'A child should worry about their tests and their environment, not be afraid of how they can survive and where they will be able to escape.' Yeva Skalietska talks to Patrick Freyne
Was she always good at school? Her grandmother nods. “She’s so proud of her all the time,” says Catherine. “She’s her biggest supporter.”
A lot of people in the apartment block went to the basement, she says, 40 or 50 people. “It was a huge mess [down there]. Every time you breathed there was dust ... We were afraid because we didn’t know what would be [happening] tomorrow, or even after an hour, or after a minute.” When did she write in her diary? “Anytime. In the morning if I had any dreams in the night, or I could write in the middle of the night ... I could write in the darkness, because in the evening we couldn’t just switch on the normal light like now … I really wanted to turn on the normal light ... but if we switched off that light, it wouldn’t help planes [see us].”While the adults tried to figure out what to do, the children played games to occupy their time.
At around this time, they spotted an unmanned bomber. There’s a short Russian conversation between Yeva and her grandmother at this point in our interview, about whether this should be called a “drone”. Her grandmother thinks not. “It was a huge plane, without a pilot, flying low,” says Yeva. “It was dropping bombs … We just fell on to the ground and tried to hear where it was flying. It was so loud … When it dropped bombs, I heard it.
Yeva Skalietska: 'I really wanted to study in Oxford, that was my dream.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill