You were born in Kyiv. Do you still have family members in the Ukrainian capital?
Yes, my grandma. But for a few weeks she has been living with my parents near Hanover. She is already 85 years old, it was incredibly difficult to get her out of the country. We needed a lot of help there. We were all extremely shocked, sad and paralyzed for the first two or three days when the war started.
How did your grandma manage to escape?
It took almost two weeks in total because she herself is not mobile and does not drive a car. She tried two or three times to get on the train at the main station. There were thousands of people there, the crowd was huge, she just couldn’t make it in, especially since she would have had to stand for several hours the whole journey because the wagons were overcrowded. It was then pure coincidence and luck that she finally made it. An old table tennis friend of my father called and said that he wanted to take his family abroad to safety. He himself had to stay in Ukraine and defend the country. He asked my dad to help him find an apartment and go to the authorities because no one in the family speaks German. In return, the friend took my grandmother with him.
