Maryna Prylutska, 34, says she is grateful for the hospitality she has found in Bonn, Germany, despite missing her loved ones back home in Ukraine.
Maryna Prylutska
For Maryna Prylutska, Christmas will be a muted affair this year. Like other recent family occasions, it will be celebrated online, with most of her family back home in Ukraine.
That is, if the electricity supply to Prylutska’s hometown is recovered following a string of Russian attacks.
It is nine months now since Prylutska — who now lives in Germany with her two children — last saw her husband and parents. And for Prylutska, and the millions of others who have fled Russia’s invasion this year, the holidays are proving especially hard.
“I’m dying to go home,” she told CNBC via zoom from her new home in Bonn, Germany. Before the latest attacks, she had planned to return with her children for Christmas.
“It’s great here, and I’m really grateful to everyone who has helped us on the way. But no, there’s no place like home,” the 34-year-old said.
Prylutska is what she calls an “accidental refugee.”
We Ukrainians are willing to do whatever it takes to defend our children.
She and her husband had been considering leaving Ukraine since the onset of the war on Feb. 24. But with no friends abroad to stay with, she was reluctant to move to a shelter with her daughter, 12, and son, four.
“For me, it was really scary. I had to weigh up the pros and cons,” said Prylutska, an English teacher who had never traveled abroad before this year.
Then, one day in March, she received a phone call from her former father-in-law who had encountered a potential host while transporting his own children to Germany. There was a shared home available to her and her children in Bonn, if she wanted it.
Maryna Prylutska’s children, 12 and 4, adjust to their new home in Bonn, Germany after leaving their small hometown in central Ukraine.
Maryna Prylutska
By that point, Russian troops were just 80 kilometers (50 miles) from her hometown, a small locale of 16,000 people in the center of Ukraine, and her options were limited.
“I remember going to bed at night thinking about how I would defend my son with my body if a bomb hit,” said Prylutska, who had read a similar story of another Ukrainian mother. “We Ukrainians are willing to do whatever it takes to defend our children.”
Within days, she and her children were being driven overland to Germany, where they are currently living in their contact’s house with four other Ukrainian women and…
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