By Vitalii Hnidiy
KHARKIV, Ukraine (Reuters) – Wide-eyed and gripping a stuffed blue rabbit, six-month-old Zhenia settles into his pram before being walked along a Kharkiv factory forecourt – a treat to be savoured for someone who has lived in a bomb shelter since he was born.
Pushing the buggy is his mother, 39-year-old Olha Shevchenko. Seven months pregnant when the war broke out on Feb 24, her house in the Ukrainian village of Prudyanka was destroyed by shelling that same morning.
“We were woken up at five in the morning by the sound of bombs. At 6 a.m. the suburban trains stopped running, so we could not leave,” she told Reuters.
Fearing that advancing Russian troops would soon reach her home, lying north of Kharkiv some 20km (12 miles) from the border, she eventually managed to escape in a neighbour’s car with her two older sons, Nikolay, 17 and Andriy, 16.
When they reached Ukraine’s second city she rejoined her husband Evgen and, offered a refuge in the shelter underneath the factory where he works, they moved in.
Nikolay and Andriy left for Poland last month, where friends helped arrange accommodation and schooling for them. But the rest of the family remains in the brick and concrete surroundings that, for Olha, have a disconcerting familiarity.
“I knew this bomb shelter because when I was a little girl I saw it with my grandpa. I asked him what it was for and he said ‘For when the war comes but hopefully you will never have to see it again’. Well, now I have,” she said, with a rueful smile.
Zhenia was born in a nearby maternity hospital some two months after they moved in.
“The following day in the afternoon we checked out of hospital to come here,” Olha added, cradling her baby as they sat on a bed inside the bunker.
With renewed shelling of Kharkiv making it increasingly dangerous for them to be outside, the family have worked hard to make the shelter as liveable as possible.
It is linked to the power grid and equipped it with basic cooking facilities, food, books, toys and even a TV – all part of preparations for what they expect to be longer haul underground.
“We will surely spend winter here because we have nowhere else to go,” Olha said. “We are not going to go back home (to Prudyanka) because first of all in order to rebuild it, clean it all, it is not a job for one day.”
(Reporting by Vitalii Hnidiy, Writing by John Stonestreet; editing by Anna Dabrowska)
