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"We will definitely return home": a family from Bakhmut hopes their city will once again see peace

"We will definitely return home": a family from Bakhmut hopes their city will once again see peace

One year after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Olena still can’t believe what she sees on the news about her hometown of Bakhmut. Heavy fighting continues there even today. Olena doesn’t recognize the grey, destroyed town Bakhmut has become.

Olena married her husband just two months before the war started. For their new family, everything was just beginning. But they didn't even have time to enjoy their honeymoon.

"In the early morning of February 24, a neighbor called and said that a large-scale war had begun, and Kharkiv was being shelled," Olena said.

Many people were leaving Bakhmut, Olena remembers, because there was already a sense of inevitable doom in the air. Seeing the Russian bombing of other cities like Mariupol, Kharkiv, Izyum, and Chernihiv, Olena believed Bakhmut would not be spared. Olena considered leaving her home in the early days of the war, even though it was relatively calm there. She also found out she was pregnant with her first child.

As the days and weeks passed, the bombing continued in Ukraine. Streams of people left the town, including doctors. Olena wondered more and more how she would be able to carry and give birth to a child in a city that was quickly emptying out. So the family made what they saw as the only right decision - to go where it was safe. In April, Olena, her husband, mother-in-law and husband's sister left.

They found a shelter in Lviv. At first, they lived in one of the local schools for four months, and when the preparations for the school year began, they had to look for another place to stay. Previously, Olena had come to the Caritas-Spes center for humanitarian aid, where she met Father Grigoriy. He invited Olena and her family to stay in their shelter, where a safe space had been created for people who had been displaced. Olena and her family have been living in the shelter for several months now. Her first child Rinat was also born while they were living in the shelter.

"He will be baptized with the name Grigory in honor of Father Grigory,” Olena said. “After all, we owe him a lot.”

Olena tries not to think about the future. All her worries are now concentrated around her young son, and thinking about the future causes pain. She is almost certain that her family has no place to return. Most of the city is destroyed and it is not the place for a little boy to grow up.

"We have no connection with the city, and this is very worrying," says Olena's mother-in-law. "After all, my disabled husband stayed there, as well as my mother-in-law and father-in-law. We still don't know what happened to them. But we will definitely return to Bakhmut after our victory. Because our home is there."

3 April 2023
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