‘Was nearly impossible to leave…we were scared we would die’

“The temperature was -5 degrees Celsius, and we had to wait at Lviv for a bus for about 5-6 hours. It was crowded and buses were difficult to find,” said Priyanka, who finally made it to the border with Hungary.

“The embassy issued an advisory. I understand it must have been difficult for them too, but expecting us to travel from the east to the west… It was nearly impossible to leave,” said Priyanka, who is from Kaithal, Haryana, and arrived on an evacuation flight from Budapest.

Shubh Madan, a third-year student in Kharkiv, who is from Moga, Punjab, arrived from Rzeszow in Poland on Friday morning. Shubh said she stayed at a metro station for two days, before the city was attacked. “When the city was attacked, the metro station was closed and we had to move to a bunker. The bunkers are crowded and suffocating. We left on Tuesday morning, walking around 7 km to reach the railway station, since cabs were either difficult to find or expensive. When we were at the railway station, we heard the bombardment outside. We were scared that we would die at the station,” she said.

She said the group of 40 -50 students she travelled with took a train to Lviv from Kharkiv. “We somehow arranged a bus on our own from Lviv to the border with Poland. We reached the border at 1 pm, but our turn to cross over came only at around 7 pm. They were letting only 30 to 40 people pass at a time, and they gave priority to people with Ukrainian passports. When our turn came, we waited another four hours for the immigration process,” she said.

Both Priyanka and Shubh said their problems eased after crossing the border. “We were taken to a hotel about 125 km from the border. Mattresses and food were made available, and registrations were done for evacuation flights,” Shubh said.

Anirudh, a second-year student at the Kharkiv National Medical University, also arrived from Poland. “We spent a few days in a bunker, and went two days without food. Our friends are still in Kharkiv… The train journey from Kharkiv to Lviv, which would normally take 11 hours, took 24 hours. Trains were all running slowly, with their lights off. There was no help in the war zone. However, once we crossed the Poland border, we were received very well,” said Anirudh, who is from Saharanpur.

For Govind, a fifth-year student in Odessa, in the southern part of the country, crossing the border into Hungary was a grueling process that took days. “I took the train from Odessa on February 26, and reached the border, but was not able to cross. I spent three to four days at the border, on the street with my luggage,” he said. Though a curfew had been imposed in Odessa, the situation was not as bad as it is in Kharkiv, he said.

According to a PTI report, the Civil Aviation Ministry said in a statement that 14 civilian and three IAF flights brought back 3,772 Indians on Friday. “One more civilian flight is expected to arrive later in the day (Friday),” it said.

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