Raisa Makhnovets, 73, and her mother Yevhenia Khomenko, 94, at her family’s Sacramento home. (Omar Jimenez/CNN)
Even when the bombs were falling, Yevhenia Khomenko didn’t want to leave her home in Kyiv, Ukraine. “I’d rather die there,” said the 94-year-old. But eventually it got too much and her daughter convinced her to leave the home she had known all her life.
When Chomenko was a child, she experienced the Great Famine in Ukraine – a famine that killed millions, fueled by Joseph Stalin. Years later, she fled her homeland during World War II when her country was under attack by Adolf Hitler. Now she has once again had to flee an invasion organized by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Russian attacks reminded Chomenko of the bombing, shooting and violence during World War II, she told CNN.
The bombs were unpredictable then, as they are now, and she recalled running somewhere to escape them. Chomenko returned to Kyiv after World War II to help rebuild the city’s main square, she said. Now she worries that the city may never be the same — and that, given her age, she may never return.
Her 73-year-old daughter Raisa Makhnovets is also worried about this fate. Through tears, she told CNN how difficult it was to convince her mother to leave Kyiv and how her attempts to do so quickly turned into a “horror movie.”
They had no other family in town and initially spent two days in an air raid shelter before attempting to flee the country by train. The station was overrun by others attempting the same.
“I just couldn’t believe it was actually happening. The train station was scary,” said Makhnovets, who spoke in Russian, as many Ukrainians do, and was translated by CNN. “So many people with their kids and stuff, it’s just really scary. The first train left without us, then the second. It was so cold waiting there overnight. There were even newborns.”
Makhnovets said it took about 20 hours to get from Kyiv to Lviv in western Ukraine and then out of the country altogether. She and her mother were then able to fly to the United States on a visa they received years ago. They reunited in Sacramento with five generations of their family as great-great-grandmother and great-grandmother.
In Sacramento, Khomenko noted the peace in the California air.
“It hurts in my soul for my home where I lived. But it’s quiet here, I can’t hear anything. I have a home and I want to go home. I want to be in my own home. But circumstances forced us to come here. Just go where it is necessary to avoid having to see the war,” she said in Russian.
Her feelings are now familiar to those of long ago, Khomenko said, but growing up she didn’t understand war the way she does now.
She then told CNN: “I wish you a good life and that you don’t have to endure what we have had to endure. I hope for friendship between us and all peoples.”
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