Take the Children and Run

“You divide a piece of bread among four children so that they have at least a crumb of bread in their mouths.”

It is now a too common story: women and children trapped underground in basements or bunkers for weeks, running out of food, sometimes water too, as the dread from bombs exploding overhead mounts throughout the long nights.  And each story climaxes in a similar but impossible choice: about who stays and who goes, and why. 

In this video, Alina from the small village of Kotlyareve, between Mykolaiv and Kherson in southern Ukraine, sits with her oldest daughter Sophia as she recounts the weeks they spent in underground shelters, the desperate decisions she had to make about how to ration food, her children’s despair over the absurdity of why this is happening, and ultimately the moment she was forced to leave behind her husband, his mother and his sister.  

These videos are difficult to produce, both logistically and, as you will see, emotionally for the women themselves to tell their stories. We owe many thanks to our partner Marina Klyushnyk, who conducted the interview, one of our longtime guests, Polina, who translated the subtitles and whom many of you may recognize as the mother of Mr. Chekov the cat, local Polish volunteer Łukasz Janusz, who edited the video, and most of all to Alina and Sophia who told us their story.