When two pre-dawn blasts jolted Julia Gurelya awake at her home in Zhytomyr — an attack on a nearby Ukrainian airfield — she knew it was time to leave.
She grabbed a pre-packed bag, gathered her husband, 17-year-old daughter and 76-year-old mother, and her cat, Kovalsky, then stepped from her apartment. She headed west to the city of Ternopil and, hopefully, out of the line of fire.
Gurelya’s fast, Thursday morning departure not only sought to protect her family, but to enable her to continue coordinating a high-risk, city-to-city, house-to-house relocation of about 100 colleagues, all Ukrainian employees of a Philadelphia e-commerce firm, Stuzo.
With director of operations Gurelya in that country, and founder and CEO Gunter Pfau in this one, the firm is managing to synchronize a cascading series of moves across half of Ukraine. So far that’s prevented its workers from being injured or killed amid an intensifying Russian invasion.
“All of them are safe,” said Pfau, who knows about Soviet dictatorships, having come to the U.S. as a refugee from Romania. “Half have temporarily relocated with their families. We’re working on the other half.”
Some 20 people managed to get to Poland early on. Others are sharing and swapping apartments as fighting in particular areas rises or quiets. One person dropped his wife and children at the Polish border and, assured of their safety, turned around and drove back into Ukraine.
“We’re really exhausted,” Stuzo program…
