Stories that you confided to us
We lived without electricity for two months. But now, thank God, they are fixing it. There is no water and no gas supply. Sometimes we hear some very loud shooting. Thank God, it doesn’t come here. We use firewood for heating, but there is nowhere to get firewood, and if we want to buy it, it is not allowed to bring it here. You can only bring the wood using your own transport.
…Our eldest son Sanyok got very scared when there was shelling in August. After that, he reacts aggressively to everything.
Once I tell him something like, ‘Sanyok, you can’t do that.’ He starts screaming even more. I cannot tell him anything at all. As for Raisa, she is okay. She took the bombing just fine. Thank God, she is fine. As for Sanyok, we need to take him to a psychologist in order to somehow calm him down.
Children run around and play. Sometimes, even when there is some distant roar of shelling, they still continue running and playing, not paying attention to it. At the beginning, they would get very scared, of course, and now they say, ‘Mum, it bangs.’ That’s it. They used to flee to take cover and were scared. And now they don’t run, it is normal for them. We have got used to hearing explosions from time to time. We almost do not react to it. When it starts out very loud, then yes.
It was very loud two days ago. It is good that it did not land anywhere near our place. We were sitting quietly and praying to God for those shells not to fly here. We sit on the floor in the room. There is a cellar, but we did not go down to the cellar. We have our own house here. My mother’s house, which is from my grandmother. We moved here. And the one that we had was destroyed. There is no cellar at all there. There is a garage with a pit, so we hid there.
We moved here because a shell fell in front of our house. The dog was killed then. All the windows were shattered. We had three windows in the house and all the three were blown out. There was a three-apartment house, but now not one of the three families lives there, because it is impossible to live there. The house’s walls moved apart, sideways. You can’t install the windows, because you have to pull the walls together first. We live with my mum and grandmother.
When quoting a story, a reference to the source – the Museum of Civilian Voices of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation – is mandatory, as follows:
The Museum of Civilian Voices of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation https://civilvoicesmuseum.org/
Other stories
