‘Putin is coming’: A family’s escape from Ukraine
Global News
Natalia and Oleksiy Bihlenko, driving instructors from Kherson, never thought war would come to their city. Now she and her two children are refugees in Poland.
His feet barely touching the ground, nine-year-old Platon Bihlenko sat at the kitchen table inside an apartment in Poland, reading aloud the story he had composed.
Written in neat, boxy letters, it was about a family that never imagined how war would touch their lives — until the Russians began shelling their city in southern Ukraine.
“Putin is coming,” he read.
A Grade 3 student at School No. 57 in Kherson, Platon fled Ukraine on foot on Tuesday, along with his mother Natalia and his little sister Maria, who does gymnastics.
After they crossed the border into southeast Poland, a volunteer picked them up and brought them to an apartment in the nearby city of Rzeszow.
The woman who took them in was a Ukrainian-Canadian named Heidi Baumbach, a violinist who ran a music school in Alberta.
She was so moved by the news from Ukraine that she renewed her passport and flew to Poland to help, even if she wasn’t sure how.
In Warsaw, she met a volunteer who asked if she would help house refugee families arriving from Ukraine, so she rented an apartment on Airbnb.