Residents of the Svitylnia village, located fifty kilometres from Kyiv, spent three weeks under occupation. Sofiia Diachenko and her sister left the day before the russians arrived. The girl's mother refused to leave the house, but a week later, under shelling, she also left.
Dozens of houses in Svitylnia were damaged, some completely destroyed. However, the war almost did not affect the ancient East Slavic settlement in the village. The unique monument of history and archaeology of national significance is about 1,000 years old!
Sofiia herself works as a methodologist at the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide. At the Department of Oral History, where thousands of testimonies of people who survived the great famine are stored and processed. The girl and her colleagues find many parallels with the present.
