It didn’t take long to see all the infamy of the “great liberators”. Even in the first days of the war, rashists broke into our neighbor’s house with a cart, demanding the poor pensioner give up all the food she had. In about a week, the russian occupiers began to break into the houses and, if not steal [because you can’t rob everything], then destroy and smash things and furniture that seemed too civilized to these savages, as they called them “nice”. In our neighbors` house, while they were hiding in our basement, these inhumans caused a serious riot: they stuck knives into the TV, refrigerator, microwave oven, computer, etc., simply filled with envy… And left an inscription made with lipstick on the mirror “how do you like it?”.
Our house is located not far from the main road, and enemy`s military equipment was constantly passing along it. We were in extreme danger, and it would be good to get out of there as soon as possible. We realized this when, hiding in the basement for a week, we heard very loud explosions, and the next day we saw that 13 houses near us were destroyed. Somewhere only the first floor remained, somewhere only a few walls survived, and somewhere only the foundation. The occupiers dug trenches in our garden, and their headquarters was in the house on the other side of the highway. In addition, the head of our village informed us that all the young girls who live near the central road should be immediately resettled deep in the village (there is no need to explain why the girls). So me, my brother and parents moved to our relatives, a little further from the unfortunate place. The next month we lived with them — a large family of 20 people, 9 of whom were children. A school was set up for the youngest: they studied mathematics, Ukrainian and English and read books from the home library in their free time. In order to somehow keep my sanity, I wrote poetry — it was my therapy. Some of the lines originated there, in the basement, when the fighting was going on outside.
We got lucky with food, because my grandparents had a lot of reserves stored in our temporary storage for the so-called “black day”. In addition, my cousin was able to obtain 10 bags of feed wheat for the birds. So in the afternoon, all the children sat down to sort through the grains — this was our daily activity, because for such a large number of people, a lot of food was needed. Then the men grinded the pure wheat. One part of it was the groat and other — flour. The groats were cooked as kulish*, and the flour was for pancakes. Every day of our life resembled the Middle Ages, but we survived.
On April 1, 2022, the russian invaders were kicked out of our village! We were able to walk freely in the streets and received Ukrainian humanitarian aid.
*Kulish (Ukrainian) — flour porridge.
Translator: Bohdana-Nikolietta Terekhina
