On February 24, 2022, Olena's family woke up to a phone call. Her husband's employee called and asked if he had to go to work because there were explosions around the city. The day that Olena had spent a month wanting to believe would never come had arrived.
That day was very chaotic. Olena received calls asking where her family would go and telling her who had already left the city. So far, Olena and her husband had only talked about what they would do.
“My great-grandmother and great-grandfather, along with my little grandmother, lived in their house during the German occupation. Their large basement was a shelter for many neighbors during the bombing. Staying at home and waiting it out is my plan for war,” Olena had thought.
However, their family didn't have a basement, and while Olena’s mother had a basement, it took a while to get there, which was dangerous during shelling. Instead, Olena, her husband, and their children took shelter in the corridor, where they set up a small sofa and put a few chairs.
On the evening of the first day, Olena’s husband's mother and his sister’s family came to them. Their district was the second to meet the advancing Russian troops. And although while they had to drive to Olena’s place to the sound of explosions, they were lucky enough not to encounter the tank that drove down their street the very next morning.
“7th day of the war. Everyone is united. People are supporting each other. In word and deed. People carry bread and milk to different parts of the city, under shelling. I don't see the shelling, but I hear it. Yesterday I couldn't contain my emotions when I found out that the cadet corps was bombed. Kids were bombed. Demilitarization in a dastardly way,” Olena wrote on her social media.
She saw how the Russian military carried out airstrikes on the residential areas of Kharkiv. One day they bombed a hospital. Maternity wards and children's oncology departments moved to basements.
"Now I know what a special operation to "enforce peace" looks like. It is when the house trembles and burns," says Olena.
On the 9th day of the full-scale invasion, Olena, who is a psychologist, gradually began getting back to work in an almost usual format. Before that point, she had been working in crisis mode, texting nonstop with more than 10 people at the same time and discussing situations with unpredictable developments. These were conversations about panic, fear, and physical survival.
During these days, Olena even managed to take part in two seminars with Israeli colleagues, whose calm and motivation to get to work providing help gave Ukrainian psychologists great support.
On the 10th day, an enemy shell hit the school near Olena's house. "It was very loud. At that time, we had gotten used to "just loud", she recalls. After the explosion, when the house shook, Olena saw the fear on her youngest son's face. The fear was so deep that she promised the boy to stay awake until morning to carry him into the corridor if it happened again.
That night, Olena thought about what to do. In her head, she heard the voice of her late father, who was her greatest protection, and he told her: "Olena, take the children away, we have a house in the village."
The next morning, she started packing their bags. Although the house in the village was not fit for living at all, it was still there. There were relatives and neighbors there whom Olena knew well. When the family arrived in the village, kind people found them an apartment.
During her first days outside the city, Olena came out of her state of shock and noticed that she would shudder from loud sounds. She also cried at the realization that she had used to come to this place to visit her grandmother and relatives, but now she fled here from the war.
Olena believes that war cannot be learned from a textbook: "You understand the value of peace only when you know and use the rule of two walls, turn off your car’s headlights at checkpoints, shade your windows at night, go nowhere without your children, and secretly wipe your eyes after the words "Mom, I want to go home..."
This material was prepared with financial support from the International Renaissance Foundation.
