Mace nag-retweet
From a Russian-speaking Ukrainian civilian in Kharkiv whose home russia burned on March 6:
“On March 6, the not-so-great Russian army burned down my apartment — during one of the most brutal air raids in the first days of the war on my native Kharkiv. That night the city was ablaze in such a way that the fire brigades couldn’t keep up with putting out the flames — mostly residential neighborhoods were burning. They reached us a couple of hours later.
Even if they had arrived five minutes earlier, they would have seen flames bursting out of every window many meters upward — the high-rise looked like an enormous torch.
Fortunately, my daughter wasn’t in the apartment at that moment — she missed the explosion by some 20–30 minutes.
The children said: “They burned our childhood”…
Our beloved cat Nyusha perished;
the photo/video archives of the children and of Kharkiv’s literary life from 2007–2022 burned (300–400 GB);
a library of several generations — roughly 3–5 thousand books — burned.
Our pre-war life burned…
The apartment door turned out to be sturdy — installed conscientiously — it withstood the blast and saved the neighbors’ family who were hiding behind it in the shared corridor…
……
three black windows:
the right one — my son’s window,
in the middle — my daughter’s window,
on the left — the kitchen cat window
Of all of them, only Nyusha did not survive —
the cat alone took death for everyone that night:
black soot and char
on the outside walls seems
to be spreading even now, as if
the cat’s soul,
still unable to believe in such a death,
is trying to escape this hell
a cluster bomb
left a crater in the courtyard
exactly in the place
where I used to walk the little ones
to the playground,
and from the benches came the grumbling:
“Need to wrap the kids up better,
or they’ll catch a cold in the draft”
now the early-spring draft
sings a lullaby
to the dead (un)home
where all the photo albums
of all generations have been burned
when my children’s grandchildren
ask to be shown
a photo of my grandfather,
who defeated fascism in ’45,
they will hear:
“there are no photographs of great-great-grandfather,
the fascists burned them…
English
