REPORT. Mother is travelling to Lviv to fetch her children. A personal story, full of wonder, rhetorical questions and crying out: "Why?"

A little debate on the train - the mother is travelling to pick up her children. Katja looks very young, calm but fully alert. The train between Berlin and Přemysl is already an hour late, and yet she has to coordinate with her husband, who is bringing three children from Poltava to Lviv.

She is courageous, clever, surrounded by men from Poland and Ukraine who advise her on the logistics. The children travel from Poltava as far as Vinnitsa (600km), but that’s still a long way from the border, even from Lviv (300km). Why not take a bus? A bit more expensive, yes, but those Ukrainian trains keep dragging on mercilessly. On the other hand, and this is being discussed, drivers who hear gunfire are capable of stopping, dropping people off in a nearby town and then turning back - not everyone wants to risk their lives for a single journey from one town to another.

They had been travelling for almost twenty hours, all our trains go via Kiev, and there - as we all know - is the front.

— says the woman.

We cannot count on timetables now, but trains are a more reliable means of transport. There, it will stop for two hours in Biała Cerkiew, then an additional hour in Zhytomyr, but when the alarm sirens die down and the shooting becomes less intense, the transport moves on. And it will be possible to get there. The train consultation board decides unanimously: the husband should take the children to Lviv by train. Everyone puts their heads in their phones to check the news from the Ukrainian railway’s channel on the social networking site Telegram - no mention of a traffic freeze, so the decision is made.

Further on, the setting could hardly be more obvious - a personal story, full of wonder, rhetorical questions and crying out: „Why?”, „Why?”. A few years of peace, in Ukraine, in Poland, in its western part. Then war again… How far will this Putin go? After all, he won’t stop in Ukraine. She doesn’t want to live in Spain or Italy; she’s fine in Poland, and she also wants to return to Ukraine. What does he get out of Ukraine? Is he not rich enough in land? Journalists from Poland and Spain, Ukrainians and a soldier from the Territorial Defence Forces are all listening. There is little to add and nothing to comment on.

A video from Kharkiv appears on the mobile screen; explosions can be seen in the city, lighting up the sky more than the sun in daylight. The mother is not looking at the screen and by the sound alone says: oh, it’s „Grady”, oh, and these are ordinary „BTRs” - she calculates and identifies the range of the missiles. This might be peculiar knowledge for young mothers, but perhaps not in the case of Ukrainians.

She is not only going to collect her children; her friend has asked her to collect hers as well. Transporting children from distant Poltava to Zielona Góra poses quite a challenge. How to take care of the youngest, who is 5 years old? If only there were warm clothes, but Poles give everything; even this train journey is free of charge. They asked professional carriers about transporting the children, but it turned out that it costs a thousand dollars; who has this much, and besides, can one trust them?

Hopefully it will only work out. Will they let us go to Lviv now? It is night, and there is a curfew. She would so much like to see the children. The worst thing is to wait and to remain helplessly stranded in one place. She would even go to Vinnitsa herself, but they would have to wait for ages. So better to Lviv. As long as this children’s ordeal ends soon. The three little Ukrainians will then have travelled 1500 kilometres, of which more than half with the sounds of war in the background.