SUCEAVA: As Olga Okhrimenko walked into a bustling ballroom-turned-refugee shelter at a four-star Romanian hotel, her corgi, Knolly, strained at the leash anxiously seeking the warmth inside. It had taken them three days to flee Ukraine by car, bus and taxi in the bitter cold.

The 34-year-old Ukrainian marketing manager could hardly contain her emotions, and a simple are you OK? filled her eyes with tears she thought she no longer had.

The first refugees began arriving more than a week ago at the Mandachi Hotel and Spa in Suceava in Romania, where the owner decided to make the lavish, 850-square-meter ballroom available to them. Since then, more than 2,000 people and 100 pets have taken shelter here, with row upon row of numbered mattresses under an incongruous glittering disco ball.

They are part of the swiftest refugee exodus so far this century, in which more than 1.7 million people have fled Ukraine in just 10 days, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. Since the war started on Feb. 24, more than 227,000 Ukrainians have crossed into neighboring Romania, according to local authorities.

Like Okhrimenko, some of the refugees at the Mandachi have fled cities on the front lines of the war.

Whenever somebody asks me where I am from, and I say Kharkiv, their expression, its like I arrived from Hiroshima, Okhrimenko told The Associated Press from mattress number 60. Then, I remember everything going on there and I break down.

After five days of shelling, she decided to flee Kharkiv on March 1 with Knolly, a couple of friends and their two cats. Their car passed by the citys central Freedom Square just 20 minutes before it was engulfed by a giant ball of fire in a Russian military strike. It was difficult for me before to say Im a great patriot of my land, she said. But on Feb. 24, I became one 100%.

As she spoke, volunteers on megaphones interrupted several times to announce buses leaving for Italy, Germany, Bulgaria and other European nations. The room was chaotic, filled mostly with women and children, as men stayed in Ukraine to fight. Some spoke Russian, underlining the sense of a war on family.

The majority of the refugees were Ukrainian, but there were also Nigerians, Moroccans, Italians, Chinese and Iranians. Toddlers cried in the arms of exhausted mothers, who took deep breaths to calm their children and themselves. Cats and dogs of all sizes shared beds with their owners, and one stressed Chihuahua with bulging eyes bit anyone who attempted to pet it.

Some 300 volunteers, translators and social workers take turns to help here. In the mornings, they change the mismatched sheets on vacated mattresses, placing a reserved or free handwritten sign over them. In the reception area, the two bars display not alcohol but an array of diapers, toothbrushes, snacks and even surgical masks and disinfectant gel.

At the opposite end of the King Salon, at mattress number 82 near stacks of red velvet chairs, 85-year-old Nellya Nahorna sat in silence combing her gray hair with her fingers.

It was the second time this Ukrainian grandmother had fled war. In 1941, when she was just 4 years old, Nahorna was injured by shrapnel in Nazi Germanys invasion of Ukraine, she said.

Published in Dawn, March 8th, 2022