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For Grace Kass, Ukraine was home. Sure, it could be unwelcoming for a Black woman, and she would never get used to its bitterly cold winters, but it’s where she had lived for the past seven years. The 24-year-old, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, had come to Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv as an engineering student and stayed on, forging a successful career as a make-up artist.
She knew its parks and fountains, she learned Russian and some Ukrainian, she made close friends—in a word, she belonged. “This was not just a place where I lived, I was making something of my life,” Kass says, fighting back tears in the train station of the Polish city of Przemysl on the border with Ukraine.
Read More: Here’s What You Can Do to Help People in Ukraine Right Now
Refugees wake after sleeping on blankets and cardboard on the ground on the Polish side of the Medyka crossing, on March 1.
Natalie Keyssar for TIME
It was Monday evening and she had fled Ukraine overnight, on Feb. 27, the fourth day of a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. She made it out just in time: a day after leaving Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, the city was bombarded with Russian rockets that killed dozens of civilians. But when Kass reached Lviv in Ukraine’s west near Poland, joining the heaving crowds desperately trying to board trains for safety, she says she encountered…
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Source : time
