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It shudders to think that Europe is reliving these days the bitter days of WWII. But it is like this. The snapshots left to us by journalists and special envoys to Ukraine during Vladimir Putin’s offensive might have been signed by Lee Miller or Robert Capa eight decades ago: hundreds of refugees running toward a train as an officer clears the way. In the evacuation, women and children prevail.
The only difference is that the station is in Kharkivin the north of the country, and not in the Warsaw of the late 1930s or the Moscow of the 1940s, which watched with dismay the inexcusable advance of Nazism.
Sad days, days of crying and despair.
Wars, beyond the decades that pass and the drones that are assembled, always emanate the same stench. And the greatest paradox of all this sad theater is that one of the largest population exoduses that was experienced in the Second World War took place back in 1941, when the troops of the Third Reich They were moving at full speed towards Moscow. “The people were aware of the danger that threatened them and were preparing to face it. While I was walking through the suburbs and through the accesses of the city I realized that, whatever happened, they would arrive », the correspondent explained in his chronicles Erskine Caldwell.
Kharkiv evacuation, 2022 pic.twitter.com/b5kVoFfRhS
— David Josef Volodzko (@davidvolodzko) March 8, 2022
Despite the fact that, at that time, the panic had not spread in Moscow – neither today in Kiev, where President Volodímir Zelenski resists in his office the failed Russian blitzkrieg – a mass exodus was conceived in the capital. In October, the most outstanding works of art were evacuated from the city. Afterwards, it was the turn of the diplomats and the senior staff of the Government. Thirdly, hundreds and hundreds of civilians crowded the train stations ready to go to other nearby cities and be safe. And that, despite the fact that many people were determined to fight back.
That exodus was narrated by some Spanish exiles in Moscow following the Civil War. Among them, Dolores Ibarruri, the Passionflower. She left the city on October 16, the day she described as follows following World War II: «The Kazan station, to which they took us, was immersed in darkness, an elementary security measure due to the continuous enemy air attacks. And in that darkness an immense human mass moved, making its way as best it might, looking for any train that would take them to any place far from the Nazi invasion». The confusion was such that the communist leader lost her two children there, Rubén and Amaya, who traveled in another.
Caldwell himself recorded his own flight from the capital. In his case, he left with his family for Arcángel, from where he intended to embark for the United States. “Large crowds formed queues two and three deep, waiting from who knows when to get tickets and take the trains. There must have been at least six hundred men, women and children waiting patiently at the closed ticket windows.’
The reporter was not sparing in details. He described, for example, that the doors of the station were opened half an hour before and that the place was full of soldiers and sailors whose destination was the north. “There was a lot of hustle and bustle on the platforms, but no confusion.”
The journey that awaited the Muscovites was lethal. According to the journalist and historian Jesus Hernandez on ‘
That wasn’t in my WWII book‘ (Almuzara), they spent months on those trains. Men, women and children faced frigid temperatures, food shortages and deplorable hygienic conditions. They were even less lucky than the Ukrainian refugees, as their respective destinations were thousands and thousands of kilometers from Moscow. To make matters worse, the locomotive used to stop to give priority to the passage of convoys full of soldiers.
“We stopped frequently throughout the day, while military trains with priority passed us in both directions. Some were hospital trains coming from Leningrad, others were loaded with laughing soldiers,” the reporter explained.
