Oleksiy Pshemyskyi shares the story of Mykola, a resident of Bucha town, who had to bury three of his friends himself.
He was given 20 minutes to piece together the body of his friend and bury him.
This is Mykola. He is 53 years old. He lives in Bucha town. Mykola has a strong stutter. He starts talking only after lighting a cigarette.
He has been living in the basement for 34 days. He could leave, but the man is a superintendent in a five-storey building. He says he could not but stay.
On the first day of the fighting in Bucha, a shell struck into his windows, pierced the wall and got stuck in a child’s bed, which caught fire. Fortunately, Mykola had already evacuated the children by that time. They extinguished the fire, and immediately after that, together with three friends, they took all the elderly and women down to the basement and moved there themselves too.
When the Russians occupied the town, they began to break into every house. Men were taken outside, undressed and checked for tattoos on their bodies. Two of Mykola’s friends, Leonid and Serhiy, were over 50 years old. Another one, also Leonid, was much younger.
Having checked younger Leonid’s passport, they said that he was younger than 50, so he could be a soldier. They put him on his knees and shot him in the head.
Leonid was the first whom Mykola buried. He buried him right in the yard, near the electricity transformer booth. A bloodstain is still visible at the crime scene.
In a few days, Serhiy died too. The man went outside to have a smoke and was shot dead. Just for nothing. Without any words or warnings.
When the fighting intensified, the Russians seemed to have gone mad, Mykola says. Before that, people sometimes came out of the basements to cook some food or just breathe some fresh air. But then they decided to lock themselves up. Closer to the evening, the soldiers began to knock – they yelled and asked to open the door. They probably wanted to break in in order to shoot everyone before leaving the town. This happened in one of the houses on the neighbouring street, the man says.
Having failed to break the door, they threw a grenade on the stairs. On the other side, the second Leonid was firmly holding the entrance door. He was the only man who remained alive together with Mykola. Explosion followed and silence set in after it. His body lay on the bloodstained stairs for a whole day. Only the next day there was a knock on the door again, a voice saying you have 20 minutes to clean everything up. Then Mykola came out and saw that his friend’s head had been torn off and his legs had been thrown apart.
Mykola collected the remains of the body in a bag and dug a new grave. It was the third one.
He says that he could not dig the ground deeply. There was not enough time, and he is a bit over that age to be able to do it. That is why now his biggest worry is that when it starts raining, the sand will be washed off and stray dogs will come.
It must be easy to lose hope in the midst of horror, pain and death, but today Mykola is my hero. Having seen the worst in people, he still did not lose his humanness himself. Speaking to us on camera, the man could barely hold back his tears, and when the recording ended, he burst into tears and thanked us simply for listening to his story.
Looking at the mass graves, where stiff hands stick out from under the sand, it is easy to lose faith in humanity, but it is people like Mykola who restore this faith.
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