“I never felt this kind of fear before. I had panic attacks. Outside the window, I heard explosions,” began Dima Belyi. “We come from Bucha, Kyiv region. I have been married to my wife for seven years, and we have a two-year-old daughter.”
Dima was working as the director of photography at Hope Channel Ukraine. “Bucha is a wonderful city for young families. We were living happily here,” he explained.
Then, suddenly, the war began.
“We heard explosions outside. I quickly took a few blankets, wrapped my daughter, wrapped my wife, and ran away … but we didn’t know where to run because explosions occur everywhere, and you are always an open target.”
The Belyi family decided to hide in the basement and tried to keep calm. “It was important for us to keep our daughter’s mental state as stable as possible. We constantly heard artillery fire; we heard machine-gun fire; and we prayed a lot about how to get out.”
Finally, they were able to contact their brethren from the church. The church had left a car in Bucha and gave it to Dima so he could take his family out.
“We were miraculously let through by the military to get to the car [and] through the city,” explained Dima. “People panicked a lot, so I realised I had to coordinate a procession to leave the city. Forty people were able to gather and get out of the [line of] fire.”
The Belyi family was able to leave Bucha and find shelter in a safe area. “We don’t know what comes next. We lost everything, but we believe that God will not leave us.”
Adrian Duré, producer and documentary filmmaker for Hope Media Europe, and his team were at the border between Ukraine and Romania during these last days and produced a few stories of people entering into Europe and looking for safe places on our continent.
Duré and his team got a request from Hope Channel International to do a mini-series of short films focused on stories of people leaving the country. This series is a part of the global Hope Channel and ADRA Campaign called “HOPE FOR UKRAINE”.
This article was originally published on the Inter-European Division’s news site