(7 Mar 2022) FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER: 4369571
A four-star hotel in Romania has turned its lavish ballroom into a makeshift refugee shelter for some of the thousands crossing the borders from neighbouring Ukraine each day.
The first refugees began arriving at the Mandachi Hotel and Spa in Suceava soon after Russia began invading Ukraine.
Since then, more than 2,000 people and 100 pets have taken shelter inside the 850-square-meter former ballroom, sleeping on numbered mattresses under a glittering disco ball, for one or two nights until they can find transportation to relatives in other European nations.
In what the United Nations has described as the swiftest refugee exodus so far this century, more than 1.5 million people have fled Ukraine.
Among those staying at the hotel shelter were Olga Okhrimenko and her Corgi, Knolly. It had taken them three days to flee Ukraine by car, bus and taxi in the bitter cold.
"Whenever somebody asks me where I am from, and I say Kharkiv, their expression, it's like I arrived from Hiroshima," Okhrimenko told The Associated Press from mattress number 60.
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.
The majority of the refugees were Ukrainian, but there were also Nigerians, Moroccans, Italians, Chinese and Iranians.
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