Danya Fearless in Chernihiv
–Danya’s Story–
For Danya, a 7-year-old first grader from Chernyhiv, life changed overnight.
February 23, 2022, Danya, as usual, did his homework; his mother packed him a lunch for school. And the next day, early in the morning of the 24th, his grandmother, who lives near the Russian border, called to say that there were Russian tanks moving outside her window. By evening, the shelling of Chernyhiv had begun. “I was not afraid,” Danya says, “only my mom was”.
When the Russians were trying to break through to Kyiv, the family heard an enemy plane every day at the same time: around midnight, and then again at 5 a.m. It passed overhead, dropped a bomb, and flew back. In the early days, Danya was wakened to go down to the basement during air raids, but then the family began simply stepping out into the windowless common building corridor.
On March 17, Danya’s family came under fire. His parents were wounded, and the boy had a leg injury, shrapnel in his back, and a stomach wound. 60 centimeters of his intestines had to be cut out. “They tore off a piece of flesh from me,” he said, remembering the wound.
“When we came under fire, Danya knew that it was the Russians who were shooting and killing. He said, ‘let Putin croak,’” his mother recalls.
Danya spent 16 days in a local children’s hospital alone because the family was taken to different hospitals in Chernihiv. For four days the parents did not know where their child was and what happened to him. The boy was listed as “unknown” but the parents managed to find their son. Then volunteers brought Danya and his parents to a central hospital in Kyiv, where they stayed for more than three months.
Before the New Year, Danya and his father were in rehab, and his mother was undergoing her ninth operation in orthopedics. But in March, Danya will have to resume treatment.
“Danya told me that he wanted a stable life—the same as it had been before the war,” his mother says.
By Olena Barsukova, February 24, 2023. Abridged and translated by Lina Bernstein
