Olga and her youngest children are safe in Poland, but she is consumed with worry for her husband and oldest son, who are still in Ukraine.
And her heart breaks when the little ones ask questions, including about why Russia invaded Ukraine when so many Russians live in Ukraine and when so many of their families are intermarried.
Everything is difficult to explain to the children, Olga said. “The youngest (two) don’t notice so much, but the oldest asks when he will see his father. I tell him the truth. He asks why uncles shoot at his father. And ‘When daddy dies, will he come to us?’”
“I don’t know how to answer these questions and I want to cry,” she said. Olga and her three children — Dima, 2, Natasha, 4, and Nazar, 6 — and her friend Alina and Alina’s 4-year-old son, Alexander, and 19-year-old daughter, Anna, found safe haven with the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Family in Lublin. The Ukrainian women asked that their real names not be used.
The Polish Conference of Major Superiors of Women said March 15 that an estimated 18,000 refugees from Ukraine were receiving spiritual, psycho-logical, medical and material help at 924 convents in Poland and that close to 500 of those communities are sheltering almost 3,000 adults – mostly women – and more than 3,000 children. Olga and Alina met at a prayer group near their homes in the Dnepropetrovsk Oblast (district) in southeastern Ukraine.