Lydia, 85, passed through Lviv’s railway station in western Ukraine as a wave of fast-moving passengers rushed past her. Bent almost twice by spinal disease, her eyes were fixed on the floor as she tried to keep up with her son, a few steps ahead.
But her thoughts, she said, were on the village she fled and her daughter, who could not be saved when a Russian bombing destroyed her house.
Before the war, Lydia lived peacefully in the farming village of Dovhenke, near Izyum, with her 61-year-old paralyzed daughter Irina and two grandchildren. Three weeks ago, the Russians began bombing the village: the school, shops and people’s homes.
Lydia and her son spoke on the condition that their surnames were not used for fear of Russian repression.
At about 1:30 a.m. on March 26, Lydia had gotten out of bed, frozen to put more wood in the iron stove. Her daughter was asleep. They were alone. Her son Volodya, 62, was staying at a friend’s house. One of her grandchildren was injured in an assassination attempt the day before and was in hospital. His brother was with him.
Then explosions were heard and the house began to shake. The roof fell apart over Irina.
“The ceiling fell and everything fell on it,” Lydia said. She was shouting, “Mom, save me!”
The electricity was out. Lydia tried to make her way in the dark to her daughter’s bed, but stumbled and fell.
“I got up and then I fell, I got up and I fell, and then I crawled up to her,” she said. “She said, ‘Quick, hurry up, I’m suffocating,'” Lydia said, wiping her eyes with the edge of the purple skirt she wore over the bottom of her flannel pajamas.
The only light in the room came from the stars visible through the hole in the roof, Lydia said. She remembers trying hard to move fallen wooden beams and pieces of clay from her daughter’s top. “She kept saying, ‘Quick, quick,'” Lydia said. “I told her, ‘I can’t do it fast. I don’t have the strength. “
Lydia did what she could, removing small debris that covered her daughter until the sun rose. In the morning a neighbor arrived, took out the biggest trees and rubble and wrapped Irina in a blanket. She was still breathing, but her arms and legs were blue. She was taken to a relative’s house, but there was no way to treat her with the shelling.
“If she lives, she lives,” Lydia said, her doctor told her.
She died the next day.
Slow deaths like Irina’s have received less attention than other horrors of war – civilians who were found shot dead in places like Bucha or the bombing of a maternity hospital and theater in Mariupol.
Lydia blamed her daughters for the death of her arms, weakened by age and arthritis, and the curved spine that prevented her from standing up.
“What can I say? My daughter died,” she said, crying softly as she sat next to plastic bags holding her belongings. “If it weren’t for me, she would have survived.”
At the train station in Lviv, the mother and son were about to stay with friends in Khmelnytsky, central Ukraine.
Volodya, with years of experience familiar with the conflict between Russian-backed separatists, described the types of missiles he said were falling on their village: “They fired mortars and started hitting us with Grads, Tornado. “Hurricane”.
“My house was demolished, the barn was demolished. “My car burned down,” he said. “I had everything and now I have nothing.”
Add Comment