LAMS teacher Inna Bohn with her mother Lyubov Girman safely out of Ukraine and in the airport in Bucharest, Romania in March waiting to fly home. Courtesy photo
By CAROL A. CLARK
Los Alamos Daily Post
caclark@ladailypost.com
“The scariest moment for me was not knowing how things would work out logistically,” said Los Alamos Middle School teacher Inna Bohn during a recent interview with the Los Alamos Daily Post. “I like to plan things out, but I had no idea if my mom would have the stamina … and I was getting conflicting information … some people said she would be there at the border for two or three days. But I was standing at the border, and in just 10 minutes she came walking out … I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
Bohn is a teacher in the English Language Learner Program (ELL) at the middle school. She spoke of her childhood in Ukraine and recounted details of how she traveled to the Ukrainian border last month to rescue her ailing mother and of the incredibly kind people who helped her along the way.
“I was born and grew up in Zaporizhia, a big regional center in Eastern Ukraine, located on both banks of the Dnieper river, famous for its Khortitsa Island, the former center of the freedom-loving Cossack Republic, as well as for the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe,” Bohn said. “I met my husband Kevin Bohn on christianmingle.com. He is from Wisconsin, we have been married 13 years and he works at Los Alamos National Laboratory.”
Bohn explained that her mother was born in 1947 and had lived in their cozy apartment in downtown Zaporizhia since age 16.
“It’s where she and my father got married, it’s where my sister and I were born and grew up, it’s where my grandparents peacefully died. It’s a place full of sweet and dear memories, of her loving and creative touch, surrounded by mom’s flowers and the tall and shady walnut trees that my father planted,” Bohn said.
In November of 2021, Bohn dropped everything she was doing in Los Alamos and rushed to Ukraine because her father was taken to the ICU with COVID-19. Her mother contracted COVID as well.
“After 16 days of agony my father passed away,” Bohn said. “No one was allowed to see him, alive or dead. My disabled mother, a cancer survivor, now a COVID survivor, became a widow, crushed with grief and loneliness. That same year of 2021 my mother lost her last living sibling (her sister) and her sister’s husband due to COVID, her nephew (their son), and my father’s brother who passed away on Christmas morning.”
Bohn began the immigration process for her mother in December of 2021. It was going well, she said, and was being expedited due to her mother’s frail health. They were ready for her mother’s visa interview, when, because of the impending war, the U.S. Embassy in Kiev packed up and left without explaining future prospects to the visa applicants.
Bohn and her sister, who lives in Texas, had hoped to go to Ukraine in the summer to help their mother pack her belongings and sell her property before flying her to the U.S. as a legal resident.
“Our plans were in shambles, and we felt stuck,” Bohn recalled. “Three weeks before the war I had a bad dream. There were rowdy men in black leather jackets in my uncle’s apartment, and my parents’ apartment was completely blocked by ruins. It gave me a strong gut feeling that the war was coming, and our plans had to change.”
Bohn and her sister began speaking with their mother about evacuating right away, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Her health was failing, she didn’t want the stress and the uncertainty of a long journey, she didn’t want to lose all her possessions.
“My mom was clinging to the familiar and honestly didn’t fully believe that the war would happen or that it would get so bad,” Bohn said. “Since the start of the war on Feb. 24 we have all felt like we are living in a bad unending dream. Every morning I would rush to call and check on mom, with air sirens wailing in my cell phone. I kept pushing her to agree to leave, she kept multiplying reasons not to. My cousin joined the local territorial defense unit. Many of the local friends and neighbors left. Evacuation trains were packed with refugees like herrings in a jar. Getting out was becoming more and more difficult. Out of all evacuation venues, escaping by car as part of a humanitarian convoy was mom’s only chance.”
A dear old friend of Bohn’s, Andrey, was director of “Athletes in Action” Christian Ministry in Ukraine. He had evacuated his wife and two children to Hungary and stayed in Ukraine to help, unable to leave anyway due to his age. He felt compelled to organize a rescue team of volunteers like him. They secured a Jeep and a few buses. They thoughtfully organized every step of the journey, Bohn said. They secured financial donations, guns for protection, food, gasoline, first aid medications, places to stay at night for the evacuees. They would load their buses with humanitarian aid in Western Ukraine, take it east and deliver it to the war-ridden areas. They would pick up evacuees in the east and bring them to the Romanian border, then repeat the process for the next wave of evacuees.
“Andrey offered to get my mom out and promised to treat her like his own mother,” Bohn said. “Sadly, his own mother was stuck in a small village in the Kharkiv region, occupied by the Russian horde. He had begged her to leave, she refused, and he lost all connection with her. Overcome with grief and constant worry for her, he was compelled to help my mom. Finally, my mom reluctantly agreed to try. We asked her to take a baby step – travel to the neighboring city of Dnipro (one hour north) and stay there for a week at the house of her former pastor whom she loves dearly like her own son, wait it out, and then go back home if she wanted. She took a small bag with her, and my cousin drove her to Dnipro on Friday, March 11.”
On the morning Bohn’s mother left, the Russians resumed bombing Dnipro. There were explosions 15 minutes away from where her mother was riding in a car. She began realizing that she was not safe in Dnipro and agreed to travel further. Her pastor Sergey drove her further north, where she joined Andrey’s convoy and started her long journey west, along with other refugees.
“This is when Andrey called me and told me to fly to Romania immediately and be ready to receive my mom at the border. I left my husband, three school age kids, my job at LAMS and flew to Bucharest,” Bohn said. “I was not sure how long it would take to finalize mom’s visa process and when we would be able to fly back. The community support was amazing. I was flooded with monetary gifts, free tickets, helpful contacts in Romania, prayers, and encouraging words. I have never been to Romania before, nor do I speak any Romanian. It was nothing more than a country on the map.”
When Bohn arrived in Bucharest March 14, she was met by a Lutheran pastor named Sorin, whom she had never met. They had connected on Facebook the week before her trip, and he offered to be her guide and host. They drove all the way north to the Romanian-Ukrainian border (a nine hour trip). The arrived at 10 a.m. Tuesday, March 15, at the Ukrainian border. By that time her mother had been on her journey for several days.
“The police guards wouldn’t let our car close to the border checkpoint due to human trafficking concerns, so we got a ride with a humanitarian worker who had a special permit,” Bohn said. “I was also told that there was no way they would let me, a U.S. citizen, cross to the Ukrainian side. I had to wait there. The border area was amazingly organized. There were rows and rows of booths with hot food, free supplies, multiple buses ready to take refugees where they needed to go, there were counselors and free SIM-cards for cell phones.”
Representatives of each and every Christian denomination were there as well, Bohn recalled, as well as from many secular organizations.
“We stood at the checkpoint gate for 10 minutes only, and, lo and behold, I saw my mom hobbling. When she saw me, she took off … we hugged and cried.” Bohn said. “Pastor Sorin took us to his house. Mom had PTSD symptoms. She would startle and cringe at the sound of any siren and have night terrors. While she was resting, I tried to figure out how we were supposed to get her a visa. It turned out that immigration cases like mom’s had been transferred to Frankfurt, Germany, and according to the new rules, we were supposed to travel to Germany and wait there for weeks or even months for our case to be processed.”
Bohn remembered thinking that long of a wait would be impossible with mother’s fragile physical and emotional state and her family and job commitments in Los Alamos. She wrote to the senators from New Mexico, and the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest asking them to take her mother’s case and process it quickly. The office of Ben Ray Lujan responded quickly and sent an expedite request to the Embassy in Bucharest on her behalf, Bohn said, adding that as a result, her mother’s visa was processed in a week.
“My mom and I moved to Bucharest on March 19, to be closer to the Embassy, where we were blessed with another amazing host named Cami,” Bohn said. “She is an American who has lived in Romania with her husband for 22 years. Their family helps orphans and rescues trafficked women. Cami is an amazing go-getter, she is never discouraged, she speaks Romanian, is a red tape expert and masterful driver in horrendous Bucharest traffic.”
With Cami’s prompt help, Bohn’s mother had her medical examination Wednesday, March 23, visa interview Monday, March 28, received her passport with her visa Tuesday March 29, and Bohn and her mother we allowed to fly to the U.S. on Wednesday, March 30, “with the business class tickets purchased by an amazing and generous friend of a friend whose name I don’t even know”.
Bohn’s mother is staying at Bohn’s sister’s home in Texas, waiting to move in with the Bohns in Los Alamos in June.
“She is doing so much better! I stand in awe of God orchestrating this whirlwind of a trip for my mom and am grateful for the amazing friends and total strangers who took part in this crazy undertaking,” Bohn said. “It truly takes a village to rescue a mom.”
Now, looking back, Bohn said she is realizing that the scariest part of the ordeal to rescue her mother was not what she had said during her recent interview with the Post.
“The scariest part was mom not agreeing to leave (she changed her mind several times and I was afraid that she would end up choosing to stay), and her long and physically strenuous drive across Ukraine that took several days with the constant threat of bombing, shelling and sickness (she has a compromised immune system as a cancer survivor),” Bohn said. “I was afraid she wouldn’t make it to the border alive, and their convoy would be shot or bombed, which happened to others, or that she would get sick without access to medical care.”
Bohn recalled a quote that conveys what she wants to say to the Los Alamos community:
“Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.” –Tolkien ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’
As for what she wants to tell the world, Bohn said, “Be brave like Ukraine. Stand up for and with Ukraine. Grieve with Ukraine. Don’t think it is not your war. Pray, give, show hospitality, seek to know the truth, fight for freedom and justice where you are, find ways to get to know and encourage your Ukrainian friends and neighbors.”