Anastasiya Semenova from Kramatorsk
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My family, like all residents of the country, woke up on February 24 to the worst explosions in our lives. It was 5 a.m., we woke up and heard the first explosions. But I was not afraid, I thought it was something in the yard, a car tire or something else… I took the child from my room, and we went to bed, but just a few minutes later, we heard such an explosion that I thought my balcony was going to fly into my room. Then friends and relatives started calling and saying that the war had started, but we still didn’t believe it. In the morning, I went to work, the child stayed at home because they said it was an emergency, but everything was fine. When I was going to work, I saw people going somewhere, withdrawing money from ATMs, huge lines in stores, everyone buying food, some kind of wild panic. But I went to work, and my husband did too, we all went to work. We stayed in Kramatorsk for about 5 more days.
Then I got scared, because there were explosions at the airfields and air raids on the outskirts of the city. A curfew was imposed in the city, and we had to close the windows. It was pitch black at home at 7 pm, you couldn’t see where the planes were coming from, you couldn’t see anything going on. It was scary, so we decided to go to the dacha. It’s Blue Lakes, the village of Zelenyi Klyn, it’s 15 minutes away from Lyman.
When we got there, everything was fine, everything was great. Fresh air, silence… We lived a quiet life as if nothing was happening. We didn’t have a job anymore, we didn’t go to school anymore, we had some money left over. We were paid off at our jobs because no one else was working and there was no point in keeping us. Everything was fine and good, but I did not know that I was taking my family to meet death.
A week after we arrived there, hell broke loose! They had already bombed Izyum and went to Lyman, and we were just in the village, I was between Lyman and Izyum. And they were sitting in Sviatohirsk because it was already occupied. We had already heard all those rockets, we had already heard all those hailstones, it was hell in the evening, we didn’t leave the basement. We saw the first fighter jets that came… It was very scary when your child says: “Mom, let’s not go inside, I want to sleep in the basement! And I realize that the basement is… If it falls in, we will be buried together in this basement, but I didn’t know how to save her… I managed to survive for two weeks before the shelling started, even in the morning. There was nothing left in the village where we were, nothing was brought to the shops, people were clearing everything. We realized that I couldn’t stay there with my child anymore, so we made a decision and went to the Czech Republic with our child. We stayed there for 1-1.5 months, but I could not live there because it was not my home, and we were not needed there. We decided to come back with the child, because Ukraine is not there. At that time, my husband had already found an apartment in the city of Uman. It’s calm here, but there were also arrivals, there are also rockets, but they fly past us… We can sleep peacefully. Housing prices are high here, and earnings are low. It was easier at home, of course. It was important for the child, too, because a new school and adaptation… we had our own apartment and a favorite job.
But we are holding on, we believe in the Victory, that we will definitely return home and all this will end one day. We don’t know if there is a place to go, because there are terrible arrivals in Kramatorsk and a rocket landed near our house. We don’t know what is happening there now, but we believe we will rebuild! We believe in our Victory!
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