The Lemekh family were building their house for twelve years. They lost it in a few hours’ time. The house burned to the ground in March 2022 because of shelling. The family spent a day in the basement hiding from the attack of russian helicopters but managed to leave then. On their way, they met a large column of russian tanks that was heading for Kyiv.
This is where our house was before the war. We bought a land plot back in 2007 and were building this house for twelve years.
We were able to live in it only for about two years. I usually wake up... at around six o’clock in the morning. Well, I just woke up and saw a slew of phone calls, missed calls. My parents called me and I got lots of messages too. I started reading all of those but there was not any specific information. They just said that russia attacked us. I was in touch with our production plants. We have two manufacturing plants, one in Berehove and another one in Cherkasy. I work for an Austrian company that specializes in thermal insulation. We have two plants that produce foam polystyrene products. These are mainly insulation materials for construction. We got in touch by phone and decided that people from both plants would stay at home because the situation was not clear.
Nobody understood what was going on. To be honest, I thought that it was around Donetsk and Luhansk, that they again wanted to either occupy the entire region or make a land corridor to the Crimea. That is, I could not even assume that there would be an attack on Kyiv. It was around 10:30 in the morning and I was working in my home office. I was in touch with our Austrian office via videoconference right at that moment. We were talking with them; they asked us about the situation and told us that there were some news reports shown on their TV. At 10:30 sharp, I saw a helicopter flying. I had the attic windows here, and I saw a shadow fly by.
I noticed how a helicopter flew over the house and started to shoot in the direction of the airfield.
There is Hostomel airfield here, a kilometre away from us. This is a non-military airport. It is the airport of Hostomel company that produces airplanes, passenger airplanes. In fact, it was the base airport of the Antonov company, and Mriya airplane was parked here. That same morning, they were buzzing there, some planes were flying away. To be honest, I thought that Mriya airplane was taken somewhere, but in fact, Mriya did not leave. Maybe it was Ruslan airplane that left, as some heavy plane took off early in the morning. The helicopter was flying and shooting precisely in the direction of the airfield.
I ran outside because at that moment my children were playing on the summer playground in the yard. I grabbed the children and we ran to the basement under fire.
We hid in the basement and I called in our neighbours who have a wooden house without a basement. They ran to us and hid in our basement too. A black helicopter. I did not see any signs or emblems of the russian army on it, but only Roman “eight” figures. If russia attacked... and then this plane appeared… All the more so, everyone still remembered those stories of “there are no our people there”, like the case with “little green men” in the Crimea. I thought that they were unfolding a similar scenario here too. There was not any marking of the russian army. They only had “V” sign on the sides. By the afternoon of 24 February, we realized that they were attacking from all sides. Basically, I still did not suspect that everything would be that serious. I thought it was some kind of provocation. They flew in and attacked by fire, but I did not think that it was of such a serious scale. We realized this only the next morning, on 25 February.
We decided that we had to save the children. We had to try to get out somehow, between the fire attacks.
There were some breaks. They were shooting for half an hour and then those helicopters flew away. There was no one and half an hour of silence followed. Nothing happened. Some groups of soldiers ran towards the airfield. Then they flew in again. Those helicopters fired again. We started packing up at dawn. The kids were still sleeping in the basement. We packed the most essential things to fit in the car. We locked our second car and hid our pets. We took our cat out of the house.
We closed one of our dogs inside with a supply of food and took the second one, a small dog, with us. At around half past six or at seven o’clock, we left together with our neighbours, although we knew that the traffic on the Zhytomyr highway was not moving. It was blocked because a lot of people were leaving Kyiv. That is why we drove along the old Borodyanka highway, which was free. Just when we reached the end of the village, we ran into a column of tanks with a Roman “five” sign on their sides.
At that moment, I realized that there would be very fierce battles here because that long column stretched along the horizon, while it was moving. Well, I would say we were lucky because they did not open fire on us. Perhaps they did not yet understand that we were not happy to see them. It was the first day.
They came here without any fighting. They just drove in freely and thought that now they would reach Khreshchatyk Street. They thought they would bring Yanukovych here and would go back receiving their travel allowances. At that moment, I realized that this was all serious. We drove further along the highway beyond Zhytomyr, towards Novohrad-Volynskyi. We just reached the Zhytomyr highway, in Novohrad-Volynskyi. We stopped at the filling station but it was impossible to buy the fuel there. However, we had some fuel with us, so I re-fuelled the car. We continued on our way.
While we were drinking coffee and having a little rest, we realized that this column was destroyed in Hostomel. That exact column we came across there. It included many vehicles, in fact. About 200 vehicles were moving and some women of Chechen appearance were sitting on some of them. They were snipers sitting on top of the armoured vehicles. We were just face to face with them when they were going past us, when that whole column was passing by. I simply could not imagine that they would attack us using so many resources. There were so many helicopters flying here... Well, there are some photos of helicopters that were shot down. There were a lot of them.
Probably about 10 helicopters were shot down near the airport. There were a lot of them flying there. Assault helicopters carrying the troopers tried to land here. They were shot there. Having seen all that military equipment and vehicles, we realized that it was very serious.
We do not live in a militarized country. It is there [in russia] where everyone only thinks about the war.
Some people stayed here, some of our neighbours stayed. Ninety percent of people left and ten percent stayed. From some fragmented messages, we understood what was going on here. Our neighbours in the house next door… They were hiding in the basement of another house and they sent some photos to the group [chat] showing that their house and our house were on fire. The commission’s conclusion is that the house was affected by shelling. It caught fire. The house is subject to demolition because its structure has been disrupted, so it has to be demolished. I would like to restore it, but I would also like to receive some compensation, as I am not ready to re-build it for another 12 years. It would mean very significant resources for us. While it is not clear what will happen with my job, and how things will develop in general. Just a huge amount of money is needed to have it all restored. Part of the house will have to be demolished clearly. Part of it can still be restored but this would require very significant resources.
Speaking of the kids, the situation is like this... We were asked if this trauma had any impact on them. On the one hand, it did not really affect them. The only thing is that they worry very much about their pets. Every time I go here, they ask me to find our cats. They don’t understand what happened to them.
Our neighbour said that an armoured personnel carrier ran down one cat that was running around there. The cat was really hand-raised. He was not afraid of anything, so he could get under the wheels easily.
We are now renting a flat in Lviv, from a family with a child, a boy. He had a lot of toy cars, a lot of toys, and when we just moved in there, our kids were very curious to explore the new flat and new toys. Our elder daughter found a toy helicopter and said, “Dad, look, a similar helicopter was firing on us but it missed.” In fact, this certainly affected them and the kids are very afraid of air alerts. Thank God, they rarely happen here in Lviv, but when an air warning sounds, they are very afraid of it. We left our dog here. The dog had lived with us for almost 10 years. The children loved her. It was Jack Russell breed. As we loaded our things into a small car, we could not take everything with us. And we had the second dog there.
It was difficult to leave – two children, our things, and two dogs. We did not know how serious it was.
We just thought we would get somewhere, to Rivne, would wait it out there and go back. We realized that everything was very bad when we ran into a column of tanks while leaving. Then I called an acquaintance who was here. He was a handy-man who used to do some work for me... He is a tile layer (he lives across the street from here). I asked him to take our dog Eaton to his place. Because Eaton knew him and would not bite him. He got inside our house and then sent me some photographs showing that the house was damaged by shooting. There were some holes here and there. He took the dog, let the cats go outside and went back to his place. Then, later, it turned out... He also had a wife and a child. There was no telephone connection then, no one understood anything, and then suddenly people from his street began to leave somewhere. He went with them and handed the dog over to an old man who remained there. The old man had nowhere to go one hundred percent. Unfortunately, it turned out then that the old man disappeared somewhere too. I am not aware of his fate. He was shot or something. When I came back first, on 7 April, when it was possible to enter Bucha, I learned that he died. I came just a few days later. Surely, it had a big impact on us, as before that we had everything.
We built a good house. We were building it for a long time. We worked for many years. We built it and made a swimming pool. We had a happy life, in fact, which has been stolen, and now we are forced to start everything from scratch.
Because we do not have our belongings, we do not have my wife’s car, while the kids need to be taken to school. Everything from scratch, absolutely from scratch. I would put it this way, “Despite this destroyed house, I am quite lucky in my life because I have not lost my job. I had a job that kept me busy. In fact, on 19 January we registered a site for a plant to be built in Lviv. Just on 22 February, I came to Lviv. We were looking for an office to manage the plant construction. On the morning of 23 February, I signed an office lease agreement and returned to Bucha in the evening of the same day. And on 24 February, the war started. Basically, the fact is that I am lucky as I have something to be busy with.
