Reddy Nomula Satya Sreeja of Visakhapatnam and some other Indian students, who were holed up in a bunker at Kharkiv National Medical University (KNMU) in Ukraine for five days, finally came out of it and boarded a train to Lviv, located at a distance of 1,017 km, on Tuesday.
Ms. Sreeja had sent an SOS message late on Monday night that the situation was getting from bad to worse, and that they could hear the sound of shelling near the area in which their bunker was located.
“We don’t have water to drink and food to eat. There is no proper signal to contact and our parents are worried about us. The distance from Kharkiv to Hungary is 1,637 km, to Poland 1,403 km and to Romania 1,283 km,” she said.
Ms. Sreeja appealed to the officials of the Indian Embassy to arrange a bus or train for their evacuation to the borders.
Ms. Sreeja, who is pursuing her first year medical education at KNMU, had been bold from the day the war began. She had been calling her parents and reassuring them that the situation was not as bad in their area and she was safe in the bunker, and that the university authorities were taking care of their food and water requirements.
On Sunday, when the situation began getting worse, Ms. Sreeja shot a video clip on her phone about the problems she and other Indian students were facing in the bunker, and appealed to the Indian Government for help. All of 19 years, she spoke boldly on behalf of all the students.
The parents of Indian students were worried as satellite news channels brought live visuals of the bombing of various cities in the war-torn nation. The death of an Indian student, Naveen, from Karnataka, in the shelling at Kharkiv compounded the anxiety of the parents.
“There are 48 Indian students, and 24 of them, including Ms. Sreeja, have left by the 8 a.m. train and an equal number of them are scheduled to take another train at noon from Kharkiv to Lviv. She told us that the Indian officials would arrange them food and water at Lviv and transport by bus from there to Poland or Hungary,” Ms. Sreeja’s father Arjuna Rao told The Hindu on Tuesday night.
“The students are expected to reach Lviv by Wednesday morning and from there it could take another four to five hours to reach the border,” he says.
