“When you fall asleep, here in Zaporizhia, you don’t know if you’ll wake up…”

“I’m always scared, it can fall on you, or on your house…” With each broken glass, Natalia jumps. The wave of massive destruction wrought by the Russian army in Ukraine on Monday, October 10 and the following day has certainly passed, but in the towns close to the demarcation line between Ukraine and the territories occupied by the Russians, the shelling continues.This is the case in Zaporijjia, in the south of the country, where Russian bombardments have been daily for several weeks and now affect the very dense center of the city.

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Also, on the forecourt of the Post Office covered with shards of glass blown by the explosion of a Russian strike, Natalia, professor of biology, recounts, with tears in her eyes, the nights of insomnia to tremble, each time a shell whistles and then explodes.

“When you fall asleep, you don’t know if you’ll wake up…, entrusts Natalia. Here, there is no military infrastructure, none! We have always been afraid since the beginning of the war on February 24: there were strikes in more distant neighborhoods and we heard them. But when the missiles get closer to your house, the fear is multiplied by 1,000.”

Natalia wants to stay in Zaporijjia: first for her students and then, also, for her mother. This is not the case of hundreds of inhabitants who gathered on the platforms of the main station of the city, like Natacha and her sister Luda. They took a one-way ticket to the West of the country… “We mainly took warm clothes and food for the first few days.“, explains Natasha.

“After the massive strikes last Monday, we were very scared. I wanted to stay at home but the fear was stronger.”

“At my age, I didn’t want to leave, I liked my peace of mind. Over there, I won’t have what I had at home. And when we get back, we hope our homes won’t be destroyed.” Three trains leave every day for kyiv, six for Lviv, in the West, with additional wagons… 3,200 inhabitants of Zaporijjia leave the city every day by train. They were three times less a month ago.