War. Stories from Ukraine

Ukrainians tell stories about their life during the war

“I lost my dad. I’m scared of losing someone else in my family”, Sofia Denysenko, 25, Vasylkiv

by | 22 March 2022 | Kyiv region

 

Shot through the eye. That is how the father of 25-year-old Sofia Denysenko, a recruiter for the SoftServe IT company, died. Sofia then lived in Rivne, and her parents and other relatives were in her native Vasylkiv, Kyiv Region, when the war started. Her father joined a territorial defense unit that guarded military facilities. One night, missiles fell nearby, but that time her father was lucky enough to survive. “We were very happy that time,” Sofia recalls, “‘God protects me for some reason,’ my father wrote.” He died the very next night.

Sofia says it was instant death, a bullet through the eye. There was a tough fire, about 20 people died. Sofia couldn’t get to the funeral.

“My mother asked me not to come, it was too dangerous, the route was not through Kyiv, some unknown roads. It would probably take me a lot of time to get there,” Sofia says.

“I only connected to the memorial service by a conference call with my mom.”

Sofia remembers her dad as a very patriotic pro-Ukrainian. She says he used to correct their wrong accents. He promoted progressive European values, sorted garbage, cared about the rational use of resources, although he was a common guy from the countryside, maybe even naive in a way. He was on the Maidan. Sofia remembers how the family saw him off as he was going there, as if for the last time. Occasionally he would teach Sofia and her brother to shoot. It may come in handy, he used to say.

“We didn’t pay much attention to that. We didn’t believe the war would ever come. It was too scary even thinking about that! Now we understand that his suggestions to build a bunker and learn how to shoot were very rational. If you have a gun and can shoot, you can defend your country.”

Sofia’s brother went to the front on the very first day of the Russian invasion. He is on the frontline now. Sometimes he does not answer her messages for a whole day because of poor connection, and that is the most difficult time for Sofia.

“That dark uncertainty is very traumatic. That feeling that you lose connection with someone, or maybe they are no longer alive, is the scariest thing I ever experienced,” she says. “I am scared of losing someone else from my family. These are the worst losses. Everything else just fades and becomes irrelevant. It’s scary that you weren’t around, you didn’t help, didn’t save, or didn’t foresee something. That is the worst.”

Now Sofia lives with her mom, her godmother and her godmother’s kids, cat and dog. Sofia continues to work. She says it is calm in Rivne now, only alarms are yelling now and then. Entrepreneurs resume their work, and displaced persons come to the city.

“On the first day, the sounds of explosions, even distant ones, caused animal horror and numbnesss. I was just cold and shivering a lot. It was very, very scary that this is really happening to you, this is not some kind of history textbook. And then I adjusted. Now we even laugh from time to time and get distracted by everyday life.”

Most of all, Sofia dreams of seeing European Ukraine, independent from Russia and Belarus. She dreams of a calm life here. She wants to start a family here.

 

Translated by Oksana Biliavska

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