The young girl with a disability had the immense pleasure of finding her grandmother who crossed Europe by bus to spend the holidays with her loved ones.
The best Christmas present. Anastasia, 13, a Ukrainian refugee in Brittany, found her grandmother, almost 9 months after leaving her country, says the newspaper West France this Friday.
Suffering from Smith Magenis syndrome, a rare genetic disease, the young girl has been living with her father Sacha in Névez in Finistère since March 12. They are thus among the first to have left the country after the Russian invasion began in February.
As Christmas approached, her father decided to ask Anastasia’s grandmother to make the trip from Ukraine. So Halyna, 60, got on a bus in Ivano-Frankivsk, about a hundred kilometers from Lviv, for a 47-hour trip and more than 2,500 kilometers.
Halyna arrived in Quimper on December 16 for a month, the local newspaper reports. “I thought I would never see them again,” she said in tears.
No traditional Christmas
This December 24, the Ukrainian family will eat a traditional Ukrainian dish but will not exchange gifts, because Santa Claus is “a Russian tradition”, according to Sacha, who works in the green space service of the commune of Névez. Anastasia’s gifts were opened earlier this month, on December 6 for Saint Nicholas.
The family will also not celebrate the Christmas fixed by the Orthodox Church, between January 6 and 7, in protest against the conflict started by the Russian army in February.
