My Country
is on Fire!
Varvara Zlotnyk
I want to tell you my story about the terrible war in Ukraine. I am 16 years old and I used to live in Kharkiv, which, in my opinion, is the most beautiful city in the world. I was living my best life, never thinking that the war would get to me and to my city. Everything was fine until 5 am on February 24. I woke up that morning to the sound of the explosion of shells. At first I thought it was a thunderstorm, but I was mistaken…
My dad ran into my room
screaming that the war had begun. I felt really horrible because I couldn’t believe it. We were in a hurry to collect things. There was an unreal turmoil on the street and terrible traffic jams to leave the city. I left the house with my small dog shaking with fear in my arms and a heavy backpack on my shoulders. My grandparents live outside the city, so we decided to go to them.
Everyday we fell asleep and woke up to the sound of explosions. Every night the merciless military bombed my country. I lost count of the days. Everyone lived in fear of not waking up tomorrow. We stayed with my grandparents for two weeks, but my father said that it was not safe for me to stay there, so he told my mom to leave and take me to a safe place. I resisted for a long time, saying that I would not go anywhere, because I wanted to stay with my family. We even decided to sleep with this thought, but we didn’t manage to sleep. They started bombing next to us at 2 am, so we went down to the basement and after that, I realized that we needed to leave. The next morning we poured all the remaining gasoline from our other cars into the car my mother and I