Lidia’s mother, Maryna Jasenko, is a Ukrainian refugee living in Poland. Her father is still in Ukraine, living in a Russian occupied village in the Kherson region.

Maryna left her husband and life in her homeland behind in July after learning she was pregnant. She did not want to leave, but her husband urged her to leave the country for their baby’s safety. Babcock said she does not know if she could have been brave enough to leave. She looks up to Maryna.

Maryna and Babcock have been talking for months over Facebook, after an anonymous donor in the Tri-Lakes brought them together. Last week, Babcock finally got to meet Maryna and Lidia, hug them, and speak face to face.

Though she is glad to have met Maryna, she wishes the unfortunate circumstances that brought them together never came to be.

Maryna Jasenko is a Ukrainian refugee living in Poland who left a Russian-occupied region there to have baby Lidia in a safer country. Bloomingdale resident Justyna Babcock got to meet the two in Poland last week after months of speaking with Maryna over the internet. (Provided photo — Justyna Babcock)

“Maryna, truly is the kindest, open and honest woman,” Babcock wrote. “She is so brave, and so very positive after she went through all this. Can’t imagine.”

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Fleeing a war

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On Feb. 24, 2022, after months of escalating tensions, Russia invaded Ukraine. The war is ongoing and while estimates vary, several hundred thousand soldiers and civilians have died in the fighting.

Maryna Jasenko is a Ukrainian refugee living in Poland who left a Russian-occupied region there to have baby Lidia in a safer country. Bloomingdale resident Justyna Babcock got to meet the two in Poland last week after months of speaking with Maryna over the internet. (Provided photo — Maryna Jasenko)

“I will never forget that morning of the start of the war,” Maryna wrote. “I have never experienced more terrible things in my life. It’s indescribable. It’s like falling into an abyss … and seeing no end … dark and cold.”

Babcock said they spent the first three days of the war in a basement, and Maryna told her she cried “every day, all day.”

“Every morning I thanked God that we were alive, and every evening I asked him to have mercy on us,” Maryna wrote.

Maryna sees her life as being “divided into before and after.”

“Before the war, our life was full of dreams and plans,” Maryna wrote, a time when “there was a smile on the face.”

Maryna Jasenko is a Ukrainian refugee living in Poland who left a Russian-occupied region there to have baby Lidia in a safer country. Bloomingdale resident Justyna Babcock got to meet the two in Poland last week after months of speaking with Maryna over the internet. She brought the two of them to a local waterpark because Maryna told her Lidia loves splashing in the water. (Provided photo — Justyna Babcock)

They had a business — a clothing design and production studio. Maryna painted and designed dresses. They wanted to renovate the house they bought, wanted to travel, wanted to become parents and be good examples for their children.

While the war derailed most of their plans, this last one still came.

“When God gave us the chance to be parents, I had to leave because of the war,” Maryna wrote. “I had to forget about my feelings for a loved one and the warmth of home. I had to save our gift from God.”

Having the baby in Ukraine was impossible, Maryna said.

“There is no hospital there,” she wrote.

Her family paid for her to leave Ukraine along with money sent from a volunteer friend in America.

“But my husband couldn’t leave because of the occupation. They didn’t let him out,” she wrote.

She was five months pregnant and traveled by bus for four days with her small dog to Poland.

Babcock’s homeland is in Poland. She travels there to see family about every year. Last year, her trip came just a few weeks after the war in Ukraine started, so it became an aid mission, as she brought supplies and letters for Ukrainian refugees written by people here in the Tri-Lakes.

Several months ago, she said a “wonderful person” in the Tri-Lakes reached out to her asking if she knew of any Ukrainian refugees who needed financial help. This person has asked to remain anonymous, Babcock said, but she said she’s very thankful to them.

She reached out to her Polish and Ukrainian friends in Poland volunteering to help refugees, whom she met on her last visit to her home country in March 2022. They told her about Maryna.

Maryna had been in Poland for a few months and she was eight months pregnant with her first child when Babcock first spoke to her.

Speaking over text, Babcock said it was clear she felt lonely, homesick, scared, “almost depressed.” They struck up a “long distance friendship,” speaking every day.

“I tried to give her as much information and encouragement as I could, being a mom myself,” Babcock wrote.

As a refugee, Maryna was provided a hotel room, medical care and a bit of money from the Polish government, but with a baby on the way, she told Babcock she did not know how other refugee mothers got by.

The donations allowed her to buy things to welcome her baby; to cook her own meals, instead of eating hotel meals; and a new phone so she could finally send photos of her and the coming baby to her husband — at least, when there was internet and electricity in Ukraine.

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New birth

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Still, she was going through childbirth all alone.

“I have the most admiration for her courage and resilience. It is hard to imagine how she felt being alone, in the hospital without any one by her side, to help, to hug, to encourage,” Babcock wrote.

They initially met over financial support, but Babcock also provided comfort.

“She wasn’t even able to understand very well her doctors and nurses,” Babcock said. There was a language barrier between Polish and Ukrainian, she explained. Even all her conversations with Maryna are done through phone translations.

As a mother herself, she could not imagine going through that.

Maryna had a lot of questions, more than Babcock could answer. So Babcock became a sort of intermediary virtual midwife. She reached out to her own midwife, who helped her through childbirth 15 years ago, and relayed messages to Maryna.

“We messaged, through her days in the hospital, waiting for baby. Wednesday, Thursday, passed and nothing. On Friday things started happening,” Babcock wrote.

She woke up on Saturday and waited and waited for a text.

“Joy, joy, joy!!!” Babcock wrote. “It was a c-section, in wee hours of morning.”

Now, she said baby Lidia is healthy and growing.

“(She) has best and bravest mother she could ask for,” Babcock wrote.

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Life in occupation

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Life in Russian occupied Ukraine is tough, Babcock hears. For a while, Maryna said it was “loud” there.

“It is psychologically difficult at home for the people who stayed there. Many families have small children. They live under explosions every day,” Maryna wrote. “Everything has become gloomy and joyless. People are forced to live according to the rules of the occupiers. If you don’t like it, you can stay alive. … You can’t condemn the people who live there. They are forced to live like this. Unfortunately, not everyone has the opportunity to leave.”

Maryna and her husband had a clothing business before the war, but lost it all. Now, she said he is selling fish.

From what Babcock hears, people there are keeping their heads down and trying to survive. Maryna tells her the currency has changed to the Russian ruble. A water reservoir in the region is rapidly draining after the dam was damaged, with massive implications for local farming and nuclear power plants.

Maryna said many roads are mined and people can’t find rest in the forest or the beach. It’s too dangerous.

Maryna said she is ready to go home, even though it is a Russian controlled area. Babcock said her husband is telling her to wait for their safety.

“I was lucky to give birth to a child under a peaceful sky. She does not hear the bombs falling every night. But she does not feel the warmth of her parents,” Maryna wrote. “I really want to return to Ukraine. To my native old home. To my beloved husband. To hug him and forget this horror forever.”

She describes her dream of returning, reuniting her family and how their “eyes will shine with happiness.”

“The whole year I only feel my breath in my dreams of a native person,” Maryna wrote. “For a whole year I have been holding on to the hope that I will return soon. I thank Poland for help, I thank God for the people who surround me and for the preserved lives of my relatives.”

Babcock said her dream is for them to be able go home and live in peace.

“I consider myself lucky and honored to help, but she is doing all the hard work,” Babcock said of Maryna. “It is so much easier to give than receive.”

She wishes she could do more, but she is so far away, and it drives her crazy that she can’t.

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Hoyt’s “Christmas miracle”

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Babcock is not the only Polish local with connections to Ukrainian refugees. She said “all the Polish girls around know each other and get together for Polish meals.” One of the other locals is Anna Hoyt, who is preparing for a month-long trip to Warsaw to see her mother on April 24. She is again collecting cash donations to bring for the refugees there.

Hoyt said it is overwhelming looking at all the problems on the other side of the globe, it’s easy to feel paralyzed. But by channeling energy into one person, it’s easier to help.

She is collecting cash, not items, because it travels easier and she’s not sure what is needed in Poland and Ukraine right now. A GoFundMe fundraiser for her donation efforts has been set up by Saranac Lake resident Dan Reilly at https://bit.ly/3o3aa7C.

Members of the Whiteface Ski Patrol, with whom she has volunteered, are raising money for her to bring. Her coworkers at the Fitness Revolution gym are doing the same.

Hoyt has been to Poland three times in the past year to visit family, her first time on the second week of the war, and has volunteered with refugees each time. At first, the effort was focused on the refugees pouring into Poland. In June, she said the push moved to aiding in the war effort, with hospitals and vans. In October, it was generators for orphanages and schools in Ukraine facing winter. Winter is ongoing there, she said.

Hoyt said the influx of Ukrainian refugees in Poland is returning to normal there now. Ukrainian can be heard often on the streets. The refugees are mostly women, children and the elderly. Adults are working, children are going to schools, the elderly are being cared for. Many are still staying with Polish people, she said.

One of these host families, friends of her brother in Warsaw — Irmina and Jerzy Sterniccy — took four siblings in to live with them: Katia, 13, Kostia, 15, Liza, 17, and Ania, 28.

Their mother and oldest brother are still in Kiev — the mother is a paramedic and her 22-year-old son is “fighting age.” These four siblings left their country because Ania needed a kidney replacement, and if she didn’t get seven-hour dialysis treatments three times a week, she could die.

Hoyt was overjoyed to give an update to Ania’s condition. On Christmas Eve, they got the call that she was approved for a kidney transplant. Early on Christmas morning, she was in the hospital getting the life-saving operation. Hoyt called this a “Christmas miracle.”

Hoyt said a year ago, she had hoped the war would be quick, but she sees no end in sight. Neither country is backing down, but Hoyt believes it is up to Russia to deescalate.

“No one ever thought that this was going to last a year,” Babcock said. “I didn’t know they were going to fight that good. I had no idea they had so much resilience. Never thought they were going to last that long against, against this big power. Russia. Who ever thought?”

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Uncertain future

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Before leaving on her trip, Babcock said she could not wait to meet Maryna and Lidia. In the past week they went on walks together, did shopping and went to coffee shops. Last month, Maryna sent Babcock a video of Lidia in a bathtub and said she loves water. Babcock took them to a nearby waterpark to splash around in the shallow pools.

Babcock said she wanted to make Maryna’s time “a little better, less alone.”

“We simply can’t understand how they feel,” she said.

Babcock said things are back to normal in Poland and the U.S. While life goes on elsewhere, the daily lives of Ukrainians are stuck in war, she said.

“People do get used to wars and we never should,” Babcock said.

She said she hopes Maryna’s story will remind people of that, even if just for a minute.

“I know that lots of folks are tired of hearing about the war in Ukraine,” Babcock wrote. “I want to tell people that there is still so much suffering, families are separated, babies are being born far from their home, away from their fathers. There are millions of stories like her! And that we need to keep helping Ukraine to win this war.”

“It is very difficult to understand that war is a reality,” Maryna wrote. “But I want everyone to know that Ukraine is a country of heroes and self-sacrifice for the future of their children. An incredibly strong and infinitely happy country despite such a difficult period.”

Hoyt said the Ukrainians she knows want to go home, even if that home is destroyed. As the new generation in the past century rebuilt Poland, she said people like baby Lidia will be part of the rebuilding in Ukraine.

“The future cannot be guessed by anyone … we can only believe and confidently move forward,” Maryna wrote. “Therefore, I cannot speak about my daughter’s future in Ukraine, but I know for sure that she will have parental hugs … advice and understanding. This is much more important. She will have a childhood, will grow in love and joy.

“Peaceful sky to all!” Maryna said.