The saddest woman I have ever met
’We’re just maybe hiding from each other with our pain.’
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VORZEL, UKRAINE — It was one of those days when the air smelled fresh and small birds were chittering away. My fixer and I had come to a park in Vorzel to meet a woman who said she had a story. Vorzel is about 45 minutes northwest of Kyiv, 15 minutes from Irpin and 10 minutes from Bucha — the latter two having been the sites of much publicized atrocities. But killing also happened here. The Russians occupied the area at the end of February, 81 years after Germans took over the town in World War II.
We walked a path at the park’s entrance that led to a colonnaded, mustard-colored mansion, now a museum. We veered right into a circle of carefully arranged benches. Within this tree-lined ring, we met Natalya Liulchuk, 42, and her husband, Oleg, 47.
As we approached, a thought came into my mind so unexpectedly and so loudly — it was unlike anything I’ve experienced before. It was as though I could hear my own voice saying a sentence out loud: “She has the emptiest eyes I’ve ever seen.” And that phrase echoed relentlessly in my head as she and I spoke for an hour or so.
Her hazel eyes were red-rimmed and seemingly lashless, glazed with a sadness I have never witnessed before.
I knew the basics of why we were here: Natalya and Oleg’s children had been shot and killed in their car as they had tried to evacuate from Vorzel. But the outlines of a story are nothing more than bleached bones in a desert. Reconstructing it is like reversing time until the bones have contorted back into a living animal.
Natalya strokes her husband’s hand as she begins at the beginning. Her voice shakes as she says, in halting English, that when the Russians came, she heard helicopters and explosions, but hoped the invasion would end in a couple days. Oleg went to work, as normal, at the state security service, in the first few days. But Russian soldiers moved into the couple’s house, pulled up trucks into their yard, and loaded up their belongings, Natalya says.
Eventually, she reveals in the silences between her words, the Russians stole large parts of her heart. Now, for Natalya, it is like the men never left, and never will.
She explains that Oleg, who sits with eyes swollen with tears, wanted the family to evacuate in the first few days of the occupation of Ukraine, but that she didn’t want to go. Yet, about a week in, the couple got word that the Russians were heading through a field toward the town. The family decided to leave Vorzel on March 3.
Midway through her recitation, Natalya sighs deeply and says, “Nothing’s going to be good now.”
“We headed by car to the Zhytomyr highway, but had to wait because there was a fight up ahead and we heard that the Russians were shooting at cars,” Natalya says. She and Oleg decided to turn back toward home.
“We were just trying to escape,” she says, “but they just shot all the cars. My husband was shot. And my children. They just were dead at once.”
The Liulchuk’s one remaining child, Misha, 13, was okay, along with Natalya, who’d thought Oleg was also dead. She saw two wounds in his upper back.
“But then he just started to move,” Natalya says, crying.
Misha ran to a house nearby, yelling for help.
“I tried to help my older son,” Natalya whispers of Andriy, 15, “but I couldn’t.” He’d been shot in the back of his head.
Two men from the Ukrainian territorial defense finally helped Oleg get to a maternity hospital in Vorzel, where he stayed for a week with five other men who’d been shot — the men, Natalya says, had been out looking for baby food. One had been on a bike. He’d been shot in his leg, she says, and because his tourniquet had stayed on for too long, doctors had to amputate. Still, Natalya says, this man has not given up. “The main thing is, he’s alive.”
Natalya describes how most of the cars lurching toward freedom on that awful day had been covered with white, makeshift signs on them that read “children.”
“Nothing helped,” she says.
I want to know more about Natalya’s sons, so I ask about her youngest, Nicholai, 3.
“I spent all three years with him, just…every day, I…,” she pauses with each phrase and then switches into Ukrainian. “We didn’t separate for even a day.”
As for Natalya’s oldest son, Andriy, 15, “He had just started doing stuff on his own,” she says. “He was becoming self-sufficient.” Natalya describes her oldest son as very calm and contemplative. He didn’t hang out with boys his own age.
“He could sit outside just to look at something, just to think about something,” she says. “Then he would come in and talk about it for a long time.”
She and Andriy, Natalya says, “could talk about different things,” unlike the more difficult conversations she’s had with her surviving son, Misha, who “is not talking to me,” she says.
“He is inside himself,” Natalya explains.
Andriy, whom Natalya describes as an atypical teenager, had directed his introspection into caring for an ant farm that was given to him by an aunt. He would feed worms to his ants. The deliberate and slow observation of the farm was the norm for Andriy, says Natalya. He was “a spectator,” she says. He loved listening to music, she tells me, but she laments that she doesn’t know what kind of music he really preferred.
“I don’t know why,” Natalya wonders, “but he didn’t give me the songs he liked so I could listen to them.”
And, most regretfully, Natalya says, when Andriy was shot to death at just 15 years old, “He was just on the takeoff of his life.”
Natalya’s 3-year-old son, Nicholai, also murdered in that car, used to listen to patriotic melodies on the radio in their house in Vorzel. He’d happily shout: “We are heroes! We are heroes!”
Her little boy, Natalya says, had no fear. Only one time was he afraid — when there was a rocket attack close enough that he heard a “boom” as it hit its target.
Nicholai “just wanted to go outside in the yard,” Natalya says. “He loved to play all day with kitchenware. He liked to build things and was a little bit angry if something would not join together.”
“A perfectionist?” I ask.
She laughs.
A baby howls from a far-off bench.
Oleg, who doesn’t speak English and has sat quietly leaking tears this whole time, listens as his wife describes his injuries and ongoing recovery.
“He was very strong, making jokes,” Natalya says of her husband. “He was just great.” This was all in spite of the fact that Oleg’s head injuries meant that he couldn’t write, couldn’t walk and could only speak a little bit.
I ask Oleg, “But has the pain also been other than physical?” At the beginning of our interview, Natalya had said that Oleg had stopped working because of his trauma.
“It’s a new life,” he says in Ukrainian. “I can’t really get used to it. I need another surgery. But without the psychological pressure, compared to what we’ve been through, it’s fine.”
I wonder while hearing this story how these two can possibly get through each day.
“I live just for my son and for my husband,” Natalya says. “The first week we were here, I was helping them, and it helped me to be useful — to move, to do something. Because if I were just inside me with no people around, I don’t know what would be.”
And, unfortunately but not uncommonly, it seems, Natalya and Oleg haven’t been able to unite in the depths of their agony.
“We’re just maybe hiding from each other with our pain,” Natalya says. “Because maybe he’s crying in his corner, and I’m crying, and, combined together, it’s just too hard, maybe.”
At the end of our interview, Natalya becomes emotional, and emphatic. When I ask if she is angry at the Russians about what has been perpetrated upon her family — upon her sons — there is no hesitation as she replies: “I just didn’t hate. I just wanted them to leave. I don’t want anybody to die, not them, not us. Just leave! Just enjoy your life.”
Natalya has been working with other local women to knit camouflage nets since her sons died. It’s what Ukrainian women have been doing when, for various reasons, they cannot fight. Misha, the family’s remaining son, has left Ukraine for the safety of Germany.
At this point in our interview, Natalya is sobbing heavily. And she has a message for the Russians: “They should just stop it and go,” she says. “But now I see some information from Russians — what they write, what they say — and I understand that they just hate us.”
Yet she still cannot fathom why her sons were murdered.
“I don’t understand why!” she says while crying. “I don’t understand why. And they just cannot explain that. It can’t just end like that.”
“Do you see a future at this point?” I ask Natalya.
“Sometimes I just tried not to think,” she says. “Now I try to remember something good.”
Still, like nearly everyone I interviewed while I was in Ukraine in June and July, Natalya marvels at how such a war could possibly “be in the world now? Maybe in the Middle Ages,” she says.
“I want everything to just end,” she says as the birds around us strengthen their songs. “Just end.”
I ask if there’s anything else she wants people to know.
“I just want this to stop,” Natalya reiterates as she cries. As for the Russians who killed her sons, she says, “I don’t want revenge. I just want them to go.”
This has been a refrain I’ve heard from Ukrainian after Ukrainian. I can’t help but constantly ask why this war is happening — and 99 percent of the time, I get a hands-in-the-air, “Who knows?” shrug. No one actually knows.
After the Russians left Natalya’s town at the end of March, a Ukrainian blue-and-yellow flag was raised over the museum in the park we’re in. Natalya points to that flag and says that she remembers thinking: “We just knew then that Vorzel is ours.”
But what does “ours” mean while the dead have been buried in shallow graves, awaiting the withdrawal of the enemy until the hundreds — and possibly thousands — of murdered can be properly buried?
It is one of those days when the air smells fresh and small birds are chittering away. And it is a day — yet another one — on which the dead have stories to tell, regardless of whether anyone is listening.
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Ditto, Jared's comment. Heart rending story. It is a war crime. Thanks again,
What a heart rendering story. I cannot fathom the pain, or the strength, of this woman. I appreciate you sharing this story with us, Lauren.