East Falls Woman Returns Home To Philadelphia After Taking Care Of Ailing Mother In Ukraine
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- An East Falls woman just returned home from Ukraine where she went on a harrowing journey to get her mother to safety. On Saturday night, CBS3 spoke with the woman who left eight days after the bombings started.
"I asked her, 'Mom, please wait for the victory, wait for the victory,'" Valentyna Levytsky said.
That plea is one of the last things Levytsky said to her mother as the Russian invasion forced them to flee her home in Kyiv.
"We left everything," she said. "I just grabbed basic needs."
The two of them as well as her brother loaded up a car and started a treacherous 200-mile journey to safety in the western city of Lviv.
"We didn't realize how difficult will be our journey," Levytsky said.
Normally a short trip, this took nearly 15 hours as routes blocked by the Russian army prompted Ukrainian soldiers to redirect them.
"I was able to track her pretty much the whole way and I could see them heading west and the next thing you know they were heading south," Sean Moir said.
Back in Philadelphia, Moir could only hope for the best for his wife.
Text messages between the two say, "I need you to be safe." She responds, "I'll do my best."
"We knew it was dangerous but when I started looking and seeing where they drove compared to where the fighting was, it was a lot more dangerous than any of us knew at the time," Moir said.
Levytsky eventually made it safely to Lviv, then Warsaw, and finally on Friday to Newark International Airport.
"For at least a couple minutes there was no sadness at all, it was just all joy and happiness," Moir said.
Sadly, her ailing mother died back in Ukraine.
Born in 1942 during the Nazi occupation, she warned her children about the dangers of war and the likelihood of history repeating itself.
"I'm very sorry that she was right, she was right," Levytsky said. "This fear of war chased her, her whole life and I'm afraid that we will be the same."
Levytsky and Moir say they are doing all they can to help people still in Ukraine. They say they have no doubt that peace will return.
