EFinally it worked with the phone connection from the Lippe town of Stapelage to the Ukraine. How could Olga Artych still sit quietly in her chair? While she presses her mobile phone to her ear, she paces up and down in the eat-in kitchen of the former home for the handicapped of the Freie Evangelis-Christen-Gemeinde. Artych is deputy head of the Protestant children’s home “The Good Samaritan” in Mariupol. She has been safe 2,600 kilometers away with most of her protégés for a few days. But suddenly the horror is very close again.
While some laughing children romp around and cook Elena Kornejeva starts preparing dinner, Artych gets the latest terrible news from home from her pastor. Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine has been mercilessly besieged and systematically destroyed by Putin’s troops for four weeks.
Artych hangs up and insists on dishing up a decent load of delicious Ukrainian potato salad. Then she begins to tell. After the start of the war on February 24, like many in Mariupol, she thought it was simply a matter of being strong. “A few days in the bunker and then it’s all over.” Artych shows pictures and a mobile phone film showing boys and girls singing and praying in the basement of the children’s home. “For the children it seemed like an adventure at first. But then they didn’t want to go up any more because the hail of bombs hardly let up. The electricity went out and the heating. It was clear to us that we had to get the children to safety.”
32 children in care between the ages of five and 18
So the decision was made to flee with the entire children’s home, including the teachers and cook, and their children in private cars, a total of 48 people, 32 of whom were children between the ages of five and 18. Out, only out – even if Artych had no idea where. It was a departure into the unknown, a farewell to the men and sons of legal age who are obliged to defend their country.
The first escape attempt on February 28 had to be aborted. Although the teachers had written “Children” in large letters on the car windows and had attached white cloths to the exterior mirrors, the shelling continued. “We turned around and got the kids back to safety in the basement before we tried again a few hours later and thank God we got through. Two days later, the second part of us left,” says Sascha Melekhina, who comes from Berlin and was able to flee in the convoy because her husband works in the children’s home “The Good Samaritan”. Shot-up tanks everywhere, burning military vehicles, dead Russian soldiers, dead civilians. “The children saw things that children shouldn’t see.” And the constant fear that the drive out of Mariupol would end soon.
The deputy director of the home, Olga Artych, shows videos from Ukraine
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Image: Patrick Slesiona
The kilometer-long motorized refugee trek went at a snail’s pace from one Russian checkpoint to the next. When the last Ukrainian was spoken, the relief was immense. In order to get to Zaporizhia, a little more than 200 kilometers away, as quickly as possible, the group dared breakneck manoeuvres. “Whenever possible, we overtook oncoming traffic at full throttle,” says Artych. “It was only in Zaporizhia that we felt reasonably safe.”
On the run, the mother suddenly died
The exodus dragged on for fourteen days. “Because of the curfew, which is in effect from 5 p.m. and in some places from 4 p.m., we only made small progress.” And then, all of a sudden, Olga Artych’s mother died on the way. In a strange city, Artych had to bury her. She does not know whether she will ever be able to return to her grave. She prefers to talk about her children in care, showing a video on which some of them can be seen singing in a church in Dnepropetrovsk. Pictures from Satu Mare in Romania follow, where all the children came together again. Before crossing the border, Artych had waited a long time for the second part of the convoy, which was plagued by car breakdowns and threatened to run out of money for petrol.
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It was only clear on the seventh day that the escape would end in Stapelage, a district of Lage near Detmold. Sascha Melekhina had sent text messages to Erika Rosenfeld, her friend from her days in Berlin. When Rosenfeld learned that the convoy had no place to go, she spontaneously wrote: “Then come to us!”