"I was so scared that I thought it might be the end"

My name is Vika. I want to tell my story about difficult moments during four years of military operations.

One of the most vivid and at the same time dark memories is about the days when a lot of shells fell 40 meters from my house. On the threshold of the dentist, near the store, in the yard, right under the window of my classmate, who, by the way, was watching TV with my grandmother at that moment, on the roadway five meters from the kindergarten.

All this happened  in the evening, and that night my mom and dad and I were in the hallway until the last momemt, until everything calmed down a little.

Then the three of us went to bed, dressed, on the floor next to the bed, and to be honest, I was so scared that I had the impression that this might be the end. And no matter how hard I tried, these thoughts still crept into my head.

Most of all, I was afraid not for myself, but for my family: parents, brothers, nephews, daughters-in-law. In the morning, when we woke up, we thanked God that we were alive and well.

The wife of one of my brothers is a teacher at my school. At 8: 46, there was a loud explosion, followed by two more. We ran into the corridor in horror. I was very lucky that my father tried to calm my mother and me, he is more resistant to this kind of thing, and my mother and I are terrible alarmists.

It turned out that this shelling was at the back of the school, a meter away from it. All the windows and walls were crushed, and the shards damaged the doors and walls very badly, both inside and out. Seven minutes before the hit, all the teachers, including my brother's wife, were evacuated from the school to the bomb shelter.

It is terrible to imagine how many hundreds of victims could have been if the day before there were no hits and the children would have gone to school, since it was just the time for recess.