“We crossed the border,” baby Seraphim’s mother sent a message to her father, Dr. William Hubbard, from a Slovak village late Saturday. “And the police came to pick us up and they were all so good to us.” Hubbard, the child’s grandfather, flew from his home in Fitzburg, Massachusetts, Ukraine when war broke out last month. Having worked for weeks to save Seraphim and his daughter, 19-year-old Eislin, Hubbard decided he was fed up with the tangle of protocol that prevented the couple from leaving. So he told the Daily Beast on Monday that he and Aislinn’s friend – Seraphim’s father – devised an alternative escape route for the family through “the wilderness and foothills of the Carpathian Alps” using satellite maps. After two workouts on Thursday and Friday, Aislinn and her partner started in the mountains, carrying the baby between them. Hubbard watched their progress anxiously on the Find My Friends app. The reason behind the Hubbard’s desperate struggle for freedom was insanely simple: Seraphim did not have a birth certificate. Aislinn, who moved to Kyiv to study ballet at the age of 16, was born at home last June. She feared that her baby might be infected with COVID-19 in a hospital, where she would have automatically received a birth certificate. Concerned as Russia continued to mobilize troops on the Ukrainian border, Hubbard first alerted U.S. officials to a possible problem in December. “I said, ‘Well, here’s the situation, we have this little boy who doesn’t have a birth certificate,’” Hubbard told Terra last week. “It may be two to six months before we get one. “What will you do if a war breaks out?” And they said, “I do not know.” After flying to Ukraine in early February to hire a lawyer and check on his daughter, Hubbard arrived safely at his home in Fitzburg on February 23. Hours later, Russia invaded. As Aislinn and her boyfriend tried to keep their baby safe, Hubbard turned and flew back to meet them. Faced with a “horrible nightmare” unfolding around them, the family packed up and headed to the border with Slovakia, having been informed by US embassy officials that they would have no problem crossing. But Ukrainian border officials were confused by the absence of the document and placed in a detention center. They then offered to let the Hubbards pass — without Seraphim. “And we say, ‘Were you scratching your mind?’ Hubbard remembers. Leaving detention in Ukraine, Aislinn and Seraphim are now battling dysentery. And with U.S. officials reportedly responding to Hubbard’s increasingly desperate appeals with more than shrugging, Grandpa decided it was enough. Aislinn and her boyfriend started their trip around 2pm on Saturday, according to Hubbard. They walked for about five or six hours, at his discretion, with the sun setting and the cold setting. At one point, Eislin and Seraphim slipped down a small ravine, ending up in a river, soaked but harmless. For the past hour or two, the family has been “walking in the dark in the woods,” he said. Then they arrived in the village of Slovakia. The couple entered what they thought was a small corner store. “It turned out to be a bar,” Hubbard said, “and they had everyone there looking at them.” The Ukrainian-speaking residents of the tavern helped the couple to surrender to the authorities. Slovak police took Eislin and Seraphim to change clothes, Hubbard said. Within hours, they were also given three sets of European Union documents that offered them temporary protection. Hubbard, meanwhile, had been slow to return to the official border checkpoint, which had previously denied the family. Dragging five bags, two cats and a backpack a mile and a half at 50-foot intervals was slow, he said. After the Ukrainian authorities delayed him at the border for more than an hour, they finally let him cross. Exhausted, he checked into a hotel in Kosice, the family’s scheduled meeting point. He did not believe that Aislinn and his grandson would show up until the next day, having assumed that the Slovak authorities would drag their feet in their processing. “But he called me around 6:30 in the morning and said, ‘Well, we were released,’” Hubbard recalls. “We will take a taxi. We should be there in about an hour and a half. “ Hubbard went downstairs and closed another hotel room. “And everything was fine,” he said.
