"I remember that on the morning of February 24, I first called my mother in Kharkiv. A few weeks before the outbreak of the war, there was a sad, anxious mood among the population. Everyone seemed to feel that something might happen soon. The day before, my brother had repeatedly gone to the border to observe the situation. We understood that the authorities could not tell us everything. He understood and I felt that something terrible was going to happen because we had seen what had been happening for years in Donetsk and Luhansk. And we already understood that something could happen, but what really happened, nobody expected."
"We have relatives in Russia. However, after the events of 2014, our contacts ceased at their initiative. The sentiments that were planted in the minds of the people in Russia were like a revelation to us. You lose all your relatives at once, but why? And there were no reasons as such, they were just so aggressively set up. That year 2014 changed our lives, many people in Kharkiv lost their relatives, so to speak, because it was simply impossible to continue to associate with them."
"We don't know exactly when it all started and when the plan to take over our country was ready. But 2014 was a fateful year for our city of Kharkiv. On March 1, the Russian enemy tried to seize the Kharkiv regional state administration. My brother was among the brave men who helped defend the right to freedom. What he and we as a family had to go through that day was simply terrible. That's why from now on we count my brother's two birthdays: on March 1, when he and others defended his native Kharkiv, and on March 2, when he was actually born."
Victoria Slyvka (Vasyurenko) was born on August 3, 1989 in Kharkiv. She lived near the metro station Heroiv Truda, which borders the northern part of Saltovka towards Belgorod. She graduated from the Kharkiv Institute of Humanities and Pedagogy in 2010. She then worked at a school in Kharkiv, then at her home university and then at an art school. In 2015 she got married. After the wedding she lived in Transcarpathian region in Tyachevsky district with her husband‘s family. Before the war she worked as a teacher in a local kindergarten in western Ukraine. The decisive moment for Victoria‘s decision to leave Ukraine was the morning phone call to her mother in Kharkiv on 24 February. As explosions echoed across the country in the first days of the war, it was unclear what scale the war would take and what to expect next. That is why Victoria, like most Ukrainian women, left with her daughters a few days after the war began for the Czech Republic, where her husband had been working for a long time. Later, her daughters Ksenia and Veronika transferred to schools in Prague. Viktoria was lucky enough to find a job in the field she studied: she currently works as an assistant for Ukrainian children in a Czech school. Viktoriia Slyvka sincerely believes in the victory of Ukraine and her return home. Although she lives in safety, her thoughts are far away in Ukraine, in her native Kharkiv. She dreams of returning there to embrace her family when the war is over.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
