"My father and aunt stayed in Kherson, my mother died on the eve before the war. Not a day goes by that I don't think of them and call them, I am very worried about them because I understand the terrible conditions they were left in. After all, Cherson is constantly bombed, day and night. But my father refused to leave. He agreed to visit his family in the Czech Republic when the war was over and then return to Ukraine. He loves it very much and doesn't want to leave."
"It was very cold, there was no bread because the factories stopped working, the Russians looted all the shops and warehouses, people were left without food, in a cold fallout shelter, and to find a piece of bread somewhere you had to stand in line under shooting for half a day to feed your children and family."
"When the occupation of Kherson took place, it was about two hours after the declaration of war. Many Russian soldiers came from Crimea. And Kherson is not far away. It was something terrible, a complete shock. The town was surrounded and people were not allowed to go to other Ukrainian towns. They just shot anyone who tried to leave, they didn't spare children or old people. A lot of people died then. Those people who took up arms to secure our territorial defense in Kherson and went to the tanks were all shot... at point blank range..."
Lyudmyla Gatsenko was born on 31 March 1969 in Kherson, in the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. She graduated from Kherson High School No. 47 in 1986, after which she entered the Kherson Pedagogical Institute, where she received a philology degree in Ukrainian and Russian language and literature in 1991. Since the beginning of the war on February 24, 2022, Lyudmyla, along with her younger son and neighbors, survived for practically a month in the basement shelter of the Kherson semiconductor factory where her parents once worked. Then she decided to leave Ukraine to save her and her son’s life. The large number of Russian vehicles that kept arriving in Kherson gave the impression that the occupation would last for a long time. Lyudmyla’s relatives on her father’s side live in Mariánské Lázně and Kutná Hora, so she and her son went to the Czech Republic. Lyudmyla Gatsenko firmly believes in Ukraine’s victory. She dreams of seeing and embracing her relatives who continue to live in Kherson as soon as possible. Her greatest wish is that the dying and bloodshed in her homeland will stop.
