She has driven roughly the same route before, says Alina, after looking at the route on Google Maps.

From the Ukrainian-Slovakian border crossing at Vyšné Nemecké it is to go via Košice in Slovakia to the Czech border, via Brno and Prague to Nuremberg and finally to Frankfurt.

The 41-year-old Ukrainian says that she and her husband were vacationing in Germany ten years ago.

France Wittenbrink

Editor in Politics.

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Now she's sitting with her two young sons, five and seven years old, in a car full of people she's never seen before — and embarking on a journey she didn't want to start until the very end.

"If I was alone, I might have stayed with my husband," she says.

"But the children must be safe."

For Alina it is day eight of her escape from the war in Ukraine.

Her husband took her and her two sons by car to the Slovakian border, and they drove across the country from the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, always heading west.

They had been on the road day and night to make their way through the never-ending traffic jams.

When it got dark, they put the children to sleep in the blanket-covered footwell, sometimes that was better, sometimes worse.

When the war broke out, he rescheduled

Maxim, the smaller of the two, has an almost uncontrollable urge to move.

Alina has long since given up on buckling him up.

Again and again he bangs on the window panes, tries to jump from one seat to the other, starts screaming or drums on his mother's upper body.

"At least he couldn't run away from us in the car," says Alina, stroking her son's head.

"But now it's time for us to arrive."

Kevin Skrandies is at the wheel of the minibus that will take Alina, her two sons and another woman and their child to Germany that night.

For the 32-year-old firefighter, the story began two days earlier in Rosbach near Frankfurt with a Facebook post: "Hello friends, tomorrow morning I'm going to the Slovakian-Ukrainian border to drive refugees from the border region to Germany.

The whole thing is organized by Mission Lifeline eV I still need a passenger with a valid driver’s license.”

Thomas Hurrle, a friend from our youth, answers.

Because of the pandemic, the 29-year-old Lufthansa pilot is on short-time work, has time — and was looking for a way to help anyway.

A few hours later he's in the car at Skrandies', with a load of water bottles in the trunk, food, several child seats, a few diapers - and the journey begins.

It was immediately clear to him that he had to do something, says Skrandies, as he steers the car into the parking lot of a Czech rest stop around noon for the first break.

He actually bought the van to travel across the Balkans with his wife and young son.

Then war broke out in Ukraine and he changed his plans.

In the first few days he sat in front of the news without a break and could hardly concentrate on other things.

"I'm really not the sentimental type," says Skrandies.

Because of his job, he is used to suffering and can talk about dead bodies that he fished out of the Main, about serious traffic accidents and people who died in fires.

"But this horror that's happening a few hundred miles away from us — that's something else again.

Nobody can stand that."