During the first three weeks of the conflict, this woman lived in a cellar with 12 other people in hiding. They passed “very cold, there was little food”. They had no bread and “some jam” was left over. When the family home and barn where the cellar was located were bombed, causing “the cement and stones” to fall down, they decided to leave the village. They were “covered with red dust and their mouths full of sand”.
Lydia Stefanivna was forced to move to Stanislav, a village 3 km away. It was still spring, but with winter approaching, she asked the Russian army to let her go home. On the other hand, the reaction and intention of Putin’s men was clear: “We will release them when the last Khokhol dies (a derogatory term used by Russians to refer to Ukrainians).”
Hardened by the work of the fields, Lydia answered them with her truth: “Listen, this is our land. And your land is in Russia.” It didn’t go down well with the soldiers, who started threatening her: “If you don’t shut up, we’ll put a bag over your head and get you out of here.”
Prevented from returning home, the woman eventually had to live on the help of the residents: “I wouldn’t have accepted it, but I didn’t have the money and – forgive me – we have to survive,” she says. in tears. With the fields still cultivated, Lydia now lives, like almost everyone else in the village, on humanitarian aid from the West.
“We are not starving. Thanks to all the countries that help us survive. They gave us pillows, blankets and thermoses. I wish they didn’t keep bombing us,” he confesses.
“It’s All Stolen”
During the occupation, says Lydia, the menu varied little: almost always potatoes with salt. This, “if they didn’t come out”, because the nerves were “so numerous that I got cramps in my stomach”. In such a way that, he guarantees, he has lost 20 kilos in less than eight months.
Now there are no Russians in the village, but Lydia’s husband bears the traces of that recent past. One day, in a hayfield, “a mortar shell fell close to him.” He was “very bewildered”, but not only: “He still cannot hear.”
The brands are different there. The stress she faced, and continues to deal with, keeps her from sleeping at night. The house he returned to has no water, electricity or gas. The inside is empty. “Everything was stolen, everything we earned in 45 years,” he laments, “they took everything. And what wasn’t stolen was destroyed.”
However, the house still needs to be repaired and it will not be easy to get support for the reconstruction: “We didn’t have time to get the documents. I don’t have a land register of the house. The roof fell.” Still, Lydia says she’s happy: “At least we’re alive.”
At the farewell we asked what became of the other 12 people with whom she shared that cellar: her husband is still in the village, everyone else has left. The youngest grandson, nine years old, is with his mother in Austria. Another daughter of Lydia is in the Czech Republic with her family. “They all flew out of the nest,” something he confesses he “never” thought he’d see in his old age.
The eldest grandson “recently went to the front as a volunteer”.
Source: DN
