At the Boutcha morgue in Ukraine, Lilia will soon be able to recover the body of 40-year-old Yaroslav. While the Russians are in the city, his son takes his bike, he should only have a few minutes. He never came back.
“Friends have been looking for him for a long time, Lilia says. I had no connection, we had no internet. I was evacuated to kyiv and there, friends helped me: on Facebook, everywhere, where it was possible, we looked for it for a long time. Then they called me: they had found him on April 11.” It is a man who finds him near the station and buries him in his yard.
“He told me how my son was killed: Russians shot at his legs, then they asked him to kneel. He shouted: ‘I’m in pain, I can’t’ and they shot in the head.”
“I have a photo, I saw him dead. He’s here in the morgue. I’m cryingcontinues Lilia. He was a musician, a guitarist. He was not very successful but he had talent he was very nice. He loved me very much. His friends only tell me good things about him. Him, he said: ‘I will live a long time, until I am 80 years old!’. I have another son and I live for him now.”
At the Boutcha cemetery, three burials take place at the same time. A mother, an aunt, a son, that of Volodymir. He watches the gravediggers dig his child’s grave. “He received a rocket splinter in the headhe explains. I can’t say what I feel. I don’t know why the civilians, why the children are killed?”
“What can I feel? Hate for the Russian soldiers who came? Their families are also burying a son, a husband who is in the war.”
Volodymir, a father who buries his sonat franceinfo
“It is impossible to accept ithe exclaims desperately. But revenge is evil too. I wish that never happened. But God sees everything and we must continue to live. I have my grandchildren. Today, when we got the body from the morgue, there was an air raid. I just want it to end as soon as possible.”
The impossible mourning of the families of Boutcha – report by Farida Nouar and Fabien Gosset.
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