Yuliia Stupak still can’t believe her luck with all the people she has met this past year. Thanks to them, the Ukrainian native now lives in Nijmegen, and she recently got a job at Radboud University’s department of International Marketing & Recruitment.

Yuliia Stupak (26) rolls up her sleeve to show the tattoo on her upper left arm: a cute little house with a heart-shape on the roof. She got it to remember her coming to Nijmegen. The tattoo symbolises not only her fresh start, but also the amazing hospitality with which she was greeted.

She’s still blown away by it: how a young couple, who did not know her at all, could just take her in, sight unseen. The pair – a young French teacher and a biology student – were living together in student housing on the St. Anna Street. They volunteered to offer housing to a Ukrainian refugee with the Red Cross in early 2022, where Yuliia was registered as ‘seeking’.

‘We matched, and then met up in a café’, Yuliia remembers. ‘I pictured an older couple: people with lots of space who would not mind letting a stranger into their lives. But then I met Adrian and Pien: two people of around my age, who shared two rooms in a house with seven other people. They said they would let me have their bedroom.’

Then they asked if Yuliia wanted to see the room first. Of course not, she thought; she just wanted to grab this opportunity and go with them, to find a place with these two smiling people sitting across from her.

‘I could hardly believe it. They invited a complete stranger into their home! They sacrificed their privacy for my sake. After all the misery that came my way when fleeing Ukraine, I found such kindness. What had I done to earn their trust?’

Yuliia packed her things and moved to the St. Annastraat. Now employed at Radboud University, she still lives there, but in a room of her own – another housemate moved away, and Yuliia could take his place. Pien and Adrian are now her downstairs neighbours and best friends. Yuliia beams and says: ‘we’re having so much fun’.

War

But the story of Yuliia Stupak, who graduated in international economics, does not have quite such a romantic beginning. On the morning of February 24, 2022, she opened her phone to fifteen missed calls and dozens of messages. What happened? She tried to contact her family, but the lines were overloaded. ‘It’s so silly, I usually never turn my phone off at night’, she says. ‘But I had just started a new job and I was very tired; that’s why I did it that time.’

Eventually she managed to get hold of her uncle. ‘The war’s begun’, he told her. Yuliia was shocked. ‘Yes, there had been talk of war for the past few days, but she didn’t believe the rumours. Didn’t they live in the 21^st century, in a civilised world? She simply couldn’t imagine that the Russians would really bomb their neighbours.

‘After that, I called my mother, who told me she was coming to pick me up, and I had fifteen minutes to grab some essentials.’

Yuliia lived in Kiev at the time. Her mother drove up to her place, leaving the engine running, and that’s the last time Yuliia saw her house. ‘The streets were eerily quiet. We went to stay at my grandmother’s place, a hundred kilometres away. But we forgot that her place was very close to a military base, which was bombed that very night. It was my first time in a bomb shelter, and it was terrifying.’

‘We had to cross a border as soon as possible’

It became clear that they had to get out of the country. Yuliia’s mother had some friends in Düsseldorf where they could stay. ‘We had to cross a border as soon as possible, but the Polish border already had a lot of traffic. We also didn’t have a lot of petrol in the tank, because the pump stations couldn’t get resupplied. We drove to the Moldovan border and crossed there.’

They passed several checkpoints on the road in Ukraine, but two women with cats in the back seat tend to look harmless, so they were let through each time.

Yuliia kept working in the car, with her laptop and phone close at hand. It made for a very surreal situation, but she had just been hired by a British company in Ukraine, and she didn’t want to disappoint her new team. She kept attending online meetings, even once they reached Düsseldorf.

After a couple of weeks, the two women wound up in a house in Kleef. ‘I realised it was unrealistic to continue working in Ukraine. I had to find a job in Germany, but my German was not ideal to that point. Somebody asked me why I didn’t look for work in the Netherlands; it was only a few kilometres away, and everyone spoke English there.’

Yuliia was interested, but on her first job application she realised that she was registered in Germany and thus couldn’t work in the Netherlands. ‘I went to Nijmegen city hall to ask how I could change that. Luckily, I just happened to meet someone who managed a refugee shelter, who was looking for an interpreter to help those Ukrainians who didn’t speak English. I would translate for him, and he would take care of my registration; it was a perfect deal.’

She told her mother that she would be moving to Nijmegen, and got a bed in the dorm of a refugee shelter at the Tweede Walstraat. In the shelter, she stayed among other Ukrainians and also refugees from Africa and Asia.

Survival mode

Yuliia stops talking for a second to catch her breath. She stares out the window of the conference room with a view of the campus; it’s a lovely, clear day outside. Looking back, she was in survival mode, she thinks aloud. The most important things in her life were food, shelter, and work. She was like a wind-up toy that just kept going. But she did get everything done. Meeting Pien and Adrian was a turning point because it allowed her space for herself. ‘I met their friends, and developed a social network. They even brought me to meet their family at Christmas.’

She saw several Radboud brochures at Pien’s place and started looking into the university. Would she be able to get a job there? She applied for a job at the department of international marketing and student recruitment. She was hired, not even three months aftercoming to The Netherlands.

‘The job was four days a week, which took some getting used to; in Ukraine, everyone works full-time.’ But if there is one thing she has learned, it’s how to adapt; it’s the big upside to this whole adventure. ‘I have decided to be open-minded, the way I see Dutch people. Ukrainians tend to be more conservative, but I like the Dutch attitude; I fit in. I also appreciate your directness.’ Yuliia will be starting a Dutch course with In’to Languages in March.

Yuliia is barely in contact with other people from Ukraine – except for her mother, who went back to Kyiv with Yuliia’s cat, because she missed her home too much. Yuliia’s friends and the rest of the family are still in the middle of a war, while she only witnessed it for a couple of days. Keeping in touch with them is sometimes close to impossible as they are trying to keep their lives going between constant shelling, air-raid sirens and regular power outages.

‘I focus on the present and the near future’, she says. Of course, she also carries the war with her, but for the moment it’s locked up in a little box inside her head. Yuliia wants to keep the box closed for now, because she’s not yet ready to look its contents in the eye. ‘That is how I cope. The tattoo reminds me of my new home. I am my home.’

‘The tattoo reminds me of my new home’

Yuliia has resolved to meet the kindness that has come her way in the Netherlands with more kindness; just by being nice to people, and helping out where she can.

Her housemates Pien and Adrian were married last summer, and of course Yuliia was in attendance. ‘I was allowed to do her make-up’, she laughs. Her apartment in Kiev is currently empty. Yuliia does not know if she will ever be able to come back and find her house complete and undamaged.