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

By the first night, Russians were right outside Melitopol

We were shocked, of course. They were trying to calm us down by telling us everything was under control. The information we were getting was saying otherwise, but it was impossible for us to believe that Russia would attack Ukraine. We went into the yard and all neighbors were asking each other: is it true? Has there been some mistake?

Melitopol is a peculiar city. Most people here are pro-Ukraine, but there were some who were gloating: yay, we’ll soon be under Putin. There were a lot of traitors, with many of them close to power. They worked in city government, city council, the regional council. Many police officers went to work for the occupiers 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. 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 vehicles right outside Melitopol, and the city was not protected.

In the morning, they drove down the main boulevard, right under our balcony. Everything was shaking. In the first days, they did not touch anyone, other than shooting up a car repair shop and burning down a few houses. In the city, they occupied the local branch of the security service, the police station, and the city 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 Danilchenko mayor.

When people started coming out for pro-Ukrainian protests, the Russians came out, 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 dispersing the crowd and firing shots in the air. A few people in the legs, but they didn’t shoot to kill. And the last protest was broken up very harshly: they chased people, beat them down, and detained about 50 people. That was approximately 2 weeks after the beginning of the occupation. There were no protests after that.

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

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

The city council was looted: they took computers and all the equipment. They also looted a clothing store so they could switch into civilian clothes. They quickly blended into the population, so I was afraid to say a word out on the street, as you could never know who was next to you. They would switch over often: first it was DPR soldiers, then Russians. They appointed a head of the occupation forces. They started behaving badly.

An acquaintance told me about a time he and some other men were working on a tower outside of town. They went through the checkpoint every day in a van with their tools. Every day, they would be let through with no issues, but then one day, the guards pointed to one of the men and ordered him to be left behind. The entire group was outraged: What do you mean? We can’t do our jobs without him! What did he do wrong? The soldier responded, “he looked at me funny.”

One time, the Russians rode through town shooting the windows in supermarkets and electronics stores. They looted everything in a single day: there was not even a chance to call the owners before the soldiers had taken everything they wanted.

There were crazy queues at the pharmacy. Blood pressure and heart medications all disappeared, and everyone was stressed out and needed them. They almost stopped baking bread—there were huge lines, and people were buying as much as possible . The out-of-town hotels and resorts helped out, as they had stored supplies 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 were basically out of commission. My wife tried for 10 days to withdraw her pension payment. She would get up at 6 am and go to the line. And those who relied on postal workers to deliver their payments ended up with no money whatsoever. Those who had button phones [as opposed to smartphones with a banking app – ed.] couldn’t get cash except at the bank if they showed up with a passport. At one point, they brought three million hryvnias to the post office [for pension payments – ed.], and men with shotguns came and took everything.

There were fewer and fewer hryvnias, 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 also were problems with fuel for the cars. Sometimes the Russians would just stop cars and seize them. Many people switched from Mercedes to simple Zhigulis, as those were safer from theft.

At first, they would take phones to check and did not return them. But pedestrians were generally not detained—it was mostly those with cars who were. 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 bodies. When their son brought a car, they allowed a tractor to tow the Jeep with the bodies back to the village.

We started every morning by looking for medications

They shot up a cancer treatment center downtown. It had a huge red cross on it which you could see from a distance. The center was newly built. Next to it was an old two-story 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 [a pro-Russian political party – ed.] 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. I met an acquaintance who was in the police. He approached me and said, you know, I have a family, and 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.

The bridges were destroyed, so we had to take detours through villages and over rivers. There were burned out cars on the sides of the road. The last village before Ukrainian-controlled territory, Kamenske, was completely bombed out, with no roofs, windows, or doors left on the buildings. We were driving down the street, and the locals just stared 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. I saw the insignia on the soldiers, and I told my wife: “Valy a, they’re ours!” She started crying, and I couldn’t console her. The soldier came up to us and said in Ukrainian, “A untie, why are you crying?” And she couldn’t say a word. We embraced. Don’t be afraid, you are home now. They only asked us to turn off our phones. Tokmak and Polohy were next on the road, and there was fighting going on, so if the Russians got a fix on our signal, they could fire on us.

Once we moved on from the checkpoint, our neighbor told us that her husband was on the front line. We were shocked. We brought 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, where my mother is from. Her last name was Pinkusovich. Yad Vashem has all the information 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 Jewish Agency. They sent us to Lviv, then to a hotel in Truskavets, and then on to Budapest. They were real mensches there: we got so much attention, more than we had ever had 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 in Magadan and were given an apartment there, and we made friends. Some of our friendships broke back in 2014, while 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 of a crowd trying to block Russian tanks, 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 and Kharkiv has been badly hit. “Oh come on, our soldiers don’t hit civilians. Why are you lying?”

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