In the darkness they waited patiently – hundreds of them – for the doors to the bus to swing open. Mothers and their children, cold and desperate.

They had travelled for days to get here, crossing the border into Poland leaving hell behind them.

“We had to leave our mother behind,” Anastasia tells me. She has travelled with her sister, Yana, from the eastern town of Dnipro, which has been pummelled by Russian shells in the past week.

They are in a queue of what must be 500 other shattered and frightened women and children.

A little boy – a toddler – tries to help his exhausted mother by wresting with a suitcase twice his weight. She has two more bags and a blanket to contend with.

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Sitting down on a curb, a mother wraps a blanket around her baby and tries to get her to have some formula.

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More than a million Ukrainians have had to run for their lives, crossing into Poland.

In total it’s estimated that two million people have fled Ukraine to seek safety away from the bombs and the shelling and the bloodshed.

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‘I could not stay in Ukraine. it’s too dangerous’

Nathalia, 22, made the journey on her own leaving family behind. She hopes to make it to Italy and then maybe to Canada, where she has relatives.

“I will not give up. But I could not stay in Ukraine. It is too dangerous. My family have stayed behind,” she says.

But for many this is a perilous journey with no destination. So many of the women we spoke to have no idea where they will end up. Some hope for somewhere warm to stay the night, perhaps some food. Others wanted to travel further still.

“These last few days have been a living hell,” one lady tells us. “It has been a difficult journey but now I feel safer.”

Piles of clothes, donated by people near and far, sit by the roadside. But most here just want to keep moving.

If they’ve left hell behind, perhaps there is hope ahead

Temperatures have dropped below zero and as one bus leaves another arrives. They can only take 60 people at a time and there are hundreds of people now.

“Wait!” a policeman shouts. “Six more people, please.”

Mothers usher their children towards the bus and they clamber up the steps and find a seat.

“No more for now,” the officer says, and the door closes.

Someone has brought a grand piano to the border and placed it by the roadside.

Davide Martello, a charity worker, sits down and begins to play Here Comes the Sun, by the Beatles.

If the people here have left hell behind, perhaps there is hope ahead of them.

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