Марина Демко Maryna Demko

* 1969

  • I was working, I went to work as a volunteer. I worked for free for almost a year. The Donbas SOS civil society organization. A Donetsk-based organization. The organization was founded on March 13, [20]14 [March 15, 2014], when Dmytro Cherniavskyi was killed. These are Donetsk Maidan activists, youth, Sasha Horbatko, Katia Zhemchuzhnikova, Olha Hvozdieva [Hvozdiova]. These are activists of the Donetsk Maidan, a few people. They created this organization because they understood that everyone on the Ukrainian side, the NGOs, activists, public figures, activists who are here. They need help, and they created this organization. But they also had to evacuate quickly because it became very dangerous for them to live there. They went to Kyiv and found this building there. And they say that we need to help the people who live there. Now there have been hostilities there, especially in the summer. In Donetsk, in Makiivka, in Shakhtarsk, in Horlivka. People tried to leave. There was no information, no communications, no logistics, nothing. And they just... some plastic phones. I remember that I came the first day. I thought: I'll go and learn how to work with them. I come in and there's a room, a few people, some posters everywhere, and whiteboards. And on them, with a felt-tip pen, they wrote, "Exit from Horlivka, this street, that street. Try to go down this street. There's a barricade over there, a checkpoint over there. Do not go through that checkpoint." And they are all telling this to someone at the same time. Everyone is shouting. Some other phones are ringing on the table. I go in. It's a nightmare! I say, "I came to help." - "Yes, pick up, answer it, don't just stand there." I pick it up, and there's a person from Shakhtarsk, something is being bombed, there's shooting, and they're screaming. A child is crying. They don't know where to run. They are looking for the volunteer bus, organized by the volunteers. I have to tell her where that bus is. I am freaking out more than that woman does. I don't know how to help her. I'm probably more scared than she is. I [ask] someone there, "Shakhtarsk, Shakhtarsk." - "There is a volunteer center. Here, look, it's written there." I read her what it says. I try to find something else, but it's just a nightmare. But once I worked like that for a few days and thought, "No, I'm not going back". I left. Then we went to Yaremche, and when we returned, I realized that I had to go there.

  • And at about eleven o'clock in the afternoon, he called me and said, "Maryna, I've been wounded, and they're trying to kidnap me." And I told him, "Are you joking or what?" — "Maryna, this is serious, people have come, they are like this." I said, "What about you? Did they let you talk?" — "I closed, managed to [close] the gate, and the dogs — I'm in the neighbor's yard, there are very big angry dogs — and they are holding them back for now, but they will come in soon. So that you know they are trying to take me away. They wounded me with a weapon." I just don't know, there is some kind of an abyss under me. I don't know, I feel like I'm flying somewhere. I do not understand what to do. I asked him, "What should I do?". He said, "Call the police". And he hung up the phone. He told me something, that a car like this had arrived. There are so many people there, "they shot at me with a rifle, and now they want to take me away." I start calling the police, and my entire team is present. We went to our base to celebrate as a team. It's May 8, we have a working day, but we decided to go as a team." — So you were outside the city? — Yes. And everyone realizes that something has happened. I said that I was in a situation where I needed to call the police quickly, I couldn't get through. They give me a number to call, a cell phone number, not 02. And I get through to the officer on duty and tell him. He listens to me carefully and then asks me something, I don't remember what the phrase was. Something like, "Did you smoke something in the morning?" I realize that he doesn't believe me. I understand him now, why he doesn't believe me. Because everything was calm in Makiivka at that time. Nothing was happening there, no rallies, nothing. There were no armed groups going around, and so on. I don't know what to do. What to do with this, what's going on. Then my husband called me again. He said, "That's it, I can't talk anymore. Now, they will come in because they will shoot these dogs. They will come in anyway, so now the neighbor will let them in. She will lock the dogs. But try to do something, call someone, apply somewhere, and even run away. Get out of Makiivka because they will be looking for you too." Then, after a while... I was already trying to find transportation to go somewhere into the city. And a surgeon calls me from the hospital. He said, "Your husband was brought to us with a gunshot wound. Well, he is alive, everything will be fine. But the situation here is complicated. These people are already guarding him here."

  • And on March 1, by the way, when I came to this rally, the director finally persuaded me that it would not be political and that if I wanted to support him, I should come. I thought, I'll go, I have to support the director. When I arrived, I either didn't hear or didn't want to hear something. I came to Donetsk's Lenin Square, the central square of the city. And I see some event, some scene unfolding near this Lenin [monument]. People are shouting something from the stage, lots of Russian flags. These people are gathering around these, a bunch of them, people in headbands. And they're like dogs in a herd, they're all in a herd, in a bunch. When you look at it from the outside, it's scary. I studied psychology, I have never practiced, but I still have knowledge, because I didn't study for money, I studied with my own knowledge. I remember these techniques, methods of crowd control. I read it only in books, so to speak. I never actually saw it. And here I see it with my own eyes. From the outside, how it happens, this crowd, they gather it. They call out some slogan. And they start to swing like this, these people, shouting. It's such a scary experience. I am so scared. I don't know where to go. I see the police standing there. They are standing separately from everyone else. But they are just watching. They don't take part in it. They are not trying to disperse it. And I stood next to them. It seemed to me that this was the safest place. I'm watching this. I call my colleagues. I said, "What's going on?". They said, "It's a normal rally". But as it turned out, they were in a completely different place. I wandered into the wrong place. But I saw this terrible event on March 1, when they elected the governor, or whatever they call it, this crowd. There were not many of them there, but somehow it looked very strange and scary.

  • No, when I met them [my husband's parents], it was no longer forbidden. Because it was [19]88, it was already the "perestroika," a lot of things had already appeared, but there was very little of them... — What did they read? — Various things... There were even Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, and various magazines, very different ones, and even a lot of printed samizdat. They read all of it. This was such news to me because my father used to tell me that Stalin was a kind of deity. He believed him. And then this world somehow crumbled in my mind and eyes. It was difficult for me. But... I can't say that I was afraid of it. It was interesting. And it was so new and unusual for me.

  • My grandmother once told me that she had to go to work on a collective farm, but it was very responsible. You couldn't get sick or skip out, or be late. You could even go to jail for that. And she tells how they had a newborn calf living right in their house. It was cold; he was born early, and they had to take him inside to keep him warm. And this calf took her skirt during the night and trampled it into a gap in the floor. And she could not find this skirt and could not go to work, she did not have another one. She told me then how scared she was because if she didn't come to work, she would be imprisoned, she could be [sent] to some camp... They sent them there for this and everything. She had three children at the time. And she was very afraid of this. She found just the edge of this skirt, pulled it out, it was very crumpled, and she went to work, she was on time, she was so happy. I didn't understand how this could happen. It seemed to me that we live in such a great country that it cannot be possible for people to be treated like this. And that there could be such poverty that a person did not have any spare clothes. And my father told me that he didn't have proper pants to wear to school. He had to leave school and start working.

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    Kramatorsk, Donetsk region , 17.04.2024

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I have been moving all my life. I’m a lifelong displaced person

Maryna Demko during the interview, 2024
Maryna Demko during the interview, 2024
photo: Post Bellum Ukraine

Maryna Demko is an employee of an NGO that helps Ukrainians affected by the war. She was born on July 11, 1969 in Donetsk. Her parents were immigrants from Russia. In search of a better life, the family moved to Norilsk in the north of the Russian SSR in the mid-1970s. Maryna studied at a pedagogical college in the city of Igarka. In 1989, she gave birth to a son who developed deafness, probably due to a poor-quality antibiotic. In 1994, Maryna moved to Makiivka, where her son was able to study at a boarding school for deaf children. She worked at the Makiivka City Water Utility, where she rose from secretary to head of the labor protection service. On May 8, 2014, when the battles for Kramatorsk were underway, her second husband, Oleksiy Demko, was taken prisoner by the self-proclaimed “DPR” for his participation in the preparation of the presidential elections in Makiivka. Maryna was forced to flee the city because of the threat to her life. With the help of her husband’s fellow party members, she tried to ransom him. After his release, she got a job at the Donbas SOS NGO. In 2015, Maryna and Oleksiy Demko moved to Kramatorsk, where they started a business and joined the work of the Free People Employment Center, a non-governmental organization dedicated to facilitating the social adaptation of IDPs, veterans, and other vulnerable groups. In 2024, she lives in Kramatorsk and works remotely for Donbas SOS.