When the phone rang, Alla heard only one thing: “Your house is on fire!” She ran through the explosions, screaming: “Mum, just hold on!” Her 86-year-old mother was bedridden and helpless. Luckily, the neighbours managed to break down the door, smash a plastic window and pulled the old woman out of the flames.

Alla was looking after her mother, working online and preparing for retirement. After February 24, 2022, her two daughters and their families came to her village from Kyiv. Her house on the edge of Vablia was the first to come under shelling, the occupiers shot it with machine guns when they were passing through the village in a convoy.

A fire destroyed everything: her home, her memories and the things she had invested ten years of her life in. Alla was left with only her documents and her mother in her arms. She was evacuated from the village on March 5, 2022, in a convoy of twelve vehicles. Her mother died a month later, already in safety. Alla’s daughter was able to bury her grandmother “in a human way, with flowers and a prayer”.

Alla returned to Vablia in the autumn of 2022. There was a sinkhole, ashes and a destroyed fence on the site of the house. She started from scratch in a modular house where she is learning to live again. “I’m not hungry, I’m not barefoot and I’m alive. That’s the main thing,” she says, looking at where her house once stood.