“Only the most deprived remain”

“We have transformed these facilities into a transit center, the evacuees can stay here for several days until the volunteers or the administrations find them a place to settle,” she continues, exhausted after several days of work “from 7 in the morning to 11 at night, because they arrive in their hundreds.

“Those who have relatives in other, safer cities, or resources to rent something somewhere, continue their journey to Dnipro, kyiv, Lviv or even Poland. Only the most helpless remain here” he laments.

In the old theater there are families with children, there are even babies, but mostly elderly people. Looking at their faces, one realizes the feeling of uncertainty that runs through them after losing their homes. Some come from Pokrovsk, others from cities in the region – even closer to the Russian lines, which have advanced in recent weeks faster than anyone imagined.

Evacuations in cities like Selydove, Ukrainsk, Kurajovo or Toretsk are hell for volunteers and police. They have to leave in an armoured van, because artillery duels are constant, and look for people in basements and shelters. And in some of these places there is no more phone signal, because of the destruction caused by the bombing, so it is even more complicated.

“If you want to see hell, go to Ukrainsk”says a woman in her fifties, sitting on one of the beds on the stage of the theatre. They also had to take her and her son in an armoured vehicle. “It’s terrible, the bombings, the dead,” he insists. And she is not the only one talking about the terrible situation in these places.

Flee the bombings

But the journey begins long before reaching the old theater in Pavlograd. It begins more than 100 kilometers ago, at the evacuation point in Pokrovsk. There, they gather people from all the neighboring cities to take them out of Donbass by road. And many of them began their escape even earlier.

“I sat in a cellar for 20 days until they found me”says an elderly woman, waiting to board one of the evacuation buses driven by volunteers. Her name is Raisa, she is 83 years old, and her grandson spent weeks searching for her until they found her underground. By the time she was pulled out, urban fighting – between Russian and Ukrainian troops – had already broken out in her city, Ukrainsk.

Along with old Raisa, ten other people are preparing to evacuate Pokrovsk. Liudmila, 61, who survived as long as possible in the city because “here she had a good job in the financial sector.” There is also a young couple who hug their baby tightly every time they hear the echo of Russian artillery in the distance.

The mother, Marina, is only 18 years old, but she speaks with surprising maturity. “We have lived half our lives in the war, because in Donbass the war started in 2014, but it never scared us… until the baby came. Now that’s scary, and we should think of her before ourselves.“, said.

A few seats further back are Vasily and his wife Natalia, 79 and 73. They decided to leave when a projectile fell on the neighboring house. Further on, another young woman with reduced mobility is traveling with her mother, another elderly woman and a couple with their cats. I decide to board the bus with them, and as we take off and leave Pokrovsk behind us, I see that none of these people can hold back their tears.

They lost their homes, their jobs, their friends. They lost the life they knew and clung to despite everything.”80 percent of these people are fleeing because they no longer have a place to stay: Russia bombed it“Or the house next door was bombed, and they had to survive in basements,” says Misha Lutsenko of the NGO New Generation Children, which is coordinating the evacuation.

At the evacuation points there are more volunteers like Misha, many other associations, as well as police teams who are helping civilians in the face of the deteriorating situation in Pokrovsk. In the last month alone, they have evacuated more than 20,000 souls – up to 2,000 people per day have been evacuated, 10 percent of whom are children.

Train cancelled

A few months ago, it was unthinkable that the city of Pokrovsk would fall under Russian occupation, but today it is a very real possibility. More than 60,000 people lived in this city and it was an important logistical center – not only for the army – because it was here that the rescue and emergency services that provided assistance to the victims of the region after the Russian bombings were concentrated. Also firefighters and special police forces.

There was work, commerce, medical centers and it was a communications center. Even today, even though Russian troops are less than ten kilometers away, some shops remain open and residents take city buses to get around the city – the sound of bombing echoes every few minutes.

More than 17,000 civilians remain in Pokrovsk – and another 10,000 in surrounding towns – and although The Ukrainian army launched a counteroffensive in this part of the front in an attempt to contain the enemy advance.The authorities’ recommendation is to evacuate. Every morning since August 17, a text message has arrived on the phones of all residents inviting them to evacuate and giving them the phone number and social networks where they can get help to do so.

Until last week, most evacuations from Pokrovsk were by train. But the threat that Russia would launch a missile at the station – as it already did at Kramatorsk, in the middle of the 2022 evacuations – forced the cancellation of that route, leaving only the option of leaving by road.

No one speaks on the bus where Raisa, Liudmila, Marina or Natalia are going. Almost all the evacuees stare out the windows, and even if they have managed to hold back their tears, a few sighs escape them. From time to time, a mobile phone rings: these are relatives asking if they have already left Donbass, if they are safe now.

Upon arrival in Pavlograd, everyone gets off the bus to register in the computer system, and then receive the corresponding state aid. In fact, while I am chatting with volunteer Victoria, at the door of the old theatre, more and more buses are arriving.

From one of them, they arrest a man in his sixties who is suffering from an anxiety attack. His wife is crying silently, next to him, without letting go of his hand. The dignity with which these people endure the human drama of losing everything – and fleeing the rubble of their bombed house – is worthy of admiration.

Holding on to memories

I stay with them to spend the night, with whom They have nowhere to go and settle temporarily in one of the beds in the old theater.. Raisa, Liudmila, Marina and the other passengers on the bus continue their journey to Dnipro after quickly checking in.

The volunteers welcome the man suffering from the anxiety attack and about twenty other people who have arrived in the last few minutes more calmly. They talk to them at length, hold their hands while listening to their stories and try to comfort them before showing them which bed is theirs.

All the volunteers are young children – between twenty and thirty years old – but they play a crucial role in the midst of this humanitarian crisis. In addition to filling out computer records and responding to the needs of the Ukrainians staying in the transit center – providing them with medicine, food, hygiene products – they devote all the time necessary to listening to them.

Most of the people who approach them are elderly people, who don’t need anything but want to talk. Sometimes they burst into tears, other times they share a joke or ask them unimportant questions. But They listen to everyone with a humanity that pierces the soul..

In the theatre, the stories are more intense than any script written to be performed on stage. Several evacuees – seeing the camera I wear around my neck – also come to talk to me. One of them arrives walking with a crutch. “A week ago I buried my mother and three days ago I had a hip operation,” he explains by way of introduction. “Come, I want to show you my photo albums, you won’t regret it.”

Sitting on one of the beds, the man – whose name is Dimitri and who is 49 years old – takes out volumes of photographs that are neatly wrapped. He must have put his life in a few bags, and his most precious possession is these photographs. Your memories. This is what he has left of half a century of life in Donbass.

There are very old black and white photographs, of his mother as a child, of his grandfather. “He worked on a nuclear submarine,” he explains, “and died very young after being exposed to radiation for so long.” His mother was a pianist and worked in a cultural center, very beautiful and elegant, image after image appearing in different places. One of the shots was taken in Moscow.

Dimitri also shows pictures of his youth, traveling or at the beach. “Where do you want to live from now on?” he asks. “I would like to continue living in Donbass, but in a peaceful Donbass. And this is not possible”phrase. “But somehow I feel a little better for sharing my story with you,” he adds. “Actually,” I reply, “you just shared your story with a lot more people, even if they’re over 2,500 miles away.”