Stories that you confided to us
"My mum’s childhood was during the war time and her old age is in war time too"
Years 2015 and 2016 were the worst ones. We were all stressed, hiding under the beds, wherever...
Our generation has learned to distinguish a shot from 120 mm mortars. We know what types of shells are falling. It’s very hard.
We are afraid of these shells. We survived 25 January 2015. Grad rockets were landing here. We thought, and we still think, that houses can fold up brick by brick when these strong shells are fired. They seem to be firing not to the village, but it all echoes nearby. It shudders heavily.
It is scary... We are worried and we want the war to be over soon, for our children to live in peace. Our children and grandchildren, and old people too, and that’s all.
Even before the war time, I needed to have surgery on my leg. But in Donetsk the price was very expensive, and with the third group of disability you cannot collect much money. We needed to buy some coal and food to eat. I lived with two children, a daughter and a son. They were still small and I needed to feed them somehow.
I had a serious depression because I could not... Now I have got used to the fact that I am a normal, fully functioning person. I do not consider myself a disabled person. I keep in touch. I help my mother as much as I can, even though I am disabled. She needs a lot of care.
She needs some medicine to be fetched, or an ambulance to be called for, or food to be brought. It is very hard of course, yet we are coping somehow, bit by bit. She feels bad without support, because the shelling is going on every day. This means constant stress and worry.
My mother survived the Great Patriotic War [WWII]. She had her childhood during the war time and now her old age is during the war too. How can they sleep? We only heard about that war from movies. And they lived through it in reality. And then this reality came back to them. It should not happen. Our mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers need to live their old days in peace and calm.
And if there is no this “need” word, then there can be nothing!
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
