Where before there was a flood of russian tanks burned in the street, has opened a mattress store. A small vegetable garden grows over one of the graves at the entrance to an apartment block. The wall with traces of blood where shot several neighbors have new paint. And in the children’s playground turned into scrap metal, the children run around again. Six months after the world was horrified to discover the massacre of civilians by Russian forces in Bucha, the city tries to erase the traces of the destruction bequeathed by the occupying soldiers and overcome its immense collective trauma. The first part of the exorcism progresses relatively quickly; the other is difficult to quantify. Almost no one talks about what happened anymore: everyone lives with their ghosts.
Oleksandr Beszmerny spent much of the Russian occupation of Bucha taking care of her mother in the neighbor Irpina city with considerably more material destruction than the first one as it became one of the fronts of the battle of kyiv. “The hardest thing when returning home was finding out about all the people who had died. And not only those killed by the Russians, but also those who died days after they left after having lived in hiding without heating, water or barely food for a month,” he tells his 64 years in front of the door of her apartment, where two of her neighbors died shortly after the end of the occupation. “It is impossible to leave behind all the vivid horrorbut we are trying,” adds Beszmerny with a half smile.
Bucha was the first great massacre of civilians in this war, with the permission of Mariupol, a city of almost half a million inhabitants devastated by the army of Vladimir Putin. A coven of atrocities at the gates of the capital that lasted from February 27 to March 30: summary executions, murders, torture, rape, mass graves… A total of 458 people died during the Russian occupation, some so unrecognizable that they have been buried in unmarked graves in the local cemetery. “At first everyone wanted to tell what happened to them & rdquor ;, says Liliya Usakova while sweeping the autumn leaves in the alley of his house. “But now the subject is hardly talked about. People are very tired and do their best to erase it from their memory. They don’t want to remember & rdquor ;.
The tragedy has changed this small commuter town to the west of kyiv, how could it be otherwise. “The shared pain has made the neighbors more united and willing to help each other. People have become more empathic and close,” adds Usakova, a 72-year-old woman who has been since 1953 living in Bucha. His family ended up there due to force majeure. “I come from a Russian family of political victims. My parents were imprisoned by Stalin and interned in camps for visiting Ukraine during the Nazi occupation. dying Stalin they were allowed to leave, as long as they settled in a village in the country. Bucha ended up being that village & rdquor ;, she says now with resentment. “My family knows well who these are”liberators‘ and how they behave & rdquor ;, he adds in reference to Russia.
Crews of workers work here and there on the roofs and facades of the neighborhood, the same one where many of those corpses dumped on shoulders and gutters appeared. Priority has been given to the rehabilitation of the houses that do not need scrapping, as well as the schools, used by the occupants as command centers and barracks for the troops. The most destroyed houses have been boarded up to erase them from sight and the sections of street battered by the bombs have been repaved. “We’re doing all we can“, says the head of the reconstruction brigades of the town hall. “The only thing for which there is no money at the moment is to redo the electrical installation and heating of the damaged houses.”
The slow homecoming
Next to one of the schools occupied by the Russians, where they left weapons and supplies, a barracks of prefabricated houses donated by the Polish government has been erected. They shelter those who were left in absolute destitution. “About 70% of the people who left during the occupation or just before have returned,” he says. Iryna Paschna, Director of Social Services at the Bucha City Council. “Families with children are finding it more difficult to return because they are still afraidDespite everything, this is still a place marked by absences. Those of those who were brutally murdered and those of those who wanted to put land.
The topic of conversation now is the approach of winter. “People are back very stressed because they don’t know what to expect,” says Usakova. “Many don’t yet have the doors or the heating repairedthere is talk of another invasion from Belarus and on top of that the attacks on the capital have returned”. Unlike how he acted at the beginning of the war, this pensioner who earned his living coordinating ambulances has this time prepared a backpack with everything essential to flee if they return everything goes wrong again.
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The one that won’t go anywhere is Natalia Zhabenkoa woman from 65 years who now lives in the prefabricated houses for the displaced. She has health problems and can barely walk on crutches. Her house burned down during the Russian occupation, after she moved in with her sister next door. Hostomel at the beginning of the war. There was one of the great battles of those early stages, the battle of the Antonov airport. “We lived next to the airport. Planes and helicopters flew past the building all the time. For days there were fights and tremendous explosions & rdquor ;, he says behind small and scary eyes.
Now he is startled by every noise, as many Ukrainians are, and he knows that he will never be able to go home again. “I had flowers and a bench in the garden. I’m not asking for the house back, but I do want flowers and a garden. It’s the only thing that excites me to continue livingZhabenko says.