Oleksandr Fedorets, 49 years old:
It was October 2014. In the morning, everything was more or less normal and shelling was heard in some remote places. And in the evening, the shellfire usually began. The time was coming when it was necessary to hide. My wife went to our neighbours’ cellar while I stayed in order to look after two cows a little.
Everything seemed to be quiet and normal. I came to the kitchen. There were two small windows there. I was standing in the middle. The first shell was close – it shattered the windowpanes in the veranda and blew the door out. At that moment, I did not have time to do anything because the shell hit right under the foundation. Everything collapsed upon me and I remember very little of what was after that.
I only remember when I was brought to Zaporizhzhya. I regained consciousness in the intensive care unit on the third day. I looked around me and thought I was in heaven because everything was more or less quiet.
I stayed there for fifteen days I thinks, and that is it. And then, I could no longer stay there. Let it go. I had a head injury, two hematomas in the brain and I could not understand what was wrong with my eye. It was a shell-shock and I was stunned and buried under the construction materials that remained there after the repair.
I do not remember how I was taken out. I remember that my son and my wife found me in the house at about six o’clock in the morning and dug me out.
Concussion. There was a complete loss of memory. Now, hearing is still lost in my left ear and something is wrong with my eye. The doctors checked me and everything seemed to be normal, there was just a hematoma on the side. I received drops and injections in the eye. The eye remained in place, but the tumor stays for the second year. As for my hearing, nobody clearly explained or told me what is wrong with it. They say that some bone blocked the auditive passage and that’s it.
The worst thing for me right now is dizziness. The disturbance of the vestibular apparatus. It happens to me so that I can go straight and then it throws me from one side to another. It's hard, surely.
It is now like a daily routine and you know when they shell and when they don't. It was hard when shelling suddenly began at night.
I had a neighbour Mykola. He was mostly busy with keeping the household. He had rabbits and I had them too. In the evening, before the shelling, we came out here, he and me. I went out to give some hay to the rabbits and he was on the other side. An armoured troop-carrier was driving along the main street, and there was one yard where there was no residential building, just some wild cherry trees, high bushes, and they started shooting from the machine gun through the bushes. And it so happened that it caught us. It hit my garage, went along the wall, and hit something in his yard too. We managed to bend down, to fall on the ground.
How to explain when you are shot at? I am a hunter myself, but when the guns are pointed at you, the feeling is completely different. It is a hard feeling. And how to get away from it?
I do not know what will happen next. There is no point in stopping the farming now. We have to live on something. Almost everything has been destroyed.
It used to be good. We brought some excess products to the market by car: milk, tomatoes, peppers, everything we had.
Recently, I worked as a slaughterer on a farm. Then I was a watchman. Then the farm was closed. Everything falls apart, in short. Prices are going up. This is just crazy.
We kept cows. We had two milk cows and sold milk for no more than 20 hryvnias. And it turns out that mineral water is more expensive than milk. And how can you keep cows if everything around is mined now? Grazing is not possible because there are mines everywhere. Mowing is also useless because there is no grass.
We dreamed about restoring the house. To install new heating system. To make new flooring and install new windows. We ordered PVC windows just before the war. All the windows in the house were PVC windows. It only remained to finish the repairs of the kitchen, and I also wanted to have a shed. I also planned a vineyard and planted it, more than 50 vine bushes. Now, everything is upside down.
Liudmyla Fedorets:
There were no any [prophetic] dreams, no intuition, as they say. Although there was shelling, I thought it would pass by and that everything would be fine.
And when we found him, I was frightened, for sure, that I would be left alone with the child. We were crying and shouting while rescuing him. My son and I were digging him out, pulling him out and I was crying. I cried and asked that he would be alive. I said that I would give everything, I would give up the farm in order to save him.
I asked the doctors very much. I lost my first husband and this is my second husband. My first husband died of a brain haemorrhage. I have a son and a daughter from the first husband, and at the age of 40 I gave birth to a child. This is my second marriage. Those children did not have a father. I thought that this was my fate that there would be no father [for children] again. They saved him, thanks to the doctors. Apparently, God heard my prayers to keep him alive.
I hope we will get out of this. We have to live. Good people will help us in such a difficult moment, and we hope that everything will be fine. That there will be peace, and we will have everything as we used to have. Or maybe we will live even better. I really want that, surely, and we all want that.
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