The queue was three hours long. A logjam of cars, bumper to bumper, packed with women and children who had fled Ukraine into Moldova or Romania waiting to enter the Schengen area at Csengersima on the Romanian-Hungarian border.
The refugees looked shattered after travelling for days, but as a man in a red jacket approached on foot, eyes lit up, windows rolled down and hands reached out.
The red jacket belonged to Peter Turi, 37, a Hungarian Red Cross volunteer, who carried a tray laden with water, juice, ham sandwiches, snacks and energy bars as well as baby products and bubbles which he offered to grateful mothers and children in their cars.
Peter and his Red Cross team of four were the only charity workers operating at this border crossing which, in the first weeks of the conflict, had filled with cars stretching 10 kilometres all the way to Satu Mare in Romania. For one day I was to be Peter’s helper, crossing the checkpoint into no-man’s land to offer succour to waiting refugees.
“Thank you for your care,” said Marja Nesterova, a professor from a university in Kyiv travelling with her four children, aged 19, 16, 12 and eight. “We have been going for four days and now we are waiting here hours with no water, no toilet, no café, so we really appreciate you being here.”
She added: “In Kyiv, we were sleeping mostly in the basement, but in the last week, the bombs got closer and louder — and we got frightened. According to Ukrainian law, a mother who drives across bombed-out country with four kids can be awarded Mother of the Year. I saved my children. We are going to Italy.”
In the adjacent lane, Natalia, 31, a pharmacist, sat in her Porsche alongside her 10-year-old son, tears streaking down her cheeks as she became emotional about the husband she left in Kharkiv three days ago. She said: “My son is worried about his father. I try to comfort him, but I am worried too.”
A few cars behind, we gave water and a sandwich to Luba Grihovna, an elderly woman in a colourful head scarf who had travelled from her village near Kherson. “We have been on the road four days,” she said. “My legs are aching, my heart is aching, my village is destroyed. I didn’t want to leave my beautiful garden but my daughter took me and my grandchildren to save us.”
They had crossed at the Ukrainian Moldovan border and were now seeking to enter Hungary en route to Poland. More than 900,000 of the 3.6 million people who have fled Ukraine have done so through Moldova or Romania, but most refugees use these countries as a transit zone on their way to the Schengen area — where they can access free movement in Europe for 90 days. Many Ukrainians do not have modern biometric passports and have to be processed for temporary visas, part of the reason for the long delays.
Peter said: “Many people have not come prepared for such a long car ride. They arrive short of baby food and nappies and can be thirsty, hungry and exhausted.”
For two and a half weeks, Peter operated on his own with a friend, just the two of them. Ten days ago, the operation got professionalised with the Red Cross setting up a roadside tent and bringing in supplies — and Peter was signed up as a Red Cross volunteer. Team leader Emese Martini Sabo, 35, paid tribute to Peter. “What he did was a true humanitarian effort,” she said.
The Red Cross is one of 13 member charities of the Disasters Emergency Committee which is the beneficiary of our Evening Standard Ukraine Appeal and which, together with the appeal of our sister paper, The Independent, has now raised more than £400,000.
One woman, Hester Berg, a South African living in Austria was returning from the Ukrainian-Romanian border having dropped off a car-load of personal hygiene products, nappies and dog food at the border. Why had she come? “When the fighting started, it dawned on me that the distance from Vienna where I live to the Ukrainian border is less than that from Johannesburg where I grew up to Cape Town and there is no way I could sit in Johannesburg while Cape Town got bombed, so I got involved.”
Hester has done four trips of nine hours each way to the Polish, Hungarian and Romanian borders with Ukraine, but the situation was ever changing, she said. “In the beginning, it was mainly people with means and money who were fleeing, but now you’ve got people with nothing and who are really struggling.”
Anastasia, 30, and her mother, Natalia, 61, told us about fleeing Kyiv. “It’s a lottery,” said Anastasia. “Bombs can land on your house at any time. One bomb was so close, it made our house shake and that was the signal for us to leave. We are heading to Germany.”
There was even the occasional father, such as Ruslan, who had come with his wife and three young sons from Odessa, a beneficiary of the Ukrainian law that allowed men to leave if they are financially supporting three or more children under 18.
As we walked the line of vehicles, people asked our Ukrainian-Hungarian speaking interpreter, Georgina Ruszinko: where can we get free SIM cards? Does anyone have crayons for my children? Where are toilets? They were relieved to find someone who could speak their language, as was a Hungarian policewoman who ran up in a panic asking us for “urgent nappies” for a crying one-month-old baby.
All around, as cars inched forward, there was a sense of relief to have made it this far — but also of steeling themselves. The ordeal of these brave, dignified, resilient refugees was far from over.
