Stories of exodus

Exodus: a mass departure or emigration, taken from the Greek word Exodos, meaning “the road out”. 

The Exodus tells the story of the Israelites’ journey from slavery in Egypt led by Moses, marked this week as Jews around the world celebrate Passover. It feels like a fitting time to read accounts of a much more recent exodus.

Exodus-2022 is a research project documenting the stories of Jewish Ukrainians fleeing their homeland in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion. It is the brainchild of Michael Gold, a journalist and researcher of Jewish life with 30 years’ experience in Ukrainian and Israeli media, most recently as Editor-in-Chief of Hadashot, the largest Ukrainian Jewish newspaper.

As the Exodus-2022 website says:
The blood of Jewish refugees, of course, is not redder than that of others. However, the official objective of the Russian "special operation" was declared to be denazification and protection of the Russian-speaking population. That is why the stories of Russian-speaking Jewish refugees, whose lives were destroyed by the "liberators of Nazism," are especially indicative. 

In these desperate times, stories of horror and loss have become commonplace. From the slaughter of Bucha and destruction of Mariupol to the murderous attacks of 7 October and annihilation of Gaza, we tally victims by the tens of thousands and all too often pause only briefly to consider individual experiences. Exodus-2022 gives voice to some of those who have suffered, gives them time and space to chronicle and preserve their own personal testimonies about the days, weeks and months following the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

Here is Irina Zhivolup from Izyum, near Kharkiv:

Why didn’t people run away immediately? Nobody believed that they would level the town like that. After all they destroyed schools, churches, buildings that survived both world wars. Izyum was being razed to the ground…

For one day it seemed to be a little quieter, and then in the evening, on March 6, the dog started whining. I understood that it was a raid and then a Grad rocket hit directly in the hallway, where all of us were standing: me, mom, son, husband, and dog. Only I survived. I dug them out. I don’t know where I got the strength - head cracked open, all covered in blood, both legs broken. But I managed to pull the beams away. My son died in my arms, probably from internal bleeding.

We all wear glasses, and all the glasses remained intact. So strange… Don’t know why I survived, but I crawled into the house, found some water, climbed into bed, put on my son’s jacket and a hat, and I stayed like that for eight days - no windows, no roof, freezing cold of -10C, rockets flying around the clock, and the bodies of my family lying on the doorstep. 
 
Victoria Druzenko managed to flee from Bucha, just north of Kyiv, when a humanitarian corridor opened on 10 March 2022:

There were destroyed houses on both sides of the road, along with unexploded shells. By the Epicenter supermarket there was a shot-out car with dead bodies inside. I could even see the colour of the woman’s hair inside – it was red. We turned towards Vorzel and saw a burned-out car with white cloth and a “Children” sign. I thought: how many cars like this will we see on the way and could we end up like this? My friend had a daughter and her classmate with her family... in a car like that. The parents survived, but the girl did not.

Victoria made it out to Lviv and then to Israel. What is left behind? she asks.

Behind our building is a mass grave, where 76 people were buried in bags on March 11, 2022. That was the first time the Russians gave permission to collect the bodies that were lying on the streets. They buried more after and that’s not counting the ones buried in yards, in gardens, in flowerbeds. And how many people were left in basements and garages in other neighbourhoods: on Yablonskaya, by the glass-manufacturing plant etc… Plus a whole section of nameless graves at the cemetery, where people who could not be identified are buried…
 
Irina Poliushkina lived in Mariupol, where she cared for her elderly, bed-ridden mother who had been evacuated from Leningrad to Siberia during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Irina sent her 16-year-old daughter away with departing neighbours thinking she would be safer, while she, her husband and mother remained in their apartment block. Nearby shelling shattered the bedroom windows.

And suddenly it became freezing cold, and our apartment was at -5C. We covered my mother with three blankets and put hot water bottles around her. She spent almost three weeks like that.

Leaving her mother in the apartment, Irina and her husband sheltered in the basement until their apartment block suffered a direct hit, and fire broke out in the building. Fearing she would be burnt alive, they finally managed to evacuate Irina’s mother to the basement, but others were not so lucky.

There were many strikes in the yard of our housing complex and the buildings were hit as well. One family left their grandmother in the apartment and went to the shelter with their child. Anyway, there was a strike between the 8th and 9th floors and she was burned alive. Many old people died from heart attacks. We had to bury them in the yard. We had to put one of the neighbours into a bomb crater. I helped with the burial.

The buildings behind us were also burning: it was one big flame all around. They say that now there is a terrible smell there: there was a strike and someone was buried under the rubble. The body did not burn and is decomposing.
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Testimony follows testimony, almost all from women, and from all over Ukraine – from Kyiv and Chernihiv, Bucha and Irpin, Kharkiv and Izyum, Kherson and Melitopol, Mariupol and Donetsk region, all representing towns that have been devastated by war, livelihoods lost and communities dispersed as the exodus delivered Ukrainians across Europe and beyond. All those who gave testimony have lost friends or family members, and witnessed death in unimaginable circumstances. Some have been seriously wounded themselves. Every story in this collection is harrowing, every as yet untold story still deserves to be heard. Everyone in Ukraine in February 2022, and in Israel and Gaza in October 2023, knows that their whole world can change in a single minute.
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Read the testimonies for yourself: https://exodus-2022.org/

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