Fernando’s 3,000 kilometers to save a Ukrainian family from the war: “Everyone wanted to flee, so many mothers with their babies in their arms”

A call from Pablo was enough for Fernando to organize a trip of 3,000 kilometers until the border with Ukraine. The objective? Bring Olga’s family, a Ukrainian woman living in Madrid. Her two daughters and her four grandchildren were desperately trying to flee the invasion orchestrated by Putin. For this reason, Fernando did not hesitate for a second to start his van to travel with Raúl the almost 3,000 kilometers and the 33 hours that separate Cangas de Onís and Warsaw by road. When he started he didn’t even know the name of the family he had to pick up, but he was clear that he wasn’t going to stop until he brought them safe and sound to Madrid.

Thus, in a matter of hours, he contacted several friends and they organized everything. The first thing he thought is that they couldn’t go empty and in less than a day he managed to gather several tons of humanitarian aid to transport her in his van. “We talked to our contacts and in 12 hours we collected three tons. we had to select medicines, baby food, thermal clothing“, explains Fernando Abarquero, one of the protagonists of this story.

Early on Saturday morning, with a van loaded with warm clothes, food, medical supplies and baby products, not even knowing the route I was going to take nor the specific data of the people they had to collect, Fernando and Raúl headed for Poland. From Spain -and other countries like the United States- a network made up of his friends was giving him logistical support. The best routes and highways, the hotels they could find along the way, all the information about the family she was going to look for, in short, the help she needed to get there.

Anya He has been another of the key people on this path. She is the ex-girlfriend of a friend of Fernando’s, she lives in Warsaw and has helped them with this very human journey. yesand was in charge of locating the family they had to pick up, to ask for help from the center where they had been picked up, to find a point where to deposit all the humanitarian aid, as well as to provide them with all the necessary support when they arrived in the country.

Thus, Fernando can only define her as “an angel fallen from heaven”. “Everything moved us. He told us where we could deposit the material, he called the volunteers who were with the family so that they could stay one more day in the reception center, he acted as a translator and offered us a bed and a shower and a hot broth that tasted like glory to us”, comments Fernando in his conversation with laSexta.com.

The stay in Poland: “Everyone told me ‘I am Irina’, they wanted to flee”

Once in Warsaw, Fernando and Raúl were able to find -thanks to Ania’s help- the reception center where the family they had to pick up was located. Fortunately, those two mothers with their respective children managed to get out of the Ukraine and reach Warsaw, something that made his collection much easier.

But the joy and euphoria of finding the center and of having managed to cross borders without problem for the protagonists of this story did not last long. When they could reach the mentioned center, they found a bleak picture. Hundreds of people who only sought to flee from the horror and who had fled with their clothing from the bombings and massacres orchestrated by the Russian Government.

“There were so many people… I asked for the names of the mothers I had to pick up and they all told me ‘I am Irina, I am Irina; they just wanted to get out of there. Mothers with babies in their arms“, Fernando told us through the hands-free of his van, the one with which he has managed to save the life of a family.

Thanks to a psychologist who knew how to speak English, they were able to find the two mothers and their four children, ages 8 to 16. But before putting them in touch, the psychologist wanted to make sure that this trip was safe, as well as the intentions of Fernando and Raúl. And it is that, as the protagonist of this story recalls, there are mafias dedicated to human trafficking who – as always taking advantage of desperation – are approaching the borders with Poland to kidnap children and women. “The psychologist was asking us questions, she wanted to hear our story and we showed her all the necessary documents. I told her to take a photo of my ID,” Fernando says about it.

This trip was not only salvation for Olga’s family, it has also been for Valeria, a young woman in her 30s who fled Ukraine in search of a better future, away from the massacre. The young woman was alone in this temporary refugee reception center and she was able to take advantage of Fernando and Raúl’s trip to return to Spain. They had a spare seat in the van and they were clear: “We didn’t want to come back with an empty seat, we wanted to pick up someone else.” Thus, a psychologist found Valeria and, after repeating the previous procedure to ensure that she remained in good hands, she allowed her to leave with her family from the center for our country.

Before starting the return trip, Raúl and Fernando went to a Warsaw City Hall building to unload the ton of humanitarian aid they had collected in Asturias. Here they ask us to make a special mention for some of the town hall officials, who did not hesitate for a second and helped them unload all the merchandise, as can be seen in the image below:

The trip back to Spain and the gestures of solidarity at every gas station, hotel and supermarket

With the peace of mind of having picked up Irina and her whole family and Valeria, Fernando and Raúl set off for Spain. Before leaving Poland, they ran into a traffic jam that lasted more than an hour. And it is that hundreds of Germans took advantage of the weekend to cross the border and pick up refugees. “There were more than 100 kilometers of retentionshundreds and hundreds of cars stopped because many Germans had entered to rescue the families“, This is how he explains it to us in our conversation.

Once they arrived in Germany, Pablo tried to find a hotel for them from Asturias, but everything was collapsed. So, as was done in the past, they entered a polygon with the van and got several rooms in a small hostel. Here they were given a discount for the work they were doing and they were given breakfast for the next day.

Because the signs of solidarity have not stopped happening all the way. In the small supermarket of a gas station in France the cashiers did not let them pay. Fernando stopped to make a purchase so that the Ukrainian family that he had on board could eat whatever he wanted and the shop assistants did not hesitate for a moment to pay for all the products together. “We started crying with emotion. They put the money between them and asked us to please take it from them.”

And the thing is, as Fernando reminds us, “the world is full of people with a heart, of people who want to help.” And not only these shop assistants showed it to him, but also a businessman who they ran into in another hotel where they stopped to sleep along the way. Upon hearing the story, he offered to pay for dinner and the most important gesture: he offered to go in search of Valeria’s son.

This man had mobilized several vehicles from his company to go pick up Ukrainians and, upon learning of Valeria’s story, assured her that he would personally look for her son. And it is that the young woman had no choice but to leave her little one, 10 years old, with her caregiver to try to leave the country and seek an alternative before taking your child out of the country.

But solidarity, as in other stories loaded with human capital, did not end there. The sisters of Pablo, the organizer of the trip, have made a flat in Madrid available to the family “to leave it to the two mothers with their two children”, as Fernando explains.

Along the journey they also encountered problems, such as a virus that affected three of the children traveling with them. They lived “a very hard day” because they were affected “by an intestinal virus and they spent the whole night vomiting”, although “they endured like titans”.

Already more than 2.3 million Ukrainians have been forced to flee to other countries because of the Russian invasion, which began two weeks ago. These are data published by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).