USTRONIE MORSKIE, Poland—Olena Sirotiuk was on the night train moving east toward the front lines in Ukraine when she got a call from her 12-year-old son. “Don’t come Mummy,” he said. “They’re shooting.”
Ms. Sirotiuk, a cleaner living in western Poland, was one of the few women on a train packed with men headed back to fight the Russians. She wanted to retrieve her son, Nazariy, from behind what had suddenly become enemy territory.
“You go because your child is there,” said Ms. Sirotiuk, 50. “In that moment, there is no fear.”
The lights on the train were turned off to avoid alerting Russian army patrols, Ms. Sirotiuk later recalled. Instead, the corridors were illuminated by the glow of cellphone screens detailing news about the war and messages from relatives stuck in bomb shelters or negotiating their way to safety abroad. The train trundled along at about 30 miles an hour, and slowed more when artillery fire or shelling could be heard.
It was the start of what would be a five-day, 2,100-mile journey for Ms. Sirotiuk to the industrial city of Zaporizhzhia and back, by light rail and bus from Gryfino, on Poland’s border with Germany, to Lviv, in Ukraine’s west, and then by train deep into areas pummeled by advancing Russian forces.
Since Russian President
launched his invasion on Feb. 24, around 3.8 million people have fled, prompting what the United Nations has called the fastest and largest displacement in Europe since World War II. A significant number are going the other way. Among them are mothers trying to save their children.
The government of President
Volodymyr Zelensky
has banned men aged 18 to 60 from leaving Ukraine to help fend off Russia’s full-scale assault. Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service said more than 317,000 Ukrainians have returned to the country since Russia invaded, the vast majority of them men going to fight.
Ms. Sirotiuk had no plan. Her own mother, who had been caring for her son while she worked in Poland, said the trip, four days into the war, was too risky, and warned her it wouldn’t work out. Wait in Poland until things calm down, she said: “Nazariy is relatively safe with us.”
In one of the train’s middle carriages, Ms. Sirotiuk sat in the darkness by the window with her hands folded over the backpack placed on her knees, and thought about Nazariy, a boy who never sat still. Like the majority of Ukrainians, Ms. Sirotiuk dismissed warnings in Western media that Mr. Putin was preparing to attack. “We had gotten used to Putin’s crazy statements about Ukraine,” she said. “But until the last moment, no one believed this could happen.”
As she traveled closer, Nazariy got busy packing his things. He said he found a large bag and placed his documents, clothes and toys in it, including his beloved computer, ending up with something weighing around 45 pounds.
“I felt happy, because she was coming,” he said later. “But I also felt scared for my mum.”
Ms. Sirotiuk moved to Poland in October 2019 after the death of her second husband, Nazariy’s father. She was part of a wave of Ukrainians who immigrated to the EU member state after the 2014 conflict with Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine. Now she lives in Ustronie Morskie, in northwestern Poland, and cleans guesthouses there and in the neighboring town of Gryfino and across the border in Germany. On Friday evenings and weekend mornings, she attends a school for trainee nurses.
Olena Sirotiuk’s journey
Sirotiuk departs Gryfino to Szczecin via local train.
Takes an overnight bus from Szczecin to Lviv.
Makes an overnight journey east by train to Zaporizhzhia, a city about 60 miles from her son.
She tries to find someone to make the 2-hour drive to her son. She hears soldiers discussing fighting in Vasylivka, which is on the road to Novodniprovka.
Pays someone, but is left waiting. Eventually decides to return to Lviv after not hearing back from the driver.
Enerhodar
Nuclear facility
After a night in Lviv, she reaches the Polish border by car, crosses on foot, and returns home by train.
Sirotiuk departs Gryfino to Szczecin via local train.
Takes an overnight bus from Szczecin to Lviv.
Makes an overnight journey east by train to Zaporizhzhia, a city about 60 miles from her son.
She tries to find someone to make the 2-hour drive to her son. She hears soldiers discussing fighting in Vasylivka, which is on the road to Novodniprovka.
Enerhodar
Nuclear facility
Pays someone, but is left waiting. Eventually decides to return to Lviv after not hearing back from the driver.
After a night in Lviv, she reaches the Polish border by car, crosses on foot, and returns home by train.
Sirotiuk departs Gryfino to Szczecin via local train.
Takes an overnight bus from Szczecin to Lviv.
Makes an overnight journey east by train to Zaporizhzhia, a city about 60 miles from her son.
She tries to find someone to make the 2-hour drive to her son. She hears soldiers discussing fighting in Vasylivka, which is on the road to Novodniprovka.
Pays someone, but is left waiting. Eventually decides to return to Lviv after not hearing back from the driver.
After a night in Lviv, she reaches the Polish border by car, crosses on foot, and returns home by train.
Sirotiuk departs Gryfino to Szczecin via local train
Takes an overnight bus from Szczecin to Lviv
Makes an overnight journey east by train to Zaporizhzhia, a city about 60 miles from her son.
She tries to find someone to make the 2-hour drive to her son. She hears soldiers discussing fighting in Vasylivka, which is on the road to Novodniprovka.
Pays someone, but is left waiting. Eventually decides to return to Lviv after not hearing back from the driver.
After a night in Lviv, she reaches the Polish border by car, crosses on foot, and returns home by train.
Sirotiuk departs Gryfino to Szczecin via local train
Takes an overnight bus from Szczecin to Lviv
Makes an overnight journey east by train to Zaporizhzhia, a city about 60 miles from her son.
She tries to find someone to make the 2-hour drive to her son. She hears soldiers discussing fighting in Vasylivka, which is on the road to Novodniprovka.
Pays someone, but is left waiting. Eventually decides to return to Lviv after not hearing back from the driver.
After a night in Lviv, she reaches the Polish border by car, crosses on foot, and returns home by train.
Her son, her third and youngest child, lived with her in Poland for half a year. He temporarily moved back to Ukraine, to live with his grandparents, partly to be closer to his friends, but had been wanting to return to Poland to be with his mother. Ms. Sirotiuk has two adult children who have remained in Ukraine, her son to fight and her daughter to be with her husband.
Ms. Sirotiuk was on the phone with Nazariy after the war started when he witnessed Russian tanks, she said. Her worries about her son’s safety quickly mounted. Ms. Sirotiuk’s parents live around 12 miles from Enerhodar, home to a vast nuclear power station that Russian forces would begin shelling seven days into the war. An administrative building directly beside the reactor complex would be hit, prompting urgent calls for a cease-fire from the International Atomic Energy Agency. “It was a close call,” the agency director Mariano Grossi would later say.
Russia ultimately took control of Enerhodar, ending the fighting but prompting rallies by residents shouting “Ukraine!” and “Go home!” at the troops. In towns taken over by Russia in Ukraine’s south, soldiers who had been led to believe they would be met with cheers instead faced angry crowds.
Ms. Sirotiuk reached Zaporizhzhia on the morning of March 1, having slept for several hours on a hard bunk in the train using her backpack as a makeshift pillow.
“Everything will be fine,” she told her son in a text message. “I love you.”
“I also love you very very very very much,” he replied.
A few hours later—“Mum they blew up a bridge yesterday in Ivanivka,” a town 5 miles from his home.
Zaporizhzhia is a two-hour drive from her parents’ village near the nuclear power plant. The road she would have to use—there and back—skirts the Dnipro River and passes through towns under heavy assault from Russian forces.
She spent the day frantically calling taxi companies and searching for bus and cabdrivers who might go get her son or bring her to him, but none were willing to make the journey.
One man ultimately agreed and asked about $100 in payment. She gave him the money, the lion’s share of the cash she had brought with her, and never saw him again. He switched off his phone and stopped responding to her calls.
“I sat at the train station and waited for him the entire day,” she said.
Her mother would check in with her constantly, trying to persuade her to leave. On a phone call toward the evening, she heard the sound of air-raid sirens in Zaporizhzhia and screamed at her daughter.
“Leave, Olena! God forbid they fire on Zaporizhzhia and kill you too,” Ms. Sirotiuk recalled.
At the train station, she overheard two Ukrainian soldiers who had just bid farewell to their wives and children. They were talking about intense fighting around Vasylivka, a town she would need to pass through to collect her son.
It was in that moment that she decided to leave.
She traveled back toward Poland on a carriage full of fleeing mothers and children. “All I remember from the train trip was the never-ending sound of a crying infant,” she said.
When Nazariy found out his mother had turned around, he cursed Mr. Putin and wept for hours until he fell asleep. “Your mother can’t just fly over like a bird,” his grandmother told him, in an effort to calm him down.
Ms. Sirotiuk arrived back in Lviv early the following morning and stayed in the city for 24 hours, sleeping at a friend’s house. The following day, as she was en route to the train station, she met a Polish man who had been traveling between Poland and Lviv, bringing humanitarian aid. He offered her and a Ukrainian mother with two children a ride to the border, where she crossed on foot into Poland.
On March 3, at the Medyka border crossing in southeastern Poland, five days after the start of her trek, an exhausted Ms. Sirotiuk sat on a plastic chair in a small concrete parking lot filled with Ukrainian women and children who were rifling through cardboard boxes containing food and clothing brought by Polish volunteers.
She was paralyzed with grief. “I had no other choice,” she said at the time.
Her regret was compounded by happy news from another Ukrainian mother who had succeeded. Olena Opilat, who had befriended Ms. Sirotiuk on the train going to Zaporizhzhia over a 3 a.m. cigarette break, was able to retrieve her children, who lived in the city.
Back in Ustronie Morskie, Ms. Sirotiuk is struggling to cope with her son’s absence. She has taken leave from work, is taking anti-anxiety medication and has deep feelings of guilt. Without Nazariy, she said, “there’s just emptiness.”
Nazariy, under Russian occupation, spends his days playing computer games and helping his grandparents plant onions and other vegetables in their sprawling garden. He visits his uncle and his 19-year-old cousin, who live nearby. In the evenings, he watches the Ukrainian TV news with his grandmother. School has been suspended indefinitely.
He sometimes sees Russian military trucks emblazoned with a white Z, which has become a pro-war symbol in Russia. He echoes his mother’s advice about the soldiers. “If we don’t touch them, they won’t touch us.”
A brief cease-fire and humanitarian corridor were announced on social media on March 9 for people to leave the area that day for Zaporizhzhia, but with their internet connection down, Ms. Sirotiuk’s family never knew about it.
Nazariy has taken to telling his mother about ingenious escape plans. Maybe he can hide inside a box and strap wheels to it? Or hitch a ride? Recently, he asked: “Could you send me over as a parcel?”
He told his mother he plans to attempt the journey out of Ukraine on his own.
“I’m terrified that he may do this,” Ms. Sirotiuk said. She has been pressing her mother to keep better watch over him.
The area around her parents’ village is calmer, with Russian forces in control. But Zaporizhzhia has become more treacherous. It is a major destination for thousands of Ukrainians fleeing the bombardment of Mariupol, a port city to the southeast. On March 16, officials in Zaporizhzhia said it had been struck by Russian shelling for the first time, with the railway station and the area around the botanical garden hit.
Ms. Sirotiuk said she has exhausted her contacts in Ukraine in a futile effort to arrange safe passage for her son. She is considering another trip to try to retrieve him as early as this week. She’s been told prices to go into the hot zone start at $1,000.
“How can you go on? What for?” she said. “I just don’t know where I can find joy when I am without my child.”
Write to Matthew Luxmoore at Matthew.Luxmoore@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8