We lived on the sixth floor and our balcony was facing the airport. Early in the morning on the 24th my wife cried out: “Explosions! War!” And we saw a huge mushroom cloud: apparently, they hit an ammunition storage or fuel supply. The planes were removed from the airfield, so maybe they were waiting for an attack. There was only one old plane left: it was bought by the city to put in the park and make a kids’ cafe there. That was what the Russians hit and then they boasted about it…

By the first night Russians were by Melitopol

We were shocked of course. They were calming us down: everything is under control etc. The information that was coming through was saying otherwise, but it was impossible to believe that Russia would attack Ukraine. We went into the yard and all neighbors were asking each other: is it true? Is it not an error?

Melitopol is a peculiar city. Most people here are pro-Ukraine, but there were some who were gloating: yay, we’ll soon be captured by Putin. And there were a lot of traitors. They were close to power: worked in city government, city council, the regional council. Many police officers went to work for the occupiers’ headquarters and the “people’s police.”

The Russians were close to Melitopol on the first night, and Melitopol is the gateway to Crimea. There is a narrow land bridge, a dirt road where two cars can barely pass each other. So anyway, even the little bridge wasn’t blown up. They didn’t blow up any of the bridges, even though they were all rigged with explosives. I think there must have been treason involved. Because by that evening there were Russian armored cars by Melitopol, and the city was not protected.

In the morning they went down the main boulevard, right under our balcony. Everything was shaking. In the first days they did not touch anyone, except they shot up a car repair place and a few private homes burned down. In the city, they occupied the local branch of the security service, the police station, and the local council. And then they started pressuring everyone. The deputy head of the army conscription office came to them with a list of people who were fighting in the Ukrainian army. They made the city council secretary Galina Danil’chenko mayor.

When people started coming out for pro-Ukrainian protests, Russians came up too. At first they were staying at the airport, and then many of them came into the city. We came to a protest like that once and knew many people there. Then they started disbanding the meeting, fired shots in the air, a few people were wounded in the legs, but they didn’t shoot to kill. And the last protest was broken down very harshly: they chased people, beat them down, detained about 50 people. That was approximately 2 weeks after the beginning of the occupation. After that there were no protests.

Once there were lists, they started kidnapping and detaining business owners, activists and journalists. School principals were made to switch to the Russian curriculum, and there was only a month left until the end of the semester. They would hand in their resignation and end up detained. They would be taken out of town (10-20 kilometers) and released — a scare tactic. Our mayor, Ivan Fedorov, was kidnapped. He was later released as part of the prisoner exchange.

They shot some farmers we know and did not give permission to bury them

The city council was looted: they took computers, all equipment. They also looted the clothing store: Russians had to switch into regular clothes. They quickly got mixed into the crowd, so I was afraid to say a word out on the street, you could never know who was next to you. They would switch over often: first it was DNR soldier, then Russians. They appointed a head of the occupation forces. They acted up.

An acquaintance told me how they were building a tower outside of town. They went through the checkpoint everyday in a minivan with their tools. Every day they would be let through with no issues, and then one day the guards point to one of the men — leave him here. The entire group was riled up: what do you mean? we can’t make it without him? what’s your problem with him? The soldier responded: he looked at me funny.

One time the Russians rode through town, shot up the windows in supermarkets and electronics stores. They looted everything in a day: there was no need to call the locals and the soldiers got what they wanted.

There were crazy queues at the pharmacy. Blood pressure medications, heart medications all disappeared, and everyone was stressed out and needed them. They almost stopped baking bread, there were huge lines and it made everyone buy as much as possible. The out-of-town hotels and resorts helped out, as they had stored stuff for the upcoming season. Farmers would come, just stop in the middle of the street and sell vegetables. There was no hunger per se, but we could definitely feel the lack of supplies.

Banks and ATMs basically did not work. My wife tried to get her retirement money for 10 days. She would get up at 6 am and go to the line. And those who had money brought by postal workers ended up without money whatsoever. Or those who had button phones — they couldn’t get cash except in the bank if they showed up with a passport. Once they brought three million hryvnas to the post office (retirement payments), and men with shotguns came and took everything.

There were fewer and fewer hryvnas and things got worse. We shared as much as we could. There was a young woman with three children living on the first floor and we helped her out. We also helped a family in a local village, a young couple with four kids.

There were problems with fuel for the cars. Sometimes they would just stop the cars and take over. Many switched from Mercedes to simple Zhiguli; those were safe.

At first they would take phones to check and did not return them. But generally pedestrians were not detained, mostly those with cars. The family of farmers that we knew were shot up in their Jeep. They didn’t release the bodies for a few days and demanded another Jeep in exchange for the body. When the son brought a car, they allowed a tractor to tow the Jeep with the bodies back to the village.

We started every morning with looking for medications

They shot up a cancer treatment center downtown: there was a huge red cross on it, you could see it from a distance. The center was freshly built. And next to it was an old two-floor building. So they hit that second floor from an APC. We knew someone who worked there. There were surgery rooms and surgery dressing rooms. That was at the very beginning of the occupation.

They started looting the factories and taking the equipment to Crimea, 120 km from us. Evgeniy Balytskiy from the Opposition Block was appointed the governor of the Zaporizhzhya region. We knew what kind of person he was a long time ago. When there would be an event on May 9th to celebrate Victory Day, he would get together some dressed up communists, take a red flag, put on St. George’s ribbons and march as a separate group. But there were others too. Met an acquaintance who was in the police, he approached me and said, you know, I have a family, they need food. So he was trying to explain himself.

The city was empty by 16:00. Everyone was hiding at home. We couldn’t take the pressure. My wife lost 10 kg, and I dropped two sizes. And it wasn’t because of the hunger, just the environment. There’s a Russian truck going, it turns to block the road, a man with a shotgun gets out, stops all the cars and checks them. If they don’t like someone, they detain them.

Even before we left, about 200 people were kidnapped, many were released, but some vanished without a trace. Beside that, my wife has thyroid issues; she has to take Euthyrox — and it was nowhere to be found and no way to order more. We would start each morning looking for it. At the end, she stopped talking and didn’t want to go. We had a fight in the evening, but decided to try to make it out and took our neighbor with her kids with us. We could leave towards Zaporizhzhya, but the drivers raised the fare to 150 dollars per person. And the queue for the evacuation buses was huge. The neighbor went there with her kids (6, 4, and 1.5 years old) for a week, and couldn’t board a bus.

“Don’t worry, you are home now”

Anyway, she made signs saying Children, and white pieces of cloth. It was on April 9. On the way we saw a lot of destroyed vehicles, even though they took some to Crimea. Every checkpoint was a humiliation: the guards are beaten down, hungry, but they are begging for cigarettes and poking everywhere: pockets, purses. We had to reset the phones to factory settings. They turned all clothes inside out and made the men undress. But some were okay: oh, kiddos, don’t be afraid, I have kids too. We had to pass 15 checkpoints over 70 km.

Bridges are broken, so we had to take detours through villages, over rivers. There were burned down cars on the sides of the road. The last village before the controlled territory, Kamenskoye, is completely bombed out: no roofs, no windows, no doors. We were going down the street and the locals are just looking at the cars with empty eyes:

— Can we come in to use the bathroom? (in Russian)

— Come on in…(in Ukrainian)

There was a checkpoint at the exit from the village, so we stopped again. And we see the insignia, so I tell my wife: Valia, they are ours! And she started crying. I couldn’t console her.

The soldier comes by and says in Ukrainian: auntie, why are you crying? And she can’t say a word. We hugged. Don’t be afraid, you are home now. They only asked us to turn off our phones: Tokmak and Pology were next, and there were battles going on, so if they get a fix on the signal, they could fire on us.

Once we moved from the checkpoint, the neighbor told us that her husband was on the front line. We were shocked. We took her to the railway station: she is in Germany now. They gave us such a good welcome in Zaporizhzhya, and then we went to Cherkassy, that’s where my mother is from. Her last name was Pinkusovich. Yad Vashem has all the data on my relatives who were shot. My uncle, who now lives in Israel, was saved in an orphanage by a Ukrainian nurse, Anna Shulezhko, one of the Righteous among the nations. He was four years old then. His parents were shot, but Anna managed to grab him. He called her mom till her last day.

“You are lying about everything”

In Cherkassy we went to the Jewish Agency. They sent us to Lviv, then to a hotel in Truskavets, and then on to Budapest. Real mensch, we got so much attention, we never saw so much in our lives. We were planning to come visit uncle Volodya in June, but this is what happened. We are celebrating our 50-year wedding anniversary this year. We left everything and went away. We weren’t approved for repatriation, because in 1921 my great grandfather was baptized into Christianity, though in 1943 he was shot as a Jew with his entire family. His name is in the Yad Vashem database. We were only allowed to enter for three months on a tourist visa.

One of my sons is in Russia. We used to work at Magadan, were given an apartment there, and made friends. Some friendships broke back in 2014, we still talk to others, but nobody believes what’s happening. One friend from Magadan called:

— Good morning! Why did you leave?

— Maybe it’s good for you, but we were under occupation.

— Come on.

— We are refugees. One suitcase and a backpack.

— Why did you run? It was our boys who came.

My wife’s cousin called from Taganrog: time for congratulations, you are Russians now? We sent her photos, how a crowd is not letting the Russian tanks through, and she couldn’t believe it.

Another relative of ours has two sisters in Kursk. They assure her, that only military targets are being hit. She’s telling them that Mariupol has been razed to the ground, Kharkiv has been badly hit. “Oh come on, our soldiers don’t hit civilians, why are you lying?”

During WWII, there were battles close to Melitopol. That’s where the Panther-Wotan line was. And Russian trenches are now exactly on that line.