KARAIKAL: A Sivashankari was three months away from completing her medical degree course in VN Karazin Kharkiv National University at Kharkiv in Ukraine when the area came under shelling from Russia, which had begun invading the country.
The 22-year-old, who until then thought she would come back to her motherland with a medical degree, is the only one among five students from Karaikal to have been able to return to safety so far. She returned to India on Saturday.
Recounting the harrowing times she lived through, Sivashankari said, "I stayed with a group of Indian and Ukrainian students. The apartment bunkers we stayed in were built during the World War. They did not have proper locks, so we girls took turns in keeping vigil. They did not have electricity. We came out when they stopped shelling and charged our phones in metro stations. We were more afraid after (student) Naveen's death. I lost weight struggling for food."
Sivashankari and several other students finally managed to board an evacuation train to Lviv, which is close to the Ukraine-Poland border, on March 1. "The Ukrainians in Kharkiv were nice to us during our stay for years. But as the assault began on the city, we felt like they did not want us to leave in order to ensure their safety. The Ukrainians fleeing the city did not let us board the train and even started assaulting our fellow Indian students, as they rushed to take a seat. It was scary. We barely survived the trip. We were relieved only after we crossed the Ukraine-Poland border and set foot in Warsaw," she said.
While Sivashankari's father V Anbazhagan is a retired health department employee, her mother Jayakshmi is a government teacher. One of Sivashankari's sisters is pursuing medicine at JIPMER in Puducherry while the other is in Class XI. Sivashankari stressed that she doesn’t want her sisters to undergo what she went through.
'House owner helped'
"My apartment owner had taken shelter in a bunker with her children. She had limited supplies but still gave me food and took care of me," said T Saroja, a MBBS student who fled from Vinnytsia