They had known Ai Stratis for years now as a vacation spot. The family’s grandmother, Galina, a 25-year-old immigrant on the island in the heart of the Aegean, had started a family. Somehow they got the “village” of the grandmother, where her daughter Natalia, her 20-year-old granddaughter Victoria and the little one, now nine years old, Anastasia visited almost every summer.
And now the dream place of summer vacation “unbuttoned” to escape the horror of war in the homeland.
Immigrant grandmother, daughter and grandchildren refugees. And all this on an island that has suffered in history, Ai Stratis, but who opened his arms to the three women. Its few, about 200 all and all inhabitants, did and are doing what they can for them. They know anyway, you are brave and this knowledge is recorded in their DNA, out of pain.
They had a “simple daily life” in the city where they lived, in Dnipro in southeastern Ukraine. They had taken refuge there, rebuilding their home after the 2014 war and their uprooting from Donetsk. In Dnipro they said they must take root. And they took root. And all of a sudden, where, as the student of international relations at the University of Dnipro says, Victoria thought that wars could not be fought in the 21st century, they were uprooted again. “Suddenly everything was lost,” he says.
On February 24, the Russian offensive began. From the first day they realized that they had to leave. Sirens warning of attacks, media images with war scenes, sleeping at night in icy basements. Nine-year-old Anastasia was terrified. “The trains left full and the journey to the station took 20 hours. It was impossible. The father of the family came from Odessa where he worked because the homeland must continue to exist, and we went to the Ukrainian-Hungarian border in his car. It was a difficult route through the villages as the roads were full and dangerous. The father returned. We entered Hungary, went to Budapest and from there to Athens. We ended up on March 9 in Ai Strati “.
There, on the island, everything changed. At grandma’s house everything was different. The inhabitants welcomed them with a sweet word. From the first day Anastasia went to school with the other children. “Do not leave the school climate.”
Attends online training programs from home. For all the children of war. “Just when the sirens sound and the children go down to the shelters in the war zones, the educational process stops for the children in the so-called quiet areas, but also for the refugee children”, School tomorrow again.
Anastasia attends online classes four hours a day, and that is the goal. Ukrainian, math, English, reading. Then to the two-seat Primary School of Ai Strati.
Courses are also delivered online to student Victoria. Both to her and to the students of damaged universities like the one in Kharkov.
“We have to keep living,” Victoria says as Anastasia smiles awkwardly and bitterness overflows from the expressionless face of their mother Natalia.
The men fight back there in the homeland and we ask her to make a wish. Expressed, frozen, Natalia says she wants “peace, an end to the war, a return to our homes and a reunion of the whole family.”
Of course, it is difficult to return. Anastasia estimates that out of the 3.5 million Ukrainian refugees, two will never return. “There is nothing left, the cities have been leveled, they have nothing to do behind it, they have nothing left behind burnt houses …”. Only refugees from unoccupied places will return, he believes. Others will live wherever they go without risk.
Anastasia goes to school, Victoria studies online and waits to return home, Natalia helps her mother Galina’s grocery store.
“The Greeks all stood by us. They are a people who know how to help, to support, but we will return to Ukraine to rebuild our homeland. And Ai Stratis will again become our grandmother’s favorite village. And we will love the island and its people even more. It will be for us the island that embraced us and protected us during the days of war. We were lucky. “There are our compatriots who do not have to eat, sleep safely, get dressed,” says Victoria, saying goodbye. On the hill where the Maraslios School of Ai Stratis stands empty, he runs to attend an exercise program with the adult Agiostratites. “We continue to live and wait for peace,” he says.
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