.keithgessen visits the train station in Lviv, through which millions of Ukrainians have passed on their way to safety.
, most of the time the war felt very far away.
Some of the people who got off the train knew where they wanted to go and how to get there. Most did not. There were volunteers inside the station and outside of it, but there were too many people coming off the trains. The scene was chaotic. Many people wanted to get to Poland; others to Germany, Spain, Greece. Some wanted to stay in Lviv, at least for a little while. Others hadn’t thought that far ahead.. Ukrainians didn’t need a ticket, just their passport.
This great movement of people, this exodus, had discombobulated Ukrainian society, but also galvanized parts of it. The evening after escorting Rudenko to the music school, I met up with Liasheva, the Lviv-based sociologist. She had moved to the city from Kyiv four years earlier, while finishing her Ph.D. Her dissertation was about housing issues in post-Soviet Kyiv. When the war began, and suddenly tens of thousands of people needed housing in her adopted city, she started trying to help.
When I suggested it was understandable that she would want to punish the Russian Army, she shook her head: “I still think that the Russian soldiers are like my younger brother. They just had the bad luck to go to not-good schools, to not have that many resources, and to be born in fucking Russia.” In front of the Lviv train station, someone pointed us toward a man waving the French tricolor. They said he was taking people to France. Victoria asked me, “Should I go to France?” I didn’t feel qualified to answer. But, I thought, I was perhaps more qualified to answer than the local volunteers, most of whom were in their twenties.
When I told Nataliia that the men were farmers, she joked, “Great. They’ll take us to a field.” But they departed in good spirits, and Nataliia wrote me from Casseneuil, in southwest France, that they had arrived safely, and no one had been left in a field.
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