Even when the bombs started falling, Yevhenia Khomenko did not want to leave her home in Kyiv, Ukraine. “I would rather die there,” said the 94-year-old. But in the end, it happened too much, and her daughter persuaded her to leave the house she had known all her life. As a child, Homenko lived through the Great Famine of Ukraine – one that killed millions, led by Joseph Stalin. Years later, she fled her home during World War II, as her country was targeted by Adolf Hitler. Now he has to leave once again because of the invasion caused by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Russian attacks reminded Homenko of the bombings, shootings and violence during World War II, he told CNN. The bombs then, as now, were unpredictable and he remembered running anywhere to escape them. Homenko returned to Kyiv after World War II to help rebuild the city’s central square, he said. Now, she worries that the city may never be the same – and that, given her age, she may never return. Her 73-year-old daughter, Raisa Makhnovets, is also worried about this fate. Through tears, she told CNN how difficult it was to persuade her mother to leave Kyiv and how their efforts to do so quickly became a “horror movie”. They had no other family in the city, and first spent two days in a bomb shelter before attempting to leave the country by train. The station was flooded with others trying to do the same. “I just could not believe it was happening. “The train station was scary,” Makhnovets said in Russian, like many Ukrainians, and was quoted by CNN. “So many people with children and their stuff are really scary. The first train left without us, after the second. It was so cold I waited there for the night. “There were even newborn babies.” Makhnovets said it took about 20 hours to get from Kyiv to Lviv in western Ukraine, and then leave the country completely. She and her mother were then able to fly to the United States on a visa they had received years ago. They were reunited in Sacramento with five generations of their family, as great-grandparents. In Sacramento, Homenko marked peace in the air in California. “It hurts in my soul, for my home, where I lived. But here it is quiet, I do not hear anything. I have a house and I want to go home. I want to be at home. But circumstances forced us to come here. “Just go where it is needed so you do not have to see the war,” he said in Russian. Her feelings are now known to those from a lifetime ago, Khomenko said, but in her youth she did not really understand war the way she does now. He later told CNN, “I wish you a good life and do not have to put up with it. “I hope for friendship between us and all peoples.” Read more here.
