Iryna survived, but barely. Severely wounded in her city of Izyum, in eastern Ukraine, she spent eight days in a roofless house at -10°C until her neighbors found her. Then she spent 25 days in the basement of the local hospital under Russian occupation, beginning to be nursed back to health. But this story, as told to Livy Bereg reporters, has no happy ending.
On Feb. 24, 2022, at five in the morning, my son called me from Kharkiv and said they were being bombed. I jumped up and started screaming, saying, “Get down to the basement quickly, and then get to Izyum.”
The next day, he took the last train down from Kharkiv. Then a colleague called and said their house had been destroyed. Friends called from the neighboring district, where their village had been bombed.
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The flow of wounded began. On Feb. 25, the Russians started shelling Izyum. I offered to leave, but like many others, my mother and husband did not want to.
Russian forces destroyed schools, churches and buildings that had survived both world wars.
We moved to my mother’s house. At that time, the bombing was constant, one plane after another. It seemed to grow quieter for a day. On the evening of March 6, our dog barked, and I realized there was a Russian air raid.
A missile hit the hallway where we were all standing: my mother, son, husband, dog and I. Only I survived. I dug them up. I don’t know where my strength came from. My son died in my arms, probably from internal bleeding.
Voices of neighbors
I don’t know why I survived. I crawled into the house, found water, climbed on the bed, put on my son’s jacket and hat and lay there for eight days: no windows and no roof in 10-degree frost, with missiles flying constantly and the bodies of my family lying on the doorstep.
One day, I heard the voices of my neighbors and screamed. They pulled me out, washed me and fed me. The hospital had already been bombed, but one surgeon remained. The neighbors put me in a car and drove me to the doctor under the bombardment. He and a nurse sewed me up alive. I remember they were shouting, saying, “Don’t think about fainting. There is nothing to resuscitate you!” I spent the next 25 days in the hospital’s basement.
There were many people with shrapnel wounds and fractures. There were also lung diseases because they lived in basements and older people with strokes. The head of the laboratory, 82 years old, a Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust, did essential blood and urine tests.
The basement and the cemetery
I organized a crossword puzzle club in the basement. At first, three people, then five or eight, would set up chairs. The Russians were bombing, and we had our own lives. It was a distraction as the walls shook and plaster fell on us. I could at least hobble on my crutches, but others were bedridden.
The Russians occupied the city and moved on. Replacing them were Russian militants from Donetsk and Luhansk, and Chechens led by dictator Ramzan Kadyrov. The Chechens did not enter the hospital, but the Donetsk people were a nightmare. The only remaining doctor was told, “We’re going to shoot you in the legs. Let’s see what kind of doctor you are.”
In general, no infrastructure was left. No hospitals, schools, nothing.
There was a period of calm as volunteers dug up bodies in flower beds, gardens, and near entrances, took pictures of everyone and then buried them in a distant cemetery closer to the forest. I didn’t know where the bodies of my family were, or under what number. It was also impossible to get a death certificate. Volunteers were not allowed; they offered to take the wounded from the hospital, but neither they nor international organizations were allowed. At first, people somehow managed to get out through the forest by secret paths, but in early May, everything was blocked. The bus station was bombed. Evacuation buses were shot at. On March 9, one multi-story building was hit, with maybe 50 or 60 people buried under the rubble. Whole families died. No one was counting.
In general, no infrastructure was left. No hospitals, schools, nothing. My friends wrote that everything was looted and that trucks took household appliances, toilets and other items to Russia.
Humanitarian aid is another story. During one such auction of unprecedented generosity, a man was shot. People ran away. Another time, Russian forces robbed a confectionery warehouse and gave candies to children under the guise of humanitarian aid. But everyone could see that these were Ukrainian sweets. There were also problems with drinking water: the city was on a mountain, and the wells were quickly exhausted. We had to take water from the Donets River, where we could sometimes see corpses floating.
Where are you from?
My friends from another village came across me by chance while looking for their relatives in the hospital’s basement. The next day they came to pick me up and took me to the village, 20 kilometers from the city. Bandages were in short supply, so the doctor gave me two: wash them, he said. A few days later, volunteers appeared and took me to Dnipro. When I came to Mechnikov Hospital, doctors asked where I came from. When I said I was from Izyum, it was so quiet around. The trauma department patched me up a bit because my heel was broken, and pieces of flesh were torn out.
I spent three weeks in Dnipro. In the meantime, my friends from Israel organized a campaign on social media. Now, I am undergoing rehabilitation in Israel.
I wanted to be a beautiful grandmother
What was the point of all this? Most of us were Russian-speaking, and Izyum is very multinational. At one time, many Armenians who fled Baku settled here, alongside Azerbaijanis fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh and Ossetians fleeing the Russians. There is also a Chechen diaspora. How can Russia call the fighting there “denazification”?
The city had its own life, growing strawberries, picking mushrooms, trading and building roads and bridges. No one asked Putin to come.
That was the worst thing for me: to be left alone in this world. I am lying under a beautiful sky, with the gorgeous constellation Orion above me. The stars are like light bulbs, tracer bullets are flying and I think: five minutes ago, I had everything. Now I have nothing. I lay there thinking that I would never hug my grandchildren. I’m a woman who wanted to be a beautiful young grandmother. A part of my life was taken away from me — the memory of my ancestors — and I didn’t have time to take a single photo.
I can’t go back to Izyum yet; with my wounds, I still can’t put on shoes.
