They fled Kharkiv, east Ukraine, under ferocious bombing, travelled 1000km west, and walked the last 12 hours by foot to Poland in the snow.
But just 10 kilometres from safety the group of Nigerian university students were told they could not board the bus and had to turn around.
Stranded in a warzone the group of young men and their two pet dogs, sit on the floor of Lviv’s crammed train station planning what to do.
Around them, Ukrainian families and foreign nationals have set up small encampments in the stations’ waiting rooms, as train after train fails to arrive.
Panicked people cloud the information desk desperate for information on trains to anywhere.
Others wait in the snow on the tracks, flocking to every train that arrives to try to get on.
“We were supposed to get on a bus for the last 10km of the journey but they asked all Africans to get off and said only women and children to cross,” says Ben, 27, who was studying petroleum engineering in Kharkiv.
“From our experience and our friends, if you are not Ukrainian it is even harder to get out.”
Behind him, a different group of Nigerian teenagers, who had also fled Kharkiv, say they had been told by friends at the border not to even bother, as it was near impossible to get through the Polish border if you were not European.
“We heard Polish border it is harder to get in than other countries. Hungary we hope it will be easier,” Amanda, a 17-year-old medical student says among her friends. “But we don’t have much hope.”
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Chaos at the borders has piled extreme pressure on the Ukrainian and Polish authorities who are struggling to process tens of thousands of terrified men, women and children fleeing Russia’s ferocious invasion.
The UN’s refugee agency said on Saturday as many as 368,000 people had fled Ukraine in just a few days, and that this number is expected to exponentially grow.
The EU’s executive said on Sunday that Europe was facing its biggest humanitarian crisis in years and that Ukrainians internally displaced by the strife could be as many as 7 million.
Janez Lenarcic, European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management said a further 4 million may flee the country as refugees.
A group of Nigerian refugees move between platforms hoping to catch a train
“We are witnessing what could become the largest humanitarian crisis on our European continent in many, many years. The needs are growing as we speak,” he added.
At the border with Poland, where the majority of refugees are fleeing, there are 50km tailbacks of cars waiting to cross, while families ditched their bags and belongings to finish the journey on foot.
Without shelters at the crossings, in the middle of the winter, fleeing civilians have camped freezing in ice conditions for days.
As the snow began to fall on Sunday, some have had to turn around and walk back to the nearest main city to find other ways out.
An emotional couple reunite at Lviv station after fleeing war
Temperatures dropped as families wait for a way out of the country
