“I felt wrong leaving. I felt wrong being on that train,” Maksim Chmerkovskiy told his 1.1 million Instagram followers from his hotel room in Warsaw, just hours after getting out of the country.
and reunited with his wife — fellow “Dancing With the Stars” alum Peta Murgatroyd — and their 5-year-old son. He’s also given several interviews in which he’s continued to describe feeling guilty and ashamed.“I cried from the airport.
Still, he added, “I felt really bad going.” That feeling “sunk in even worse” when Chmerkovskiy arrived at the train station in Kyiv and saw that all his fellow passengers were women and children. At 6-foot-2, Chmerkovskiy felt he was “too big” and, in, said he wanted to make sure he wasn’t taking the place of “another mother with two kids.
Like Chmerkovskiy, many people experience survivor’s guilt after enduring life-threatening situations in which others may have died, . It’s commonly seen in Holocaust survivors, war veterans and those who’ve lived through airplane crashes and natural disasters.ethicist Nancy Sherman focused on soldiers returning home from the battlefield but acknowledged that the affliction applied to others who had survived life-or-death trauma.
“In war, standing here rather than there can save your life but cost a buddy his. It’s flukish luck, but you feel responsible. The guilt begins an endless loop of counterfactuals — thoughts that you could have or should have done otherwise, though, in fact, you did nothing wrong,” she wrote.