Milla Kirishun had plenty of opportunities to leave Ukraine before last week, she tells me by way of introduction: “This is not how I planned on doing this.” Kirishun is a small, delicate woman with oversized brown glasses and a tuft of grey hair. For nearly 80 years she watched the Jewish community of Bila Tserkva, her hometown, trickle away. The small city, 80km south of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, is notorious for its bloody history. When the second world war broke out a fifth of the population was Jewish – most of them were killed in 1941 by Nazi SS troops supported by Ukrainian soldiers. Soon after the initial massacre, some 90 Jewish children were slaughtered too.

During the Soviet era, the Jews of Bila Tserkva were subject to pedestrian anti-Semitism. “Ukrainian boys might not lend you their bikes if they found out you were Jewish,” Kirishun recalls. Most Jews departed in 1991 after the Soviet Union collapsed. More left later in the 1990s, as recession and hyperinflation made it hard to earn a living. When Kirishun worked as a typist in a local ceramics factory, she was paid in pairs of socks in lieu of cash, rather improbably.

By 2000, virtually all of Kirishun’s old neighbours and childhood friends had gone to Israel to start “their new life”. Kirishun stayed. A decade later, she was one of just 150 Jews in a town home to 15,000 only a generation before. “At an early age I saw that there was a stigma against being Jewish,” she says. “Some of my friends tried to hide their identity. But I went the other way. I embraced it. ‘Yes, I’m Jewish!’ I would tell anyone who asked.”

“Ukrainian boys might not lend you their bikes if they found out you were Jewish”

After the Maidan Revolution of 2014, when the overthrow of the pro-Russian government resulted in a simmering war with Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, two of Kirishun’s daughters emigrated – one to work in Warsaw, another to study in Tel Aviv. But she didn’t want to leave. Her stalwart presence in Bila Tserkva was the stuff of local legend. “Milla Kirishun! You’re still here?” young townsfolk would ask, half-joking, when they saw her.

On February 25th, the day after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Kirishun packed up her life in half an hour and left Bila Tserkva. “This wasn’t how I was planning on doing this,” she repeats, in a voice drained of emotion. In a quiet corner she stood alongside Tanya, another of her daughters, and her grandson, Klim, stocky beneath his bright yellow hoodie.

Rumours of the invasion had been circling in Bila Tserkva for weeks but Kirishun hadn’t taken them seriously. “We had heard all these threats from Putin before,” she says. But the day before Russian forces launched their attack, Kirishun’s daughter called from Warsaw urging her to get out of the country as fast as possible. Kirishun finally listened.

That Friday, she and Tanya left home and spent the night in the gymnasium of Mitzvah 613, Bila Tserkva’s last remaining Jewish primary school. They had no time to pack anything of sentimental value. “We took whatever we could grab the fastest,” she says. “I thought I was taking a few things to make do in a basement for a few days. It didn’t occur to me then that I was probably leaving for life.” In the evening, Kirishun, Tanya and a small group of friends lay on mattresses side-by-side on the floor of the school gym and listened to the faint crackle of artillery. They left the next morning, after learning that the Russians appeared to be targeting military installations, concerned that the gym might be confused with an aircraft hangar.

They went to a friend’s house, who led them down to the basement, where two beds were already made up. “Why did you take out such beautiful bed-covers for us?” she asked her friend. “Don’t you know we’re only staying for the night?” The next morning Milla and Tanya boarded a bus to Lviv in western Ukraine.

“We took whatever we could grab fast. It didn’t occur to me then that I was probably leaving for life”

Looking out of the window as they drove, they spotted a plane flying ahead – they couldn’t tell if it was Russian or Ukrainian. They forced themselves to remain calm as police boarded the bus at checkpoints along the road. Were they looking for Russian spies? The strangest thing about the journey was the absence of men: most had stayed to fight. By the time Milla and Tanya crossed the border, the government had banned men between 18 and 60 from leaving the country.

Her new life began in Korczowa, an unassuming village straddling a single-lane road tucked in the gently rolling hills of south-eastern Poland. The bus dropped Kirishun and dozens of others at a vast shopping centre that had been renovated to receive the mounting swell of refugees from Ukraine. Inside, hundreds of camp beds were arranged in neat lines. People drank hot tea out of plastic cups or curled up in blankets with chess-board patterns of brown-and-white squares. Many refugees had relatives in Poland ready to take them in. Not so Jews like Kirishun, or many Chechens, Kazakhs, Tajiks and others fleeing Putin’s invasion. Some were being transported back to the countries where their families came from. To organise these repatriations, women walked around with placards like taxi drivers in an airport arrival hall – “TAJIKS!”, “UZBEK EMBASSY!”.

Three generations of Kirishuns – Milla, Tanya and Klim – now find themselves in the middle of their own complex process of “repatriation”, caught between one life and another, awaiting the chance to resettle in Israel. “This is not how I planned on doing this,” Kirishun repeats for a third time, wearily.

She and other Jewish refugees drove five hours from their arrival point in Poland to a hotel a few miles south of Warsaw, where a lobby full of Jewish Ukrainians was hoping for Israeli visas to be approved. It was a strange place for such a dramatic – almost Biblical – exodus. Tourists awaiting delayed flights mingled with the Jewish evacuees. A janitor wiped his mop across a faux-marble floor cluttered with battered suitcases. Refugee children in parkas and yarmulkes played tag among the empty tables of the Czekolada Café.

Many of these evacuees have never visited Israel. For some, it was the first time they’d left Ukraine. After days of hectic travel, they had lapsed into uneasy idleness. In the hotel car park, new arrivals from the border were dropped off by taxi and greeted with hugs, then rounds of nervous questioning. Are others coming? What’s the state of Ukraine?

In a corner of the lobby, sitting on grey sofa cushions piled on the floor, two elderly Ukrainian men observed the commotion and quietly debated the sort of missile that had recently struck the opera house in Kharkiv, a city in east Ukraine suffering an intense Russian bombardment. “It was a Grad rocket,” one explained matter-of-factly, almost as if describing the weather. On March 5th, a Russian rocket pulverised a number of homes in Bila Tserkva.

The Kirishuns’ escape from Ukraine was organised and financed by the Jewish Agency, a state-sponsored NGO in Israel that for nearly a century has facilitated the immigration of Jews from around the world. It also has experience getting Jews out of conflict zones as far afield as Georgia and Ethiopia. According to Max Lurye, the Jewish Agency’s regional director in Ukraine, social media and groups on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, play a crucial role in this evacuation. “Immense logistical challenges nevertheless remain,” he says.

People need to prove their Jewish identity to be evacuated to Israel. This can be tricky. Some Jews in the Soviet Union changed their last name to avoid discrimination; others burned their birth certificates. It can take months of combing through Soviet records, Red Army registers and local archives to determine who qualifies for a new life in Israel. Immigrants need at least one Jewish grandparent. “Before war broke out in Donetsk in 2014, it was widely believed that there were 5,000 Jews in the region,” Lurye says. “But 6,000 came to us seeking new lives in Israel. So no one really knows the true number of Jews in Ukraine.”

New arrivals were greeted with hugs, then rounds of nervous questioning. Are others coming? What’s the state of Ukraine?

The challenges will continue once the refugees reach Israel. The state must find accommodation for the new arrivals. Psychologists will offer therapy to those traumatised by their experiences. Hebrew lessons will be laid on, though people of Kirishun’s age will find it hard to acquire a new language. Lurye reckons that some 4,000 Jews were evacuated from Ukraine in the first week of the conflict. Within six months, he says, another 50,000 people who qualify for Israeli citizenship may leave – more than a quarter of the estimated Jewish population in Ukraine.

I asked Kirishun how she was going to prove her Jewish identity to those overseeing the visa process. She produced a fat green folder that she had been clutching behind her back for the past hour. Inside, pages of black-and-white photos showed generations of Kirishuns in Ukraine, and there were photos of Kirishun herself standing in front of a white fence in Bila Tserkva. There were crinkled Soviet birth certificates – Kirishun’s, in utilitarian blue dating to 1946, was stamped “NO 623939” – and Soviet military certificates attesting to the valour of her father, who fought with the Red Army throughout the second world war and helped capture Berlin. She had land records dating as far back as the Tsarist empire; some documents had burnt edges.

“You said you didn’t have time to pack anything of sentimental value. Isn’t all this sentimental to you?” I asked. “No,” she answered, pausing and shaking her head. “It’s not sentimental. It’s just who we are.” ■

Alexander Clapp is a journalist based in Athens. He is reporting from Ukraine’s western border for 1843 magazine

PHOTOGRAPHS: AYMAN OGHANNA