I went to the supermarket, and when I got back our apartment building looked red from the flames: a rocket hit a private house, and it was ablaze. And there was a shell sticking from the asphalt at the spot where I walked just a few minutes before
When the war started, most of the pregnant patients were sent home, and the rest were lowered to the basement, where they spent the whole day. One of the women immediately gave birth there in those unsanitary conditions. And next to her sat moms with newborn babies, I mean 2-3 hours old, and male patients stood nearby. In the end, Alena was sent home too, even without discharge papers. It was clear that if something went wrong she would not be able to get medical help at home.
Three days after the invasion it became impossible to move around the city. Taxi drivers were asking for 7000 hryvnias (approximately $230) for a ride to the railway station. Anyone without a car was locked into their neighborhood, and that’s not even accounting for issues with gasoline supply.
It took us almost two days to get to Lviv on Jewish Agency buses. They gave us shelter and food. The volunteers tried to organize our day to day lives, but it was impossible to go further, given how big the crowds were at the bus station and the railway station.
By some miracle Alena found a minivan heading to Chernivtsy. Nobody announced its departure, and a ticket cost 700 hrn. We are not rich, so we made a deal with the driver: Alena would sit on my lap, and her younger sister (11 years old) would sit on my mother-in-law’s lap, and we made the trip like that. Those five hours were nothing compared to the two days it took us to get to Lviv, when we would stop in the middle of fields for a bathroom break. I don’t know how she made it through that situation, being pregnant and all…
In Chernivtsy we were welcomed by the ‘Aviv” community of conservative Judaism: who gave us food, water, and shelter. Our gratitude knows no bounds.
Alena. And I still would like to return to Kharkiv at some point. I used to have a job and a home there…
Dmitry. I am ethnically Russian, but I was born in Ukraine. I saw how Kharkiv was growing. And today the city is destroyed. Entire blocks of houses in the Saltovka neighborhood have been burned down. Nobody knows how long it would take to rebuild the city and how much that would cost. And I have a family.
I took part in fighting championships, got multiple injuries, spent a year in the hospital. I had fractures of my arms and the bones in my face. I fought to make it to the tournament finale, where the main prize was a car. I made it through five fights, and there was only the final one left. It was scheduled for April 2nd. The cost of the prize was approximately equal to an apartment. And then, bang, the war started.
Where am I going to work? People moved away, even the gym where I worked out, was hit. It was on the ground floor of an apartment building, and a rocket hit it causing the windows to be blasted out. The gym owner is a friend of mine; he let five families move in. And next to the gym there were corpses of civilians lying on the street. It is a residential block. The main street of Ukraine’s former capital is in ruins. Landmark buildings have been blown up. Soon there will be nothing left of Kharkiv. And all this was done by people who came to “liberate” us...
Instead of a post scriptum
In July 2022 Dmitry and Alena welcomed a baby boy. He was born in Berlin…