First, I did not believe that there would be an offensive. Then everyone said, they were on the verge of this offensive. I never believed that we would have an enemy in Russia.

On January 5, my husband died suddenly. So there were no special plans to be built for that year. In general, she could not live alone in the house. There was never one, but here we had to be one and here the war. Ten days before the start of the war, we remembered 40 days for a man. I already started turning on the TV, it was already a little easier for me.

Once at the end of February [2022] she was walking down the street and suddenly heard such a noise, immediately fell into a ditch. Then I can't get up from the ditch, my knees don't bend, they don't bend.

On March 7, I went out on the porch, I look, something is burning for some neighbors, and the neighbors opposite is also burning.

I went to the neighbor, I say: "Everyone is told that you have to hide in the cellar. Nadia, they went to my cellar". She walked me so much worse. We climbed into the cellar with her. We were there for a day and a half, probably. What shall I say? The kidney started to hurt very much from the cold. I decided that I would not climb into the cellar.

They started in the house to settle down somewhere. There is a blanket, there is a blanket. There was up to 17 degrees of frost outside in those days. They sat in the house until the evening, but there were no whole windows then. What to heat if there is not a single window? Then a neighbor came alone and said: "Go to us. We have a wood-burning katyol, the windows are all intact".

We went to them, we sat until darkness. She was both a son-in-law, and her daughter and granddaughter were leaving. It's already darkened, my son-in-law comes in and says: "Girls, have you warmed up yet? So now go where you want to go". It's night outside, where to go? Then she went on to the neighbors, found them in the cellar, asked if you would take us with you so that we could live with them for a while.

They say that there is no place for us to lie down in the cellar, except that somewhere we will sit on boxes. And I say: "Maybe we will be in your house, but we will not go to the cellar. We don't want to be in the cellar". Their windows were intact and the heating was working. We were given a room, a sofa. We went there and lived with a neighbor with other neighbors for more than a month. We were somewhere from March 7 to April 8-9.

We lived very friendly. Plus there was a generator, so many people from the village came to charge their phones.

I woke up in the morning, I see that I'm not at home, you don't know what to do. So I took up the broom, swept around. We began to sweep and clean everything every day.

We had one bread for the whole day for 17 people. Everyone had potatoes in the cellar. Everything was different. We even told how volunteers could come. Everyone had a refrigerator clogged. This same village is a village. We had lard, meat, vegetables. Only the only thing that was not ‒ cereals. Just on February 24, I was going to go to Chernihiv to skimp.

We'll get up, prepare breakfast, have breakfast, wash the dishes and then we'll go see what we have here. After all, it is open in the yard, the walk-behind tractor was standing, all the tools, and there were no wickets or gates. Everything's bombed. Stranger chickens, turkeys, pigs go around.

The medicine was very bad. My pressure is high. What was, they drank, then they already shared who had which pills. Then they said that the school also has one health worker and the volunteers left her some medicine. Then we went there to school for a humanitarian and I went to this Ala, asked, then she gave me medicine for hypertension.

And in general, we will sit in the kitchen at the table in the evening and let's chat. I know them all, I am older than them. We always started with the history of this corner of ours. Who lived there, who remembers whom, who was who. And here we sit until half past ten every evening. Then we go to bed.

link to history