“If I have to die, I die. But I would have had a happy life, I had the chance to visit Disneyland in Paris, then Berlin and Sicily”: under the bombs in Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine , Vika, 16, recalled past trips with her Italian host family.
When the anti-aircraft sirens sounded, she took refuge in the underground of a school, where she bundled up in a sleeping bag, trying in vain to sleep. To kill time, she introduced her companions in misfortune to Burraco, an Italian card game.
The nightmare ended on the night of March 7, at 2 a.m., when she returned to her room filled with stuffed animals in her Italian family’s house in Cusago near Milan, after a long and trying train journey and bus, thanks to the association “I Bambini dell’Est” (The Children of the East).
Created in 2010 to help the “children of Chernobyl” who came to Italy and elsewhere in Europe to breathe clean air, the association has extended its reception programs to young people from orphanages like Vika.
From the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, fighting was intense in Kharkiv. “We heard shots and the sound of missiles and we saw columns of black smoke. Lots of buildings were destroyed, like our cinema, with all the windows smashed,” says Vika, still in shock.
– Escape from the orphanage –
Viktoria Shakshyna came twice a year to Cusago, three months in summer and one month in winter, from the age of nine. Stays that allowed him to escape from the orphanage in Kharkiv, where were placed children removed from their parents for problems of delinquency, alcohol or precariousness.
Round face, wide smile, Vika does not see her future in Ukraine: “my home is here, I want to finish school and go to university”, she says in near-perfect Italian, staring her foster mother, Michela Slomp, a 47-year-old graphic designer.
Vika was not born in 1986 when one of the four reactors of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, releasing millions of radioelements into the air, equivalent to the intensity of at least 200 Hiroshima bombs.
“Our children were not directly affected by the disaster, but it is certain that in the soil, in the vegetables, there is always radiation” in Ukraine, explains Federica Bezziccheri, president of “I Bambini dell’Est” .
Since the war broke out, his phone has been ringing day and night. At the other end, Italian families desperately trying to reach their foster children, or young Ukrainians trying to escape.
“We live the war live. When we call the children in video message, we hear the sound of the bombings. And on television, I recognize destroyed places where we stayed in Kharkiv”, she says, leaning on her computer in his apartment in Milan.
– Digging trenches –
“The girls say that it is enough to walk a hundred meters in the street to come across dead people. And the boys have signed up as volunteers, they fill sandbags or dig trenches”, she explains.
“Some young people say it’s better to risk being injured or killed helping your country than to die like rats in a cage in the basement of a building.” For the time being, the association has succeeded in transporting 280 refugees to Italy.
The Italian family of Yana Alieva, 20, brought her back in January from Kharkiv, even before the start of the invasion, to their apartment in Milan, where a blue and yellow flag of Ukraine hangs from the balcony. “We could feel the war coming,” says his foster mother, Carla Marini, a 56-year-old engineer.
“I am heartbroken, my world is gone, my boyfriend and my friends lived in basements under bombs before moving to safer areas, I fear for those who remained”, says Yana , who was also raised in an orphanage.
Black hair, fine features, the young Ukrainian does not hide her anger: before the war, “we were all united, Russians and Ukrainians, as one people”. But now, “they call us + Nazis + and we see who they really are”.
A student of literature, she is now enrolled at Cattolica University in Milan. But she intends to return to Ukraine when the war is over and “participate in the reconstruction” of her city, to “make it even more beautiful”.