Yeva Zahnitko

"I asked my mother to pick up the people that fit in the car."

The population was large in the city, there were many different shopping centers, everything was very developed. Now, because of the war, a lot of things were closed there. Very few people were left there, because they moved out.

There are only practically those who, well, have no one to go to, nowhere, nothing to do.

Friends, grandparents stayed there. Great-grandmother stayed. I had a lot of my best friends there, too. Friends from the class miss each other very much.

I was in a camp in Poland at the time. My parents came to pick me up, and we immediately left for Mariupol. I was enrolled to the school school. Then they said that, most likely, there will be an attack on Mariupol too – and we returned back to Makiivka. Then eventually we went to Vinnytsia. And then we came back anyway. And we have recently moved to Kyiv.

I remember when I was at my grandmother's, we were in the apartment and the shell hit. We heard glass rattling, plastic [windows], almost fell out. My sister cried a lot. She was frightened.

If there was a lot of shooting, if we were at my grandmother's, we went down to the basement or went out to the back yard. We, too, when they were shooting, got about three or four shells: one in the tower, one near the teacher's house, and another somewhere else. At our school, in the gym, the windows were blown out, then the teachers collected them, and we, the younger ones, were lowered into the basement.

We could phone, but the connection was very bad. I called my mom and asked her to pick up more people who could fit in the car. We picked up some of the class yet.

"I raise my eyes to the sky –

the drop fell like a tear.

The sky must be crying for that –
screams and gunshots by night and by day.

And on the shards of an old wall

children draw a world without war.

Friends are nearby, everything is fine.

Screams and gunshots by night and by day."

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/