After her family fled persecution during the Soviet occupation of Ukraine in the 1940s, Numurkah woman Ruth Hartnett-Carr feels like she’s watching her ancestral history repeat itself.
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As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues to unfold, Ms Hartnett-Carr has watched with anxiety over the uncertain fate of her family stuck in the war zone.
On February 25 Ms Hartnett-Carr heard the roads were blocked for her family trying leave Kyiv, with Russian air strikes knocking out the power in the area after a military airport had been bombarded.
Her family’s plan was to to get to their ancestral village in Lviv, which is close to Poland.
“It was probably 48 hours later that we then heard from them again,” Ms Hartnett-Carr said.
“And still no-one had been able to get out of the city. And by this stage, in Australia, we were seeing that footage of people fleeing in enormous lines of traffic — gridlocked.”
It took her family three days to get out of Kyiv as hundreds of thousands of refugees fled the war zone in the harsh sub-zero winter, but made it to the relative safety of their destination unharmed and now watch on as the invasion of their country continues.
Viktoriya Ostapchuk, part of Ms Hartnett-Carr’s extended family, lives with her mother and children, Diana and Valeri, in the city of Dnipro.
It’s a city of strategic importance to the Russian invasion, and a city whose population lives under constant threat of attack.
“For five days we’ve lived in fear of what is happening,” Ms Ostapchuk said.
Russian aerial forces are flying ever closer, causing air raid sirens to echo throughout the city on a daily basis.
“But the Ukrainian people rallied, our men went to the front line to protect us,” Ms Ostapchuk said.
Ms Ostapchuk’s ex-husband, Oleg, her daughters’ father, is a former soldier, who then became a policemen. He is now on the front lines holding the Russian army at bay.
“Those who stayed at home help make Molotov cocktails and cook food for the fighters,” Ms Ostapchuk said.
The urban warfare waged by Putin is indiscriminate, with the threat of air attacks driving the inhabitants of an orphanage in Kropyvnytskyi into a bomb shelter.
They are in severe need of food, medicine, clothes, toys, warm bedding and nappies, Ms Ostapchuk said.
Ms Hartnett-Carr has a relative who works at a hospital in Lviv that has received shelling and missile attacks, forcing patients underground. Meanwhile, 865km away at the regional hospital of Kherson, near Ms Ostapchuk, women have had to give birth in bomb shelters connected to the hospital.
“Putin wants to kill us, but made us stronger. Many countries are now helping Ukraine with weapons and financially,” Ms Ostapchuk said.
“The Ukrainian people have confidence in victory. We want to live in a free Ukraine!”
Ms Hartnett-Carr’s mother, Larissa, who is a Ukrainian refugee from the last Soviet invasion, told her daughter she had no doubt civilians would be caught in the crossfire of Putin’s war as he razed cities.
“For me, this is like watching history, a horrific history that I have been told about coming to life again,” Ms Hartnett-Carr said.
Ms Hartnett-Carr is in Australia today because her grandmother, Luba, fled Ukraine to Germany after the Soviets arrested and executed her father, Andrew, in 1944.
He was a school principal, and an educated man. Therefore he was considered to be “influential” and a threat to the communist regime.
Ms Hartnett-Carr’s great grandmother, Oksana, took her two daughters, Barbara and Luba, who was only 18 years old, and fled on the same day he was taken.
A widowed mother and her daughters made the arduous journey on foot in the dead of the Ukrainian winter to Germany, avoiding everyone they saw, and hiding in barns at night.
They took turns begging for food on the trek, resigned to the fact that if she didn’t return, the others would have to press on without them.
“What a difficult decision to make,” Ms Hartnett-Carr said.
“How could you leave your daughter or mother behind? It’s unimaginable ... and that unimaginable is exactly what happened.”
Luba was captured by the Russian army, and was marched for days to an unknown location.
The prisoners arrived at a strange shed-like building and were ordered to strip before being herded inside like animals.
Luba said they knew what was happening to Jews throughout Ukraine. The Russians as part of their invasion, not unlike Hitler, were perpetrating Jewish purges that were also taking place in Russia.
The door was locked behind them and Luba had a horrible realisation. There were shower heads, but no taps. It was a gas chamber.
“She told me people screamed until they could scream no more as they waited for the gas to be pumped into the shed,” Ms Hartnett-Carr said.
For whatever reason, the gas never came, and they continued their march.
A young Russian soldier had taken a liking to Luba and had been chatting with her as he rode on horseback while she trudged through the snow.
“They were around the same age and had much in common,” Ms Hartnett-Carr said.
“They both understood what it was like to live in the Soviet Union and that the communist regime they lived under controlled their lives.”
She didn’t trust him, however, and when this young Russian soldier told her that shortly they would approach a rise in the road and when they reached the top, Luba was to turn away and not look back, she expected a bullet in the back.
But it never came, and she safely reached Germany where she was reunited with her mother, Oksana, and sister, Barbara, after a three-month journey.
In the refugee camp Luba met a handsome young Ukrainian man named Peter, who had served in the Polish navy and been a prisoner of war.
They fell in love in the camp, where they were married and would welcome their first child, Ms Hartnett-Carr’s mother, Larissa.
After five years in the German refugee camp Ms Hartnett-Carr’s family boarded a refugee ship named the General Howze in 1949 with “nothing except determination and the will to live in peace free from Russian occupation”.
After three long months at sea Peter, Luba, Larissa and Oksana arrived in Melbourne on December 17, 1949, to face the new challenge of forging a life as refugee migrants in a new country.
Luba has since passed away, but her husband’s 97-year-old sister, who lives in their ancestral home, Ozerma, has lived to see the Russian military invade her homeland once more.
“One can only imagine what it’s like to live through this twice in your life,” Ms Hartnett-Carr said.