Ms. Anastasia Kyrylenko, our heroine today, is a teacher from the occupied Kherson Oblast, who hopes for a quick liberation of her village. In this interview, she will tell us about the living conditions in the captured region, her activities, her thoughts on the fate of man, and her hopes for the future.
Welcome our interviewee, Ms. Anastasia Kyrylenko. Please tell us about your life before the full-scale invasion.
I am an ordinary person, a wife and a mother, I live in a rural area. Before the full-scale invasion I worked as a language and literature teacher at a school. I always went to work with enthusiasm, received maximum positive emotions from engaging with people, especially with younger students. I have over 20 years of teaching experience, which lets me clearly and easily present information, which I first of all try to understand myself. I read somewhere that people born in May come to this world to learn, so I consider myself an eternal student who learns many different things.
Until the 24th of February, it seemed to us that the biggest problem in education was studying from home, as well as the pandemic. We despised working through Zoom, as there is no proper contact between the student and the teacher. This made it very difficult to encourage children, to make them participate more actively in the discussion of this or that issue. We were sure that this was a disaster. We tried our best to master various online tools, possible game forms, all to incite schoolchildren to engage with important topics in 20-30 minutes (although it was quite difficult to fit everything in such a short lesson time). But after the start of the full-scale invasion, we realized that it was all just the beginning of the tests we were about to go through…They say that when Vesuvius [a volcanic mountain in Italy, near Pompeii] is in the soul, it is difficult to cope with emotions.
Please could you share with us how did your morning start on the 24th of February?
I received a call from a colleague at almost 5 in the morning, who told me to immediately prepare an emergency suitcase. I couldn’t understand why this was needed, but she clearly told me that the war had begun. “Take your documents, gather warm things and prepare a shelter.” she told me. After that, I woke up my younger daughter and we started preparing, while trying to overcome the emotional outburst. When you are worried and stress is high, it is difficult to collect yourself and think critically.
Before dawn, I already began to hear strange sounds, and thought to myself that it must be the wind swinging a door of my barn, or windows flapping somewhere. Something like that would usually make it difficult for me to sleep, but in reality that was already the shelling nearby. It was a really trashy situation, as the youth say. We knew about the war from books and movies, and it seemed to us that it was possible to be a hero, a partisan. But when everything happened, it turned out that it is not as easy to be a knight, and at the same time remain a person. To be able to control your emotions, to be calm. This anxious state is also transmitted to children. They read your mood and understand that if their mother is not calm, then everything is not quite right.
I remember the day when I first saw the pseudo-liberators. It happened on a narrow street when I was riding a bicycle: a huge column of armoured personnel carriers, vehicles with mortars, where a bunch of soldiers were sitting, pointing machine guns directly at me, was moving towards me. I had to stand on the edge of the road. I tried going into multiple yards of people who lived on that street, but everywhere was closed and there was nowhere to hide. I wanted to dissolve in the air, to become a little girl, tiny, some kind of Thumbelina, so that I wouldn’t be seen, so that they would just pass by me. Such a feeling of scantiness, smallness, because you are unable to do anything. You do not know what is in the head of any given occupier. Perhaps he has already been given the order to shoot civilians. Because they came to us in the first days of the full-scale invasion, our village had not yet heard of Bucha and Irpin (this happened later). That first time though, the rashists simply drove through the street. In the future I met hundreds of such columns, larger and smaller. Orcs don’t follow any traffic rules: they drive in the middle of the streets, very quickly (not your usual 40km/h within the village or 60km/h on its outskirts). They don’t care whether cars are driving by, whether pedestrians, or even children are walking on the road. They never slow down.
Then the yard patrols began: the russian military drove demonstratively on armoured vehicles, soldiers with machine guns walked in front and behind them, stopped at houses, inspected yards and commercial buildings. Among them were very young, and the experienced. Some apologized for the inconvenience, some frankly said that they had to obey the commander’s order, and some had a sharp cold look, which made my heart tremble. At first, when we were around them, we would avoid direct eye contact, walked by with our heads down, quickly bought what we needed and quietly disappeared. Later, we began to look into their eyes, looking for a HUMAN, as Socrates once did with a lantern. Even now, the uninvited guests buy up in shops, at the bazaar or market, pay in rubles and demand that the locals accept russian currency. From time to time, occupants visit random houses with questions and complaints like “Why don’t you cooperate?”. They conduct searches, look into every corner, drawer or locker, check phones, look for a yellow-blue flag, hearts or any symbols, and then either break or force to delete all the information. After such meetings, some people decided to leave the village to the territory controlled by Ukraine or through Crimea to Poland. Those who are left delete everything from their gadgets that can compromise them: news, videos, memes, etc. For nine months now, I have not allowed myself to write or say that which is on my mind. This pains my heart. It reminds me of the times of repression [during soviet union], where any careless word can bring trouble to relatives or people close to you, and so it’s better to keep quiet. But sometimes silence speaks louder than words. We will silently donate for Bairaktars [military drones], armored vehicles, medicine, prostheses, for everything that can bring our VICTORY DAY closer. All this gives us faith in the future, for use and our children. We have to quietly hide in shelters when rockets burst above us. We watch at the deadly charges launched from our side, and quickly call our relatives in Dnipro, Mykolaiv, Odesa, to warn about incoming missiles, to remind them of the “two walls” rule, and pray to not be hit, to survive and endure. We ask God to save our Defenders and we thank every minute for their devotion, undying faith in the victory of justice. They are our WARRIORS OF LIGHT!
I remember how they took down the flag at our school… That day we were all at work and the teachers were sitting in the teacher’s room. We saw from our windows how an armoured personnel carrier drove up, a Russian soldier with a machine gun got out of it, quickly followed by another one. By the time we came down to the ground floor, he had already removed our Flag. He did not throw it on the floor, but folded it like a cracker and took it with him. To the question – “What are you doing?” he answered – “Something like that.” The enemy’s tricolor did not hang near the school for a long time, until some of the students went back to study in person. These were children whose parents took help in russian rubles and supported the “new government”. Many residents simply left the village altogether, while some children continued to study at home without books, but with the help of the Internet and the digital text books available on there.
Illustrative photo removed from the resource https://pin.it/4qq1fC7
So these children work with Ukrainian teachers?
Children do not have the right to study in a Ukrainian school, even online. If digital communications allow them to keep in touch, then no one speaks, everything is kept a secret, because this is underground work. But unfortunately, Internet is intermittent here, and from time to time everyone finds themselves in an information vacuum. A family with two schoolchildren lives near me. I often quietly make my way to them, such that the neighbours don’t find out. I bring some books and explain the material from various subjects in person.
Textbooks that I didn’t have the time to hand in to the library, and my own little library at home became a real saving grace for me, as I essentially lost the ability to practice my area of expertise – teaching. Apart from physical work in my vegetable garden, I had no clue what else to do. This was acutely felt at the beginning of the new school year on the 1st of September, when my students greeted me from all corners of Ukraine and abroad, there were many tears that day…
When you have been working in education for more than 20 years, you already have a certain amount of respect, achievements, you want to carry the knowledge on to others, you understand what modern youth wants and how to present it correctly. Then suddenly you find yourself outside of the boat of life, you cannot practice what you do best, which makes the whole situation so scary for me.
Many of my colleagues are deeply depressed, they don’t leave their homes, they are afraid to be caught in the eye of the “new government”. I also don’t visit the centre of the village, I don’t go to shops, I travel to my relatives by going around the outskirts of our village. All, so that the scoundrel occupiers don’t pick on me because of some small, made up thing. So that they do not find out that I work as a teacher, and not for them.
The russian military came to more than one of my colleagues, and had unpleasant conversations. They asked for information about the online school, stating that the teachers were persuading children not to go to schools in person. They asked who Stepan Bandera was, and how colleagues felt about the “new government”, etc.
Mrs. Anastasia, please tell us, do the rashists move into empty houses?
Yes, especially in recent times, where they picked out the better houses for themselves. There are residents of the village who, before their departure, let lodgers into their houses. The russian military simply evicted them. Now they live there, digging trenches for some reason, maybe, some military equipment is placed in garages or they prepare a hiding place for themselves.
Tell us please, if you can, taking into account your own safety, do they burn our literature in your village?
Thank God, there is no such thing yet and the school seems to be uninhabited by them. They have already watched the territory of our school at times, and there were even guards who lived in there. But I understand that this situation can deteriorate at any moment. They can start walking around the village, taking away gadgets en masse (such cases do exist). They themselves admit, that it is calm here until they are given an order to destroy everything. The men in our village are often subjected to torture, interrogated with the use of force and electricity. For this, they are probably taken to the town centre. They can also beat people whose relatives were in the ATO [anti-terrorist operation, that took place from 2014 when russia occupied parts of Ukraine] or residents who said “something wrong” during a conversation with their relatives, among whom there are also traitors. Or they simply torture people for made up reasons. You can sincerely share information and your thoughts with a close person, and then it turns out that they are not as close as you have thought, as they tell on you.
I concluded for myself that I do not know people well, and I want to deepen my knowledge of physiognomy – to learn to better understand body language. I could never imagine that some colleagues from my school would agree to cooperate with the occupiers. I have no regrets for them, although I always tried to see the better sides in people – to note their professionalism, creativity, ability to think outside the box. There are no coincidences in life – everyone who appears in our lives, teaches us something.
I recently got acquainted with the book “Say Yes to Life” by the Austrian psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, who was sent to a concentration camp during the Second World War. His whole family died, but he himself managed to survive. In the book Viktor Frankl tells how he survived this horror, and I equate it all with my life in the occupation. I came across his saying which keeps me in check, and allows me to remain human, to believe in the future – “Those who thought that the war would end tomorrow or the day after tomorrow – surrendered first, those who thought that the war would never end, surrendered second (they died in this camp), and those who saw themselves above that situation survived.” Being subjected to inhumane conditions, the author of the book imagined himself in the audience among students, as a professor who is an expert in his field.
And this little, underground volunteering project with the neighbourhood children saves me! I also create a parallel reality for myself, in which I see that I am doing what I love – teaching and learning, traveling through Ukraine which is rebuilt and is flourishing. At this time, I feel amazing, because I work, travel, get to know the world and enjoy life, implementing the most creative projects.
At times I ponder about the fact that now, Ukrainians are changing their fate. First of all, they find out who they are, and change their name. We were under authoritarian oppression for a long time, we were puppeteered around, pulled by strings, and now we are cutting them because we realize that we are Ukrainians, not some little russians or khokhls [derogatory term russians used and still use towards Ukrainians], because we speak our native language. We get rid of the inferiority complex placed upon us, that is why we identify ourselves with Ukraine. Our new story has begun, thanks to which we are on the next step of societal development. We must create a new storytelling, where we will feel like Ukrainians living in a European state, and not in some subordinate suburb of russia, so that the bitter cycles of the past are not repeated again.
Ukrainians change their place and environment, of course out of necessity and not plans. Many residents of various regions were forced to leave their homes. Ukrainians from the eastern and southern regions are evacuating to the west of our country, gratefully accepting help, getting to know new people and the peculiarities of their culture. They see that the imposed russian stereotype “West [Ukraine] vs. East [Ukraine]” has no foundation. This is again such an experience, to see yourself and others better, to make sure for yourself that we are one people, although each region has its own traditions, customs, tastes, etc.
We also need repentance and introspection – until we change ourselves, the situation will not change. Let’s remember the Eastern wisdom – “If you want to change the world, start with yourself”. We should carefully dive into ourselves, analyse what we are doing, good or bad, how we treated those things before the war. Only then will the reevaluation of values, be 100% successful.
My students communicate in Ukrainian [she is from a russian language dominated region], they are already sitting on their suitcases and want to return home as soon as possible. Girls and boys say that they have the best school and the best teachers. They appreciate what they had and understand that they are connected to their native land by the energy of our one big family, just like the ancient Greek hero Antaeus, who was given strength by his native land. The children are convinced that Ukraine is the best place for them to live and find their calling in life.
Everything that is happening now is the price of freedom. Terrible events heal us, we become stronger and the spirit becomes unbeatable. No shelling, no blackouts will ever destroy the desire to be free.
We will win, overcome, endure, and everything will be fine!
Translator: Natalia Sudeiko
