In Luxembourg – The moving arrival of Ukrainian refugees by bus in Bascharage
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BASCHARAGE – A bus, with about forty Ukrainian refugees, arrived Sunday evening in Bascharage. The essential was there.
Emotion in Bascharage on Sunday evening, where employees of the Sales-Lentz company (who had made a bus available), host families and volunteers from Slava Ukrayini Luxembourg welcomed more than forty Ukrainian refugees. The bus arrived to loud applause.
Leaving Kockelscheuer last Wednesday, full of equipment and food, the vehicle returned five days later after a grueling journey. A liberating past of refugees in Poland, on the Ukrainian border, and in Romania, the group lived dozens of hours of waiting to cross the borders. These Ukrainian families, welcomed with a meal and many toys for the children at the headquarters of Sales-Lentz, must join their host family on Sunday evening.
“We will first bring them calm and comfort. We have involved friends who are also going to welcome a family,” confided Sarah and François, residents of the capital who are going to house a mother and her eight-year-old son in an apartment in Limpertsberg. “We said to ourselves that we had the possibility of helping and that these people really needed it”.
“A woman died in front of her children”
Agnès Leroy was impatiently awaiting the arrival of Aleksandra, a friend of the family, who “found herself in the basement of Kiev” and took advantage of the bus trip to the Grand Duchy. It’s a small Kiev that we received because of Chernobyl, ”she confided moved. “We had a lot of unforeseen events. We came across problems of cross-border travel within Europe itself, submitted we did not expect ”, insisted, still shocked, Julien Doussot, one of the initiators of the trip who evoked the horror of the conditions. the transfer of certain refugees.
“We spent 14 hours waiting at the border post in Hungary, before being escorted to a center where we waited 20 hours in appalling conditions,” he continued. In front of us a woman died in front of her children because there was nothing, nothing planned. She got out of a bus which, unlike our comfortable one, looked like a city bus. People were spending 30 hours there with small children who couldn’t get out. The woman became unwell and died,” added the CEO of Luxembourg Telecom International. “The problem was having to say no to people because I received a lot of requests to get on the bus, but we were full. And you have to be able to take care of them, to welcome them afterwards”.
“Three days were done, in the end it took five. Congratulations to Slava Ukrayini vzw. The initial idea was to transfer 16 people, then it was 21… The bus left on Wednesday morning with two drivers and a spare van. It’s a lot of emotion. Our mission has been accomplished, nine families, 31 children with two dogs, a cat, arrived well with many adventures and solutions that had to be found,” rejoiced Georges Hilbert, General Manager of Sales-Lentz, welcoming also the work of its teams and volunteers.