My name is Kostya, I was born in 2006 in the city of Zhytomyr. My father works as a wire
maker for cars, and my mother works in the laboratory of the childrens hospital in my city. I
have no brothers and sisters. Here is what I remember about the first day of the full-scale
Russian invasion.
The first few days of the war were by far the most stressful of my life. On February 24, I
woke up at 4 a.m., and the building was shaking, especially the 9th floor where I live.
Immediately I went to the hospital where my mom works, there was a pretty good shelter
there. I stayed there all day, and my family decided it might be the safest place, but it wasnt
the most comfortable because we couldnt shower there, we couldnt take our three cats with
us, so we went back home. After that, we started using our relatives basements as a shelter
when the air raid alarm went off. It was very stressful because in the first week of the war,
alarm went off four or five times a day, and each time we had to put all the cats in a bag,
take the most important things and run about 10 minutes from my house to the house where
Our relatives lived. We finally decided that we would live there for a while and come home
once a day to shower and cook something to eat so we wouldnt starve to death. On March 23, 2022 I left for Germany, it took my family 5 minutes to make that decision. One of my
acquaintances agreed to give my grandmother and me a ride from Zhytomyr to the
Ukrainian-Polish border. We crossed the border on foot and ended up in a refugee camp. I
did not know Polish at that time, so it was difficult for me to find someone who spoke
English. Eventually I was lucky; I found a woman who spoke English, she let us into her car,
which we used to drive from Chełm to Wrocław. She invited us to her house, we spent the
night there, and they even fed us quite well. This woman found another guy who gave us a
ride from Wroclaw to the town in Germany where we were headed from the beginning.
Thanks to them, we didn't have to waste time at train stations trying to figure out how to get
from Chelm to Germany without knowing Polish. Thats how my first week of the war went.
