Fourth platform, the main railway station of Lviv, lunch today. Another place where the fear of war and the scale of the refugee crisis in Ukraine were all too obvious.
What an unusual and pathetic sight he presented. Several thousand people — mostly women and children — were lined up at several depths a quarter of a mile from the edge of the platform.
Of all their secular possessions, they were only able to bring hand luggage and pets. Many of the youngest were wrapped in blankets as the temperature was just above zero. Most had been there for many hours; some overnight, waiting, waiting.
It was not clear why everyone chose to gather on this particular platform. One suggested that they had been told that the next train to the Polish border and security would stop there. If so, they have been misinformed.
“Quick! Train is coming soon! An alarming female cry echoed at the far end of the platform. A pandemonium followed.
The stationary train on the sixth platform had protected for most those waiting for the presence of another train on a distant platform 16.
Hundreds of refugees who spotted him grabbed their children and luggage and began a frantic, unworthy, up and down race of obstacles across 12 platforms and several major railroads to reach a potential rescue.
Scenes at Lviv railway station in western Ukraine as thousands of women and children try to catch trains to Poland to escape battle
Too late for everyone except a handful. The waiting train was already full of refugees, just a place to stand.
He began to move west, leaving hundreds disappointed on the platform.
Sergei from Kyiv removed it. As a man of war, he knew he could not leave the country. But he managed to get his wife, son and three daughters on the train. “It’s very sad, but I’m relieved,” he told me. At least they’ll be safe.
Lviv is the capital of western Ukraine, 64 km east of the Polish border. Its train station is a worn Art Nouveau relic from the golden age of steam.
Today, the ornate entrance hall was a scene of complete chaos, a large football crowd of refugees studying the board of departure or making their way to the platforms beyond.
But not everyone wants to go west. In the hustle and bustle of the reservation room, I ran into Max, a young Englishman living in Warsaw. What were you doing here?
“I’m trying to get to Kyiv,” he replied. Why? “Let’s help the Ukrainians.” How? – As I can.
But when he arrived in Lviv, he encountered only delays and suspicion. “There is a lot of paranoia about Russian infiltrators,” he said. “They already took me out with a gun in the toilets at the station because they thought I was a spy.”
He did well even to enter the men’s bathroom.
Several thousand people – mostly women and children – were lined up at several depths a quarter of a mile from the edge of the platform.
At the entrance was a narrow throat of ten men and ten women trying to enter and use the facilities. The cafe was closed.
Outside on platform four, the wait continued. The dogs thanked, the children cried, played, ate sandwiches, or asked, “Where are we going?” The common cry was “sit down!” – usually from a mother at the end of a relationship. Towards the middle of the afternoon it began to snow. The temperature dropped again and some were pessimistic about ever getting off the platform and reaching Poland.
“I drove to the border two days ago and couldn’t get through,” said Julia, 21, a student. “That’s why I bought a train ticket, because I thought it would help. But now I see that the ticket means nothing. She gestured to the mass of humanity around her. “Now I’m not sure how I can get out.”
We witnessed trains full of refugees heading west as we traveled in the opposite direction to Lviv.
Heading east at night and against a wave of frightened humanity, this was one of the most extraordinary, sad and surreal journeys I have ever made.
At 1 o’clock on Saturday morning, our train was moving through a besieged country, on its way to pick up more innocent people and take them to safety. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of families fleeing the Russian invasion were heading in the other direction.
Along the way, we have witnessed the efforts of the Ukrainian authorities to relocate as many women and children as possible by rail from Poland.
Cold comfort: Hugs for a child wrapped up against the winter cold while hundreds of women and children gathered at Lviv railway station in western Ukraine
These services were described to me as “ghost trains”. They are unplanned and are not widely advertised so as not to be flooded. A few days ago, warning shots were heard at Kyiv Central Station as frantic crowds tried to board trains outside the city.
Our journey began in the small village of Shekhini, on the Polish border, where it seemed that a large part of the population of Ukraine was trying to cross.
The traffic jammed the narrow main street. Hundreds, if not thousands, had already gotten out of their vehicles and carried small children as they dragged their suitcases through the dirt.
The streetlights were poor, so it was difficult to read their faces as they passed the other side. But no one seems to appreciate Putin’s efforts to “denazify” his country.
It was a real misery. Winter and war in the personification of the middle of nowhere: endless plains that disappear in the icy fog, interrupted here and there by small forests of silver birch.
We were also stuck. There were no taxis in Shehini. Indeed, no local wanted to drive us east, no matter what money we offered.
The roads were too crowded with refugees, the gas was running out, the Russians might be nearby; in any case, curfew will be introduced at 10 p.m. There wasn’t even a hotel to stay in.
Then we were told that there was a chance we would get to Lviv tonight; a small train station stood at the end of the village. The main line from Krakow in Poland to Lviv passed through it. There was a train to Lviv at 8 p.m.
So we dragged our luggage along the road and down a lane until we reached an open-air crossing beyond.
Next to the gates was a small platform for passengers, and beyond it was a home-lit villa lit by a window and a rose garden behind a fence. In front of the door of the villa stood a healthy woman in a high coat: the guard.
She waited for the gates to close so that the next special refugee heading west would pass. A distant whistle and white light flew along the line in the direction of Lviv, the refugee train heading west.
He moved slowly, crowded with people and their belongings. A woman was sleeping, facing the window. The children stared at us or into the darkness. Then he was gone, a red taillight winking on his way to Poland. The night grew colder.
The ornate entrance hall of Lviv station was “a scene of complete chaos, a large football crowd of refugees studying the board or going to the platforms beyond.”
After consulting with Google Translate and the observer at the crossroads, we learned that a train going east will stop at her stop. And if we take this train to the next station on the line, we could move for the intercity service to Lviv. And a train appeared. Small, modest, completely empty. He stopped and we boarded.
There were only a dozen strangers gathered for the war.
Half are refugees who have previously tried to cross the border on foot and gave up because of the queues. Now they were returning east to try to take one of the ghost trains to Poland.
They had brought their most valuables with them. The effect was entirely Alice in Wonderland.
A young woman was sensibly dressed in winter clothes and carrying a backpack. But you couldn’t help but notice that she was holding a huge Angora rabbit that seemed completely resigned to its circumstances.
Another passenger was Veronica. She was a young educator who had brought her own rat. She allowed him to snuggle sleepily into the leather-trimmed collar of his quilted coat.
“I just woke up and heard the crash and decided, ‘That’s too much.’ I have to leave Ukraine, “Veronica told me.
And so she left home, a dwarf from her backpack. “I don’t know where I’m going to sleep tonight,” she said. “I have a tent, but I prefer not to camp outside. It’s too cold. ‘
Passengers wait on the platform at Lviv railway station today as they wait to board trains from Ukraine and in the safety of Europe as the Russian invasion continues
At the direction of the woman crossing, we got off at the next station. “What are you doing here?” Asked a surprised employee of the platform. “We are waiting for the train to Lviv,” they told him. “But the train you just got off was the train to Lviv.”
And so many more hours of waiting began. But we were far from alone, because the station itself was used as a center for ghost trains.
The big waiting room was at least warm. Children for whom all this was an adventure, running and shouting, their parents were too exhausted to keep quiet. Other parents comforted young people for whom this was an unbearable ordeal.
Among our group was a young Brazilian doctor who crossed into Ukraine from Poland earlier in the day.
He came to try to save his daughter, who he said was trapped in a town near Crimea that is said to be under threat, if not attacked, by Russian forces. Meanwhile, in the station hall, he tried to help a mother who ran away with her child, but was unable to bring her own medicine for epilepsy.
Does anyone know anyone who came here from a city where he could find such a medicine, he asks. Nobody did it.
The influx of refugees was weakening and rushing in when special trains arrived at the station and unwanted gusts of night air rushed into the hall.
The men lifted benches from the floor below to make the waiting women and children more comfortable.
A boy, probably ten or 11, sat down next to me. After a while he asked me politely and in good English where I was from.
‘From London.’
“Oh, very good!” He exclaimed.
Where are you from? I asked.
“Ternopil,” he said. Then he smiled because people often made the mistake. This is Turn-Opil, not Chernobyl, where the nuclear explosion took place.
He was growing very late, and morale had weakened. But in the station hall, two young musicians unpacked their guitars and began to choose the opening bars of Nirvana’s Come As You Are.
They played sweetly and the atmosphere they created was both sad and inspiring. Outside, another train, full of exhausted women and children, was waiting to head west. Beyond him, in the darkness, stood a row of freight cars. The people on the platform were pounding to keep warm, and their features were hidden by a mist of breath.
“It could be a World War II scene,” someone said. For the Ukrainians on the train and at the station, there was no “can” for that.
Then, at last, a sad rumble came from the west, and the headlight of a locomotive pierced the darkness.
This was the midnight night especially for Lviv. He stopped on the far platform and they took us on foot across the rails.
The train was completely empty, but the sad remains in the car – discarded food, sweet packaging and water bottles – confirmed that it was also one of the refugee “ghost trains” moving to the border and beyond.
Now he was returning to Lviv to gather more refugees.
The train took a step until it accelerated excitingly through the dangerous night.
At one point we were walking parallel to the M11 – the main road to the west and safety – and here they are – a fixed line of headlights and taillights; mile after mile vehicles for refugees who are not going anywhere.
An employee moved slowly down the car, checking the few passengers. Did we have to buy tickets from him, they asked him.
‘No,’ he replied. “It doesn’t matter now. This is a war. ‘
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