The City I Love is Called Odessa

With war bearing down on her family in Ukraine, Alexandra Gizhitsa Anderson gave them a pathway to hope. The experience changed her as well.

From the Fall 2022 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

By Steve Neumann

“The city I love is called Odessa,” Alexandra Anderson said, “and tomorrow is the 100th day of the war.”

That was Alexandra Gizhitsa Anderson, a Ukrainian-American who immigrated to the United States in 2005 and lives in Southington, speaking back in June at the Slava Ukraini telethon in support of the people of Ukraine, hosted by the School of Communication, Media & the Arts at Sacred Heart University.

A former graduate student at SHU, Anderson recounted the nerve-racking story of how she traveled back to Ukraine during the 2022 Russian invasion to rescue her mother, sister and brother as the fighting spread to their home city of Odessa. In the process, Anderson and the people she marshaled to help her ended up evacuating over 300 Ukrainian refugees.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, after months of troop buildup along the Ukrainian border with Russia and Belarus. At the time, U.S. intelligence officials believed Russia intended to “decapitate” Ukraine’s government and install its own and predicted the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv would fall within 96 hours.

The current conflict goes back at least to 2014 when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea. Expert consensus, however, seems to be that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been fixated on reclaiming some semblance of the empire that was lost with the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, with Ukraine central to that vision.

The worst Russian aggressions to date came during March of 2022 when the port city of Mariupol was leveled in what the Red Cross called an “apocalyptic” scene.

“I think they decided to make an example out of Mariupol because it was supposed to be captured by Russia in 2014,” Anderson says. “But even though it’s full of Russian speakers, the people in Mariupol consider themselves Ukrainian.”

While atrocities were happening in Mariupol, the situation started getting precarious in Odessa, too.

“I was texting with my mom and sister every single day,” Anderson says. “One time they were sitting in their living room with our little brother when the siren went off.”

Anderson is referring to an app that she and other Ukrainians could download on their phones that serves as a mobile air raid warning. “The siren means that bombs and rockets are flying right at my family,” Anderson says, “and that means they have 30 seconds to get from upstairs into the basement.”

Despite the shock of the initial invasion, Anderson’s mother, Iryna, was reluctant to leave her beloved city. She only made the final decision to evacuate when a Russian bomb landed near her home in Odessa Oblast.

The only way to get out of Odessa at the time was either by evacuation bus route or railway, because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had declared martial law, and no cars were allowed on the main roads. So Iryna packed up her daughter, Yevheniia, and son, Misha—and the two family dogs, Monya and Zhasya—and headed for the train station in Odessa. Along the way, she collected two neighboring families, bringing the grand total of evacuees to four adults and 14 children. When they finally made it to the train station, all 18 people, as well as the two little dogs, packed into a tiny private car for the 22-hour ride to the Polish border.

“They just sat together with the kids on their laps,” Anderson says, “and that’s how they left Odessa.”

Meanwhile, Anderson was making plans for a flight to Poland to meet her family, but while on her way to JFK Airport, she learned from her mother that a Russian bomb took out the railway line her evacuation train was on, causing it to be rerouted.

“Now I’m not going to Poland anymore; I’m going to Romania,” Anderson says, “and then I’m taking a car to drive for five hours through Romania, Hungary and then finally Slovakia.”

When Anderson landed in Romania, she immediately found a volunteer center and secured two drivers willing to make the trek with her through three countries to pick up her family. “What I remember from that night is that gradually the suburbs turned into countryside, then the countryside turned into a wooded area, then all I can see is thick woods around us and this tiny trail,” Anderson says.

And then, suddenly, a checkpoint, with a mass of barricades surrounded by armed military forces and a helicopter with spotlights flying overhead. At first Anderson thought they might have driven too far, but there was no place for the drivers to turn the cars around at that point.

“These soldiers are pretty scary looking,” Anderson says. “They’re dressed in full gear, holding these big guns in their hands, and they start walking over to us, motioning for us to stop.”

One soldier came forward and asked what they were doing there, and Anderson replied that they were just looking to pick up her family.

“Then the other guy who was holding this massive machine gun says, ‘Oh, welcome! Your families are down there to the right, in the parking lot.’ The military had fires going and hot food, and then there was my mom and everyone wearing these super warm military fleece jackets, since it was negative 10 at the time.”

After an emotional reunion, everyone prepared to drive back to Hungary to stay at an Airbnb and begin the process of eventually coming to America. However, on the way to their temporary housing, some of Anderson’s other Ukrainian contacts began calling her, asking if she could help them find drivers, evacuate their families and secure housing.

“It was a complete mess,” Anderson says, “but in this chaos, we ended up evacuating close to 360 people in total.”

Reflecting on what led the Russian people in general to support their country’s invasion of their neighbor, Anderson has no definitive answer—but she has an educated guess, and it’s related to the evolution of Russian media since her childhood in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union.

Anderson was young when Putin first became president. She doesn’t have much memory of him from those days. What she does recall is that many Russians, including some close family and friends, considered him at the time to be a strong leader who would restore faith in the government.

Growing up, Anderson remembers friends from Russia who would come as tourists to visit her fair city by the sea. Families came for entire summers, with all the kids—both Russian and Ukrainian—mingling at the beach from morning to night.

When the current invasion began, Anderson had a talk with Russian friend Viktoria Vagapova, who is also an American citizen and one of her neighbors in Southington. “She told me she wanted nothing to do with Putin,” Anderson says. “She said she doesn’t know anything about Russian politics, but that people for over 20 years have been worked on by the state media there so much.

“Now there’s a view of President Putin as a God-ordained figure. It’s a very weird situation.”

Whatever the reason for the Russian population’s support for the invasion of Ukraine, one thing is certain: the war has changed Anderson’s perspective on the current nature of civil discourse.

“Today, Americans jump on each other with such hatred,” Anderson says. “I don’t think I’ve done it to an extreme extent ever, but I do remember being very comfortable taking a side; now I don’t even want to engage in an argument.”

Not that she has the time to argue anyway. Since she returned home in March, she’s been working nonstop to provide what support she can to the people of her home nation for as long as the war drags on, including becoming an expert in the processes of Uniting for Ukraine, the U.S. government program that enables Ukrainian citizens and their immediate family members to come to the United States and stay temporarily for a two-year period.

“Ninety-nine percent of everything I do now is in the United States,” Anderson says. “What we can do for people here revolves around housing assistance, learning English and getting kids in schools.”

Thankfully, her own small town of Southington has been more than willing to experiment with various solutions.

“They want to see what kind of aid they can offer the refugees,” she says, “what our school districts can do, how we can waive certain requirements and how we all can collaborate together in a strongly bipartisan way.”

For Anderson, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has had a “time is a flat circle” aspect to it. Both sides of her family have experienced the death, suffering and displacement of invasions in Europe before. Though no one on her father’s side of the family has been in Ukraine for years, Anderson says that side of the family was quite large before World War II, when they lost close to 75% of their family.

“My great-grandparents fought against the communist army in Odessa. My grandparents fought against the Nazis in Odessa,” Anderson says. “In the 1980s, Solzhenitsyn wrote about the horrors of the world wars and the Soviet Union invasions. And now, 40 years later, we’re back at it. Like we forgot it all.

“But my hope is that we continue supporting Ukraine as a country,” she adds. “I am probably more American now than I am Ukrainian, but my heart has always been in Odessa.”