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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Kateryna Kapustenenko went to Poland to help Ukrainian children and there she met her future daughters Anastasiia and Ksenia. They had been taken from their biological family, spent a long time in a shelter, and after the start of the full-scale war they were evacuated to Poland. The woman told her story to the "Voices of the Peaceful" museum, the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation website reported.
According to the Foundation, the music teacher from Kharkiv helped evacuate people at the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Later she moved to Poland, where she worked with Ukrainian children from institutional care facilities.
"We saw teenagers who couldn’t read, write, or even understand Ukrainian well. Then we realized we needed to create a school. We managed to open a Ukrainian school right in the hotel," Kateryna says.
While working, she met two sisters from Odesa region. According to Kateryna, she gradually realized she wanted to become a mother to the girls.
"Literally in the second week my Ksyusha came up, hugged me and said, ‘Will you be my mom?’" the woman recalled.
Kateryna said that after that she decided to begin the adoption process. However, at that time she was an internally displaced person, living in Warsaw and did not have her own housing. In addition, the adoption procedure during the full-scale war was restricted.
"At that time I was in Warsaw, I had no housing, there was no option to take them. Plus it’s a 2023 year. I asked their caretaker how I could do it all, and she said adoption is prohibited until the end of the war. And then the despair was strong, because you understand, a year, two, three passed, and you can’t do anything," Kapustenenko recalled.
Later, she said, she learned that the sisters were planned to be placed with another family. After that she went to Odesa and continued arranging the necessary documents for adoption.
One of the daughters, Ksenia, spoke about how their relationship gradually changed.
"As soon as I saw her, I understood: she’s focused, kind, great and funny. I wanted to spend more time with her. At first we couldn’t say ‘mom’ and ‘you’ directly, we were still learning. But now I’m used to it. She’s my mom," Ksenia said.
You can read Kateryna and her daughters’ story on the museum’s portal.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item ""Шлях від евакуації до материнства." Музей "Голоси Мирних" зберігає історію Катерини Капустенко". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Gordon.
