AOSTA. “I have never seen such solidarity from the people”, cries of happiness Nadiia, a Ukrainian employee of the Sertorelli Sport Hotel in Cervinia, where she is responsible for the recreational activities. When we reach her she is in the car with Egidio Sertorelli, the owner of the hotel, returning from Krakow where they went together to retrieve her daughter Anna, who fled from Kiev.
Nadiia is now one of the family at the Hotel Sertorelli. She has been working there for many years and she speaks Italian well. Her two children live in the Ukrainian capital: Anna is 31 years old is an architect, while her twin Maxim is an anesthetist and has remained in her country to serve the homeland. «After two days hidden in a shelter – says mother Nadiia – thanks to the humanitarian corridor Anna she managed to reach the Polish border of Korczowa. She left with two friends: halfway, about a hundred kilometers from the border, she stopped for the night in a farmhouse in the middle of the Lviv countryside with seven other people. The last stretch was the hardest: 18 km on foot in the mud, dragging the suitcase, queuing up in the cold with thousands of other desperate people fleeing the war ».
A humanitarian tragedy which however revealed a positive side: «The hearts of the volunteers in Ukraine, who accompany women and children to the crossings, helping them for what they can: blankets, food, comfort items. And also the Polish border police, which facilitates the entry of displaced persons in every way, even without documents ».
Egidio Sertorelli in his hotel with the blue ski Federica Brignone
Anna sits in the back seat, she doesn’t speak Italian but suggests to her mother who translates for us: “It was enough for me to say that I had my mother who was picking me up from Italy and they let me pass right away”. You repeat that the Poles “are exceptional”. Perhaps because they know very well what war is, having lived it on their skin: certainly their fathers and their grandfathers.
“At the border, Polish volunteers sort out the refugees huddled in queues under the snow – he says -. Mothers with children on one side, me and other students in another corridor. Just outside the border there are shuttle buses that transport refugees to the nearest towns. A driver who works in Germany accompanied me to Krakow: there were four of us, and he didn’t even charge us for the fare. I will thank him forever, he and also the hotel outside Krakow that hosted us all for free: students, elderly people and mothers with children, some still in diapers ».
The most moving thing was the hug with my mother Nadiia in the hotel: “An image that will stay with me forever,” says Egidio Sertorelli, his voice broken by emotion. Before leaving the hotel, he wanted to give the refugees what she had in the trunk: “a torch, a jacket and some money”.
Tonight Anna will sleep safely in a hotel in Cervinia, where six of her fellow countrymen already work, including her mother. Ukrainians are the third foreign community in Valle d’Aosta: “All kind and super professional”, explains Sertorelli, a leading figure in Italian skiing, having been first an athlete and then coach of the national team between 1976 and 1980, at the time of the Blue Avalanche.
The Sport Hotel Sertorelli is the hotel with the highest density of Ukrainian workers in all the Alps: among them there is also the former luge Olympian Andriy Kis, now 39, who was struck by Italy when he participated in the Olympics in Turin 2006. After competing in the Sochi Winter Games, he decided to move permanently to the Alps, in Cervinia.
«Last Thursday, as soon as the Russians invaded Ukraine, we received the simultaneous cancellation of 11 rooms, in which about twenty Ukrainian customers should have stayed – closes Egidio Sertorelli -. That same morning we also had a couple of tourists in the hotel: he Ukrainian, she Russian. In the evening they fell asleep in peace, in the morning they woke up in the war ».