“You are Russian - so live here...” The story of a woman who escaped from a special operation in the EU

On February 24, Russian woman Yelena Colombo and her daughter ended up in Rostov-on-Don, where they received a new passport. She described in detail and emotionally her ordeals related to this procedure and how she managed to go to her place in France in her blog:

“The feeling that I got used to over the past 2 weeks that I spent in Rostov, in the epicenter and outback at the same time, is rabies.

I spent it in lines for office papers, in the basement of the Federal Migration Service, where curvy maidens in and without uniforms hissed at me, shouted, kicked me out of the office and let in a fat, mustachioed type, over whose head a portrait of Putin hung, and on the right hand Iosif Vissarionovich, like him named him respectfully.

- Who am I telling this to? You or Joseph Vissarionovich? Woman, get the hell out of here, I don't owe you anything.

The basement window overlooked the neighboring five-story buildings and the gloomy Rostov evening, tortured by people standing in line and the authorities weighed down with Monomakh's hats, who decided the fate of our nonentities in these shabby walls.

- Why the hell do you need this passport urgently? - politely asked the head of the mustachioed Stalinist. Where do you want to go? You have Russian citizenship - so live here. And let the daughter stay here. And don't open your mouth here, otherwise you will go to prison from here, and not to France.

The good cop who is writing me a fine for an expired passport asked me in the end, where do I like it better, there or here?

In a state of explosion stuffed inside, I gurgled and was silent.

I had a 13-year-old daughter and an 80-year-old mother, whom I naively brought here on the eve of the war and had to take them back at all costs. I allowed myself to be humiliated, to scream at myself, looked at the floor and steadfastly propped up the doors of their offices, listening to how they laugh and swear inside. I had something to lose. I lost the apartment where I spent my childhood. I could lose my peace, I could leave a French girl who does not understand anything in a city hostile to her, where harmonists who got out of the past sing military marches in Gorky Park for coins in a tin can. Could stand with a poster in the square. No, she couldn't. I had something to lose.

I could only pack a long parental life, old photos and autobiographies of my father on yellowing paper, pack the entire apartment of my childhood in a few suitcases and follow the news with a constricted heart.

I met with old, devoted in every sense girlfriends who stayed here and watched TV. I handed out endless glasses with plates, bread makers, but take everything you can carry away, we won’t live here anymore. And they live. Without hope.

The daughter, who suddenly grew up, hugged me and said that she finally understood why I was crazy when I had to go to Rostov. This city doesn't like us. We are not loved by people in cellars with epaulettes. We are loved by old friends, they look sadly and ask for advice on how to get out of the city that looks like a basement.

I read in the morning about the shelling that had begun, screamed and cried. I called Poltava, from there they said that everything was in order, there was electricity and water. And quiet. I took myself into my hands, dry from constant washing of an empty apartment, and looked for a way out, or rather a way out of the already closed city, from where only trains ran. Having packed all her past life in overstuffed suitcases, she dragged them on a train to St. Petersburg, a northern city where the airport was not threatened to be closed. The night train was clean and deserted. By noon the next day it was full of people, children, suitcases. In Voronezh, a peppy old man with two teeth, a push-button telephone and three bags of pickled apples burst into our compartment.

-Well, did they take Kyiv? - assertively he shouted into the phone to an invisible interlocutor.

- Are you from Crimea? he turned to us.

“No,” we confessed, full of forebodings.

“Ah”, - he drawled disappointedly, “and I wanted to ask if they gave me water".

What, she wasn't there?

- So now I suppose they gave it! Our people seized everything and gave it away, but the Ukrainians did not give it away.

We watched in silence as he arranged the sausages and potatoes into a plastic bag.

- They took it, - the old man repeated with satisfaction, - and they took Chernobyl!

- What for? - I could not resist.

- So there are these right-wingers (banned in the Russian Federation - editor's note)! Could blow up!

I refused the kindly offered soaked apple and crawled away to the top shelf, where I had a long mental discussion with the wall,

All the next night, the phone rang at the apple cleaner, he did not let me sleep and did not let me forget.

The restaurant car immediately ran out of eggs, porridge and pancakes. The waitress pitifully justified that they did not expect such a load, and that there was nothing to feed us.

- If only there would no war, - the frustrated head of the train admonished us, - we are now scattered among civilian, military and refugee trains, but we are not enough.

Peter met us with the unforgotten, native beauty of the streets and young faces. The same young faces were standing at the Gostiny surrounded by paddy wagons, and I was already in a hurry to Pulkovo and prayed that the Turks would not close the sky to us. The rest of the blue sky, into which I wanted to throw my head back and dissolve in it, the earth burned my legs.

I was silent again and stuffed hatred inside. Didn't cry. I just wanted to go home. The house was no longer there. My mother also wanted to go home, who suddenly realized that she did not have a home here either. A daughter wanted to go home, for whom everything was for the first time, daily rudeness, war, a night train, shining St. Petersburg and a deserted airport, in which canceled flights were listed in red on the scoreboard.

As we took off, relief allowed us to sleep. The landing woke us up, the plane landed abruptly, rolled along the path for several minutes and suddenly took off again. On the screen where we tracked its trajectory, the distance between us and Istanbul began to increase, we flew in the opposite direction. In some primal fear, I thought that the plane had been turned around and was being taken back to Russia again.

The plane completed the loop and turned around for another landing.

When in Lyon, having already passed passport control, we were suddenly subjected to a new search, during which two girls in uniform were methodically rummaging through our swollen suitcases full of old photographs, half-decayed notes, memories and dust, I suddenly broke down and burst into tears. There were no more words, it hurt. For the fact that on the day of departure to Rostov, the Lyon border guard told us:

- You won't bring us war.

They brought it. I smeared tears down my cheeks and screamed. How much I hate everything. About the fact that I will never return there ... That I will return only when they are all over. About how these basement people with their Lubyanka consciousness are killing my memory. That for the first time my departure is not a departure, but an escape. Exodus. Because behind is nothing but an empty apartment, in which my young beautiful parents were happy, as in these pictures I took away, in which other people's hands were rummaging today.

“They have to give up”, - said my French husband.

- To whom?

- Ukraine. They are like a mosquito against an elephant. One at all.

“They are alone because you don’t care about them!”

I was at war with myself. It was pointless to explain. How pointless it was to shout here. It was necessary to shout and protest there. Here I can only extend my hand again to the next refugees from Russia, and now Ukraine, because now, more than ever, I understand their empty Facebook pages before fleeing. When silence seems to be the only way to take yourself and loved ones out of a country that has become a foreign country.