Chapter 3 #3
“Yes, even then. I don’t think we would transplant well at our age,” he said honestly.
“This is the life we know. It’s our home.
We love all of you and our grandchildren, but we want to stay here.
If it gets too bad, we’ll move to the bomb shelter at night.
There’s one right near here, just down the street.
We’re safe here, Symon, the weapons are just a precaution. We’ll probably never have to use them.”
“No, you might. The Russians are coming closer and closer, or trying to. They could be here any day.”
“We’re fine,” Petro insisted, as Symon got up to leave. “Thank you for the visit.” Symon could see now why Yulya had gotten nowhere trying to convince her parents to leave. They were stubborn and determined, and it was impossible to budge them at all.
“I’ll come again when I have a little time off,” he promised them.
In the meantime, he could tell Yulya he’d seen them and for now at least they were fine.
Symon had the feeling that they didn’t understand how much worse it could get, or how long it might take, even years.
It was already unpleasant now and worrisome, as the Russians were determined to take the city and the country, and the Ukrainians were resolved not to let that happen.
It was inconceivable to Petro and Oxana.
They didn’t have anything of great value in their home.
But it was filled with little sentimental things they loved and had collected, and were treasures to them.
They’d be heartbroken if their building got bombed.
They wanted to protect their possessions.
They walked Symon out through their garden and watched him walk down the street in his uniform.
He was a soldier now, like everyone else.
And they had become civilians with guns. The world as they knew it had gone mad.
—
The training civilians received in volunteer military units was arduous and intense, and had been shortened because men were needed on the ground as quickly as possible to fight the Russians.
Training courses in weapons and hand-to-hand combat varied from one to four weeks with classes and practice sessions, to teach untrained men and women to use the weapons at hand.
The younger women were willing and wanted to fight alongside the men.
They were usually single and didn’t have children to worry about and had less to lose.
The women with children wanted to be at home to protect them, or to leave the country as fast as they could.
That children were killed and injured every day in the bombing raids and the explosions, and the homes and residential neighborhoods on fire, convinced families to get their children to safety as soon as possible whatever it took, and out of the country if they could.
Daily, hundreds of thousands of women and children, along with a few men who were either old or disabled and unable to fight, left the country with nothing but a few suitcases and garbage bags, clutching their children and their pets, their dreams shattered, their homes abandoned in flames, and the younger men at risk in a war they hadn’t deserved.
It was brutal punishment with total disregard for humanitarian concerns and the internationally accepted rules of war.
To their enemy, civilians, women and children and the elderly, and even hospitals, were fair game.
The bombings were merciless, the shellings and shootings cruel.
Bodies littered the streets in the areas of greatest conflict, and the sight of mothers holding dead children in their arms and keening in grief was becoming commonplace.
Soldiers of both sides littered the forests and lay in the gutters until someone had time to put them into mass unmarked graves.
Neither Vlad nor Symon nor the other civilian men who joined the volunteer units, the reserves, and the regular army had expected or been trained for the kind of war they had to fight, for their lives and their country to resist being occupied.
The civilians learned the basics as fast as they could.
The army fought harder than they ever knew they’d have to, fueled by love of country and the homeland they were defending.
They were fighting for their children, their ordinary lives, their apartments, their civilization, and the cherished monuments that were being destroyed right before their eyes.
Mariupol, a beautiful beach town on the Sea of Azov, full of charming historical monuments and structures, was hit first and hardest, and eventually destroyed down to the ground with nothing left recognizable, and the remaining residents trapped in the rubble dying of thirst and starvation.
The battle for Kyiv, the capital, was the fiercest, with its suburbs Vorzel and Irpin, where Petro and Oxana lived.
Symon and Yulya and Vlad and Tatyanna lived in the city, which was an instant battleground and the prize that both sides wanted.
With the fierce fighting of the volunteers and regular army, the Ukrainians managed to hold their ground in the capital, despite losses and the destruction of the city, with missiles raining on residential neighborhoods, and bombs treated to cause maximum damage to human flesh, which was deemed a war crime by international governments and authorities.
Nothing deterred the Russian invaders, but the combined Ukrainian military forces staunchly defended their cities and towns and hadn’t lost a city yet.
At their request, Symon and Vlad were assigned to the same unit, and they fought nobly together with a tank unit that faced off with the Russian tanks backed up thirty-five miles on the outskirts of the city.
Symon took part in an attack on a Russian tank and found it exhilarating when the tank retreated.
Vlad found he had an ability to conceal himself in the forest outside the city, literally leaping from one tree to the next, as he would have in a ballet, and shooting at the Russian soldiers with surprisingly good aim.
He had a keen eye and a solid hand and was fearless.
At night, when they could get a connection, he called Tatyanna, still at the Polish border, but he never described the battles to her.
He just said he was all right, and that their food rations were getting slimmer.
She was eating well at the refugee camp near Medyka on the Polish border.
The Red Cross and NATO forces saw to it that they had everything they needed to reach other cities if they wished to, to meet up with their relatives.
Local residents came to the base to offer a place to stay for those who had nowhere to go.
The outreach and warm welcome of the Polish people had been extraordinary.
They were willing to take in their war-weary, destitute neighbors without hesitation.
The Germans, for those who had gotten that far, had been equally hospitable, taking women and children into their homes.
Refugee assistance groups often helped make the connections.
Everyone wanted to help them once they were able to leave Ukraine.
Until then, they were powerless to assist.
But no one could reach those trapped in the beleaguered cities.
Refugee aid trucks were shot at, people in the humanitarian corridors trying to escape were killed, including children.
As the days wore on, it was harder and harder to escape.
The Russian military was determined to trap the residents of Mariupol in the city, and pointedly bombed all the locations where they had taken shelter.
They decimated a maternity hospital, killing mothers and babies and medical personnel, an art school where four hundred civilians were sheltered, and a theater where thirteen hundred of Mariupol’s residents were sheltering, killing six hundred of them.
An estimated fifty-eight thousand of Mariupol’s four hundred and eighty thousand residents had been killed or had managed to escape to other cities and regions, a month after the war began.
The Russians were determined to kill the remaining four hundred and twenty thousand trapped there, and they turned the city to rubble, with no food, electricity, heat, or water.
By the end of May, a once beautiful, charming town that had provided pleasure to all its visitors had been leveled without a single recognizable dwelling or monument left standing.
Those who had survived the bombs were hiding in basements.
There were no buildings left weeks after the fighting had begun.
It was both a human and a historical tragedy.
Petro mourned the lovely city when he heard about it, and residential buildings in Irpin had been targeted and destroyed too.
Theirs was still standing, but Oxana doubted it would be for long.
She had packed two bags with some clothes and a few small treasures in case they needed to escape, and her box with Petro’s poems to her was in hers.
—