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Ukraine, Elena: “Mom, dad, our house in Mariupol is gone”

Every afternoon, when not working, Elena takes a walk along the seafront of Castiglione della Pescaia with her parents, Ivan and Larissa. They sit on one of the benches overlooking the sea and remain silent. Only when she passes a plane, Larissa does as if to hide. Last time they had a passer-by take a souvenir photo but Ivan and Larissa, 89 and 86, struggle to smile. They can’t do it anymore, since they had to leave their city, Mariupol. They did it to save themselves but it is as if their life had stopped last March 15, when, after several discussions with their daughters, including Elena, they got into the car, headed for Italy.

Elena with her parents, Larissa and Ivan, on the seafront of Castiglione della Pescaia

Elena had been living in Italy for nearly 30 years, ever since she put aside her career as a dancer at the Kiev National Opera in exchange for a free life in Italy. “I was just over 20 and my husband was an anti-Communist. We wanted to find a place to live peacefully. A job opportunity arrived in Marina di Grosseto and I came to live with my family. I experienced a very different world from the one I was used to living and I made my choice. I started working as a waitress, then I graduated as a sommelier and I embarked on a completely different life from my classical dance studies ».

It was painful to give up ballet on pointe but as soon as she arrived in Italy Elena needed to work. “Unfortunately it was no longer the time to dance for me.” Her marriage ended and Elena started returning to Ukraine several times a year to find her parents, former workers at the Ilyich steel plant. The same occupied and besieged by Russian troops since the beginning of the invasion.

“The last trip to Italy was last Christmas, when I left to spend the holidays with my family,” says Elena. “It had been beautiful days, there was a lot of snow and beautiful Christmas lights. One afternoon while I was waiting for my grandson by the ice skating post, a reporter approached and asked me what I thought about the war. I replied that there would be no war, that people were smiling in Mariupol, that nothing would happen. ”

An image of Mariupol taken by Elena at Christmas.

History, as we know, did not believe Elena’s feeling. “The morning the war broke out I woke up immediately with the first planes passing over the city and the first explosions. I saw that my sister was online on whatsapp, I wrote her immediately but I recognized those noises since the 2014 war and I realized that the invasion had really begun. The world collapsed on me ».

Elena’s parents immediately decided that they would not go down to the shelters and would remain in their home, with their habits, their lives in their hands. “Then the bombings began to be continuous. On March 2 they turned off the light. It was cold, the heating did not work, there was no hot water, there was no gas, in our house the temperature was +6. Only Russian channels were seen on television and I kept listening to Putin saying that this was a special operation. They were killing us, to save us ». Elena’s voice is swollen with pain. She stops, takes a breath, starts talking again. “The bombings continued day and night. The city was dark, there was a curfew, and our only light was a battery-operated Christmas wreath. The evenings were long, to try not to think we played cards or bingo but we were afraid “.

Ivan and Larissa, 89 and 86, arrived in Italy from Mariupol

For three weeks Elena woke up every morning convinced that she was in a nightmare. “I didn’t know if what I was experiencing was really real. I started telling my parents that we had to leave, but they repeated that they wanted to die in our house, in our city. Only when I told them I was going to stay with them were they convinced. So we prayed that the petrol in the car would be enough to get out of the city, since there was no possibility of refueling and we left. We were able to leave because one morning my niece arrived saying that they had removed a roadblock and there were already many cars lined up ready to leave Mariupol. We did the same thing too. We understood that the siege would only get worse ».

Now Elena lives in Castiglione della Pescaia with her whole family. “There are six of us, my youngest nephew started going to school here and I got my sister a job. We are all starting to live here again but my parents can’t rest“.

Larissa and Ivan, 66 years of marriage in a few days, want to return to Mariupol. Ivan wants to go back to drinking coffee sitting in his kitchen, and then go out on the terrace and do some maintenance work. Larissa wants to go back to her home, within those walls where she built everything about her, where she raised her daughters, where she celebrated her grandchildren’s birthdays. “But that house is gone,” Elena whispers through tears. She says it slowly, in a low voice, almost as if she doesn’t want to hear those words anymore. “Our building was hit by bombing and our house went up in flames. A few days ago to convince my parents of the impossibility of returning to Mariupol, I was forced to tell them. I showed him the photos of our building. My mom looked at them and said to me: “Elena, you see, those side windows may have been saved, there might still be something there”. But that’s not the case, that part of the building was also hit ”.

The building where Larissa and Ivan lived, in Mariupol

“Just yesterday my father repeated to me that he made a huge mistake in leaving because he wanted to go back to his house and die there. He made me call the driver of the buses that departed from here for Ukraine and only after hearing from him that now there is no turning back did he resign himself ».

Elena’s parents now live in a hotel room that they will have to vacate in early June. «My house is small, only about forty square meters and the tourist season is starting here now so there is nothing to rent. They proposed that we move them to a shelter, a beautiful structure in the countryside but far from here. They don’t even want to get away from me. And I would never leave them alone ». So Elena is trying to organize her house so that she can accommodate both her parents and her sisters with their respective children. “I used to suffer from the distance of my family,” smiles Elena. “Now by the will of someone other than us, we all find ourselves living in the same room, here in Italy”.

While she talks Elena takes a breath several times, struggles to tell about her city, to go back with her mind to her streets, her memories of life. “I have a hole in my heart for what they did in Mariupol, when I think of the theater that there is no more I burst into tears. This was the gathering place of the city, with the illuminated Christmas tree, the soul of Mariupol. Today I call it the city that no longer exists. I happen to have moments of moral breakdown but we are strong, if we managed to get away from the war, we will find a solution even now“.

Elena has been used to doing everything on her own since she was little. Again she doesn’t want to ask for help but we do it for her, asking anyone who can help her find larger accommodation for her family in the Castiglione della Pescaia area to get in touch with our editorial staff. Email: [email protected].

Other stories of Vanity Fair that may interest you:

-Mariupol, the stories from the siege: “People drink the water they recover from the ground”

-Mariupol, the children’s hospital destroyed, Zelensky: “Europeans, you can’t say you haven’t seen”

Source: Vanity Fair

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