Good afternoon. My name is Yana and I am a citizen of Ukraine. When the war came to our Ukraine on February 24, 2022, we were at home. Home is in the Donetsk region of Toretsk, Bakhmut district.
We had a war there not on February 2022, but much earlier in 2014. But we lived, built the city, dreamed of development, studied, worked, and our children went to school. We believed that everything would be fine and that a full-scale war would not start. But what happened happened...
When the war started, my eldest son Mykyta was studying in Kharkiv. He was a 2nd year student at that time. And it was a horror, because we tried to get the child out of Kharkiv for 2 weeks. On February 28, we enrolled him when it was still possible to travel from Donetsk region to Kharkiv region. We signed him up for a minibus to go home, but for some reason he did not get on that minibus and that minibus with our kids from Toretsk, students, was shot by Russians. Almost all the children who were on that bus were killed. And the worst thing is that when the ambulance arrived, it took away the children who were wounded, and those who were dead remained lying in that minibus and the mothers of these children were only able to take them away, it seems, a week later it was a nightmare as my child, what saved my child, I am grateful to the Lord God for not getting into the minibus!
My son came home much later. A humanitarian truck took him to Dnipro from Dnipro. He came home by evacuation buses.
We stayed at home for another week, but our younger daughter, who has diabetes, was running out of insulin and there was no more insulin supply to Donetsk region, and we realized that this is a common death for a child without insulin, so we put our lives in three bags, took the most expensive thing we had, our children.
My husband and I went to nowhere, we went to Vinnytsia. Because we had friends there who could give us free accommodation for 2 weeks, we stayed there, but we were very homesick and tried to be closer, so we went to Dnipro. In Dnipro, we were also looking for free housing at first, and then we started working a little bit. My husband got a job at a factory and started working. We are currently renting a house in Dnipro. We are trying to pull ourselves together, work and live. My mother remains in Toretsk to this day, and she keeps us alive. Our memories, our homes, our cats and dogs that stayed at home. My mother protects our home from looters who simply take everything out of the house.
We are waiting for the day when we can return home to our peaceful Ukrainian Toretsk. Thank you!
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