Mykola Deriahyn

All of a sudden, the life Mykola Deriahyns is used to comes to a halt on February 24^th, 2022. He is awoken by sirens in the morning. It’s the air-raid alarm in Chernihiv in Northern Ukraine. The war has started. For the single father and his 5-year-old daughter, it’s the beginning of an odyssey that will last more than two months, take him through five different European countries, and eventually to Wolfenbüttel in Germany.

On the morning of the first day of war, sirens wailing, Mykola has no doubts: he and his daughter have to get away. The town of 300,000 in the northeast of Ukraine is much too close to the Russian and Belarusian border. Instead of taking his child to school and then going to work at a construction site as usual, he hastily packs some clothes. At first, they stay with a friend’s mother at the edge of town. It seems at least a little safer to him, but at night they hear gunshots. On the next day his complete family decides to go to his grandmother’s house in the countryside. There’s twelve of them, nine adults and three children in two cars, and they get out in the nick of time. “On our way to the countryside we learned that the Russian forces had occupied Chernihiv”, Mykola says.

But the war is moving closer.

The front line is being pushed forward to within 15 kilometres of the grandmother’s house.

Fighter jets cross the sky over the village, food is becoming scarce. They’ve run out of flour, oil and toilet paper. Fortunately, Mykola hears that it’s possible to cross the border into Belarus and go shopping there. It works: he comes back with new provisions. He says he was extremely careful. They stay in the countryside for one and a half months before the Ukraine forces liberate Chernihiv. It was safe to return, but it was not a place Mykola and his daughter wanted to live anymore.