the town square, with its statue of T.G. Shevchenko, the great Ukrainian writer, and Rivne’s tallest building, a modest nine stories, which they called “Manhattan.” Her destination was a small, vibrant-pink building that stood out brightly in the morning sun.

‍

Twice a year, her kindergarten class would put on a play. Each student was expected to memorize a short poem, and parents would gather to watch. Solomiia landed the lead in “The Snow Queen.”

‍

Her mother, Yana, was ecstatic and immediately enrolled Solomiia in acting classes. She adored showing off her children. Yana spent hours picking out Solomiia’s dress for the performance, painstakingly searching for the perfect colors and embellishments to make her shine.

​

She was raised to be independent. Her parents taught her early on to care for her siblings and to handle responsibility on her own. At 13, when her mother and sister left to visit her father, who was working in Kazakhstan, she stayed home to manage the apartment and care for her younger brother.

‍

But as she watched from the back seat of her grandmother’s car while her mom carried her sister into the airport, something felt different. A week later, the phone call came.

‍

“We can’t come back right now, but we will as soon as we can,” her mother said.

‍

“For how long?” Solomiia asked. Her mother didn’t have an answer.

‍

The COVID-19 pandemic had prevented any flights from leaving Kazakhstan. For five months — 152 days — Solomiia and Roman lived alone in their apartment in Rivne. She cooked their meals, did the laundry and kept the apartment clean.

​

In the evenings, they’d curl up in front of the TV, distracting themselves from the bleakness of a parentless home. They’d watch shows all night, everything from “Stranger Things” to “Sex Education.” Solomiia practiced her English, but switched on the Ukrainian subtitles for her brother. Sometimes her grandmother would stop by to check in on them. She made sure they had food and were keeping up with their school work, but she could never stay. Solomiia’s grandpa needed her; his health was getting worse with each week.

‍

When she left, the house felt empty again.

‍

***

‍

Solomiia’s childhood ended the moment she got the phone call from her mother that they couldn’t come home. Even though her parents caught the first emergency flight back to Ukraine, the five months spent as a stand-in mother figure for her 11-year-old little brother stripped her of the blissful feeling of youth.

‍

Gradually, she set aside her love of music and the arts. It was time, she told herself, for more practical career choices. She applied to a school specializing in biochemistry. But in small moments, between the rigorous biology and chemistry classes, the joy of her childhood would rush back.

‍

“I never thought of myself doing art 24/7, or as my job,” Solomiia said.

​

“You know, people in the United States think that if they really like music or like art, they'll go to school for that and do that as a career,” I replied.

​

“There’s a Soviet part of it, too. My parents are not wired like that as much, but a lot of parents in Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan are. You're either going to law school, med school or you're an engineer. So you only have three options.”

‍

Just like in kindergarten, her school required each of the five ninth-grade classes to perform a ballroom-style dance. Eager for an escape from schoolwork, Solomiia and her two friends stayed late at their school practicing. Giggles and the squeak of clumsy footsteps on polished floors echoed in the empty classroom. Solomiia grabbed her friend’s hand, spinning her around as they laughed.

​

The girls twirled and stumbled across the floor, stepping on each other’s toes and grinning. The room brimmed with childish joy. Solomiia had never been the best dancer, but the music filled her with a sense of freedom that she hadn’t felt in a long time. For that night, she was back in kindergarten, eating buckwheat grits and taking naps on a small cot.

​

But when she woke up the next morning, she didn’t open her eyes to the sun shining through their fourth-floor apartment window. The sky had turned a shade of gray she had never seen before. Her beautiful city, once vibrant with blues and greens, seemed drained of its color.

​

When she walked out to the kitchen, her parents stood together talking in hushed voices, phones in hand. ​Russian rockets had struck the airport only 30 minutes away from where she stood. The gray in the sky wasn’t rain clouds covering up the sun. It was smoke and ash.

‍

Russia had begun its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

‍

“Do you remember what you were thinking?” I asked.

‍

Solomiia fidgeted with her necklace, looking out the window. It was a gold cross on a long, thin chain.

‍

“I saw the smoke coming from the explosion [on the TV], but I was like, ‘OK. That's it. That's going to be it. There is no way my city’s going to be actually at war,’” Solomiia said.

‍

She’d thought the same thing eight years earlier when Russia invaded the Ukrainian province of Crimea. She’d seen the footage on TV, but back then, when she’d looked out the window, the sky had been striking blue.

​

“I remember looking out that window and thinking, ‘I don’t see anything. It’s probably not happening to me. It’s somewhere. I don’t know,’” Solomiia said.

‍

In the eight years Solomiia had spent growing up, learning and enjoying her life, war was raging in Eastern Ukraine. Smoke and ash darkened the sky. Soldiers in green uniforms stalked by, and haunting sirens wailed into deserted streets once bustling with life.

​

Now, instead of the TV showing images of distant places with unfamiliar roads, these images held memories from her childhood.

​

Solomiia, Roman and Zlata spent the entire first day glued to the TV screen. Solomiia wrapped herself in a blanket, only leaving the couch to eat. The Ukrainian media kept things optimistic, telling tales of small victories amongst the devastation: An old woman who lured in Russian soldiers, offering them food and then poisoning them, a man who had stolen a Russian tank by attaching it to his tractor and driving away, a Ukrainian pilot who shot Russian missiles from the sky before they reached their targets.

​

Over the sounds of the TV, she could hear her mother and father speaking frantically on the phone and to each other, a constant reminder that they were in the war zone, and not distant observers.

​

Fueled by fear and building uncertainty, Solomiia quietly slipped away from the rest of her family and began to pack a bag. She bought it in Croatia on vacation two years before, and it was once filled with sunglasses and souvenirs. But now, she placed in a few small items: a sweater, a few pairs of socks and her tablet.

‍

“What were you thinking as you packed?” I asked. “Why’d you pack on the first day?”

​

“I was thinking, ‘We just need to go somewhere. I can't be here right now. It's so scary,’” Solomiia said. “All that was going on in my mind was that I need to leave. I love my country. I love my people here, but I can't stay here right now.”

​

“You only packed a few things. Why didn’t you pack a bigger bag?”

​

“Because, deep in my heart, I was just thinking that we were going to be away for a week or two.”

‍

***

‍

The next day, the rest of the family packed their bags. Zlata was having panic attacks, her first-grade mind overwhelmed with fear. While their mother tried to calm her down, Solomiia turned to optimism, but she knew the chances of her father crossing the border to Poland with them were slim. Able-bodied men were vital to the war effort. Her grandfather had served in the Ukrainian military, so she understood the sense of duty her father felt to stay. He’d be proud to serve, but she also knew their family needed him.

​

“What am I going to do?” she heard her mother ask her father. “What am I going to do with three kids in Poland without knowing the language or having a job or basically anything?”

‍

“She tried to hide it from us as much as possible, but she was so worried,” Solomiia said. “But I think I was just so confident that he'd be able to [cross the border with us]. I don't know why.”

‍

That night, her parents made their decision. With the TV still on in the background, they sat the children down on the living room couch. Her father looked strained, and her mother’s face was tight with worry. They’d been on the phone all day. It was clear they were making arrangements.

​

“We’re going to leave,” Solomiia remembers him saying. “We don't see that there's going to be a bright future for you here in Ukraine. And we wish the best for you.”

​

The next morning, before dawn, they left their lives behind.

‍

The trek down from their apartment had never felt long before, but as the family walked down the steep stairwell in silence, every step stretched to eternity. The backpacks slung across their shoulders felt heavy, as though they held much more than a few clothes and toiletries.

​

The blackness of the early morning shadowed the gray ash and smoke in the sky, making the town look almost normal. Their early wake-up would hopefully help them avoid some of the inevitable traffic on the way to the border between Ukraine and Poland. Solomiia had slept in the same clothes she would leave in. 

​

The family shuffled downstairs to the car while the street lights glowed and the moon still sat high in the sky. Solomiia left behind her textbooks, art supplies and childhood toys; things she hasn’t seen since that morning when her father closed the door behind them for the last time. She fell asleep immediately as her father drove off into the night.

‍

“It almost felt like we were going on one of our vacations … almost,” Solomiia said, leaning back in her chair.

​

“At that moment, did you know you’d never be back?” I asked.

​

“No. Not at all,” Solomiia said. “I left so many things. I don’t even remember them now.”

‍

***

‍

When the Tkachuck family had driven to Poland for vacations in the past, it usually took five hours. They would play upbeat music, talk or sit in a comfortable silence. The silence that lingered in the car during the 24 hours it took to get past the border was anything but comfortable. Solomiia’s mother was silent with worry, devastated by the possibility that her husband might soon be taking a bus back into Ukraine, unable to cross with them.

​

When she awoke, Solomiia stared out the window of their family’s car. They’d been driving for hours now, the traffic growing slower and thicker the closer they came to the border. Outside, she saw her childhood racing past: the places she had grown up, the familiar streets, all shrouded in a veil of gray. Her phone was full of messages from friends and family concerned about their whereabouts and praying for their safety. She did her best to answer them optimistically.

​

On the opposite side of the road, Ukrainian tanks and anti-ballistic missile trucks thundered past. On TV, those machines had seemed like toys: distant, unreal, almost imaginary. Here, they loomed larger-than-life in an undeniable message: The war had crossed into her world.

​

At one time, Solomiia thought she was prepared for anything. When her parents were stuck in Kazakhstan, she’d learned to deal with pain and fear. She had held everything together for her brother and for herself. But this time, as Solomiia sat in the car that day, things were different.

‍

“That was the moment when I just let go of all of that,” Solomiia said. “I was just led by my parents again. I was a kid again.”

‍

The car line that had once crawled steadily toward the border slowed and eventually stopped altogether. People got out of their cars, talking amongst themselves. Many paced the long line, seeing how far it stretched before their turn to cross.

​

A few hours earlier, her father had wordlessly opened the car door and joined those pacing. She watched him through the window. She had never seen him smoke before. He smoked half a pack of cigarettes that day.

​

Some people carried their panic silently, others let it spill out for everyone to hear. Every car carried its own reasons to worry. Some were leaving a husband behind to fight in a never-ending war, some had forgotten an important document and some had to leave their pet at home.

​

Slowly, the line inched forward. Instead of relief, the silence and fear in their car grew as the daylight dwindled.

​

When they finally reached the industrial gates, her father answered each question steadily. Yes, he was their father. His eldest was 15. The entire car held its breath as the officer studied their documents.

‍

Solomiia remembered the last time they’d crossed this border, the scene flashing through her mind as her eyes remained shut in her pretend sleep. Her father had grabbed two of his own passports instead of Roman’s. Their grandma had taken a six-hour bus ride to bring them the forgotten document. Her grandma couldn’t come now. It was far too dangerous.

​

Her father answered each question steadily. Yes, he had their passports. Yes, he was their father. His eldest was 15. The entire car held its breath as the officer studied their documents.

‍

“Go ahead,” the officer said, handing him back their papers.  “You can cross.”

‍

No one spoke as their tires crunched over the asphalt and the car slipped past the gates. Beyond the border, the road was dark. The line of cars they had stood in for nearly 24 hours fell away. As her father increased the speed, putting distance between them and what could have been the last time they were all together as a family, it felt as though they could breathe for the first time since they had left their apartment so many hours before.

​

As they pulled into the small gas station on the side of the road, the whole family climbed out of the car. Solomiia brought her siblings inside to use the bathroom. As they walked out, she saw her parents locked in a tight embrace. She stopped, watching them.

​

The future was uncertain, but they were together.

​

The weeks that followed in Kraków were a blur. Between the comfort of seeing her cousins and the sightseeing and shopping they did every day, it was easy to forget they no longer had a home to return to.

‍

***

‍

“How would you describe how the family was feeling when you arrived?” I asked her.

‍

“Very muted emotions; everyone was trying to be calm,” Solomiia said. “Everyone was trying to think strategically, like, ‘What are we gonna do now? What are we doing here? Are we going to find jobs in Kraków? Are our kids going to go to school in Kraków?’”

‍

The family eventually found an apartment in Gdańsk, Poland. Her parents worked in local factories. Solomiia returned to school, attending a science lyceum just as she had in Ukraine, but the news from home was inescapable.

​

Russia bombed an oil depot in Rivne, driving gas prices through the roof and making it almost too expensive for Ukrainians to flee. If they hadn’t left when they did, the family would have been stuck in Ukraine. Solomiia kept in touch with her friends back home. Her new life couldn’t erase her old one.

‍

“That's the time when our family lost contact with each other,” Solomiia said. “We used to have these family dinners just sitting together, chatting. They didn't really know what was going on in my life. I didn't know what's going on with their life.”

‍

A month after settling in Gdańsk, the Uniting for Ukraine program opened. The system provides a way for Ukrainian citizens to live in the United States if they have a sponsor, and Solomiia’s cousins, who live in Ohio, offered to take them in. This was their ticket to starting over. Poland had always felt transitional.

​

All of the paperwork was in English. Solomiia was the only one in her family who knew the language well enough to make their transition possible. She was raised to take responsibility, and she was prepared. She spent weeks inputting every required detail.

‍

The weight on her shoulders felt familiar. She typed in everyone’s personal information, scanned all of their documents and filed them in the right places, documenting every country they had traveled to or driven across. She knew she could do this for them.

‍

***

‍

Two years later, 15-year-old Solomiia had the life she always imagined. She attended high school in Walnut Creek, Ohio, and had new friends and hobbies. She replaced her art supplies and started painting again. Her family was settled, too, each of them finding a rhythm in a new place. It had taken time, but they were happy.

​

She thought about Ukraine often. She missed the food, her friends, her life there. But rarely did she allow herself to dwell on those four days at the end of February when they left. She didn’t want to revisit the fear that had been lodged in her chest, the pieces of her life she had abandoned or the persistent feeling of loss she couldn’t seem to shake.

​

But after a late night laughing with her friends, something shifted. Driving home from her church’s youth group, she found herself thinking more deeply about her situation than she had before. She can’t remember now what the session was about, but something about the message that night caused the box of emotions she kept under careful lock and key to begin to spill out.

‍

“It was being grateful, but feeling guilty that I left my country and everyone behind,” Solomiia said, “and I’m just here enjoying my life and going to youth group with friends, and drinking my coffee and going to [an] American school that some people are dreaming about.”

‍

“That is a thing, you know, feeling survivor's guilt,” I said.

‍

“My brain finally felt that everything is safe now, everything is settled,” Solomiia said. “Now it can unlock all of the emotions and can slap me in my face with everything I should have felt then, but I couldn't feel because my emotions were pushed away.”

‍

***

‍

Tears streamed down her face for one of the first times in years, the darkness around her in the car hiding the pain she felt from the world. Everything she had held in burst through the seams: the fear, the grief, the loss, the pain, the guilt. All the things she was afraid to feel back then.

​

She finally let herself feel it all.

‍