My nine-year-old granddaughter Kamilla can sit by the window of a hospital room for hours. You can only guess what the girl who saw the war with her own eyes and lost two little brothers thinks about. She really wants to forget those terrible times.
My granddaughter and I experienced fierce battles of Lysychansk without electricity, water, or communications. We cooked food over a campfire, because we didn't know when they would start bombing again. Very often the attacks caught us in the apartment. I can still hear whistling from shells in my ears. We often sat in the bathroom. I thought if I hid the baby in the bathroom, she would be more protected. We had an icon there. So we lit a candle and read "the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors" aloud so that we could hear the explosions less.
At this time, Kamilla's mother, who was pregnant with twins, was at work in Kharkiv. She was restless, because telephone lines with Lysychansk were cut off. Trains or buses stopped running, and she was ready to hitch a ride home.
Kamilla remembers sitting in the basement for five days straight. She contracted lichen, and her luxuriant hair had to be cut off.
Her mother had twins in Kharkiv, but the babies died immediately after birth. Kamilla cried, didn't speak a word or eat. A month later, she had a bleeding and suffered from a stomach ache. We sounded the alarm, but local doctors could not make a diagnosis and sent us to Kyiv. Luckily, in the capital, Kamilla was diagnosed with hydronephrosis. She required an urgent surgery. If she didn't, she would lose her kidney. The Rinat Akhmetov Foundation helped us, too.
