Russia-Ukraine War: Bucha’s psychologist who saw his neighbors die and wrote poems to overcome trauma

If, as the Greeks say, happiness is the total absence of trouble, then perhaps Olesya Anisimova looking to experience something like this. Now the sounds of war were not around him.

No ejaculations or gunshots. The metal advance of the tankettes is inaudible. Nor is the dialect of Russian that circulates in his house day and night. Gone is the buzz of the cry of that neighbor who died asking for help.

There were the ruins, there was the silence of a frightening dawn and there he was, with his phone, taking pictures of the place where he was born, grew up and fought: Bucha.

He is 46. The clear eyes. the hair is brown. The devil bangs. A windbreaker jacket closed around the neck. He left his all-terrain bike lying on the sidewalk and walked through the ruins of a house that was no longer there. You want to record everything. He also wanted to show that the rebuilding of his ruined city would take a long time.

He had just come from Kyiv to see how his house and belongings were. He could not sleep there because there was no electricity or gas, and only this week the local government reconnected the drinking water service.

Olesya is a child psychologist. He led a reasonable life of work and social relations until the war began. In Bucha, which is wooded and peaceful, about 63,000 people live in normal weather. When the aggression began, the children left. Almost all the inhabitants left. But still, some seniors chose to stay.

They thought they could fight back, that the Russians would not hurt them, that no one would dig graves to hide the corpses behind a church. Nor do many of them believe that they will be tortured. Olesya thinks nothing will be scary. He saw no reason to flee. He lives with his parents, a brother, two nephews.

At the end of February, they began collecting food: preserves, drums with water, medicines. In front of his house there is a shed. Inside the shed, a basement. Space is limited, too humid, a bit smelly. That was her definite hiding place on the hardest day, from March 4 onwards, when Olesya thought that everything that happened should be kept like a diary on her Facebook account.

“One night the tanks came, the soldiers came, they started shooting at the houses. We hid in the bathroom first. We chose not to go out. But many went to the streets and were killed”, Said the woman who witnessed the deaths of her neighbors.

“Just looking at the gate, I saw the massacre: the old couple on the other side of the road was hit by a missile explosion. Their bodies were thrown there for several days. Behind it, an entire family appeared to be burned in a mound of earth, ”he said.

“Natasha’s body was in that corner,” he said. We all know Natasha. His body was left on the street during the time the Russian occupation lasted. Dogs appear every day and eat it little by little. ”

Olesya’s diary is rich in images and situations. Olesya spoke to the camera and said she couldn’t take it anymore, that she felt like she was about to die. Olesya came out of her house, bent over, I ran to a well where she had a brazier. Light a fire at speed. Put a pot with lard. Cook scrambled eggs. Eggs last forever. She was afraid he would be killed while waiting for the cooking. He runs with the food back to lock himself in the bathroom.

Olesya is running across the street. Again he thinks they will kill him. It goes under the house of a family who fled from Bucha. It hit the puddle of ice hard, opening a hole. It is a well. At the bottom is water. Drop a bucket with string and return the bucket full to load a jerrycan. So occasionally, when the shooting subsides, Russian voices disappear and no one seems to roam the block.

Olesya cleans the windows. Wipe repeatedly with a damp cloth. He was cleaning even though he knew the glass was about to explode.

One day Olesya sent her siblings, nephews and parents away. They can no longer. Trauma engulfs them. They move away while breathing. They walk five kilometers. He’s still a bit old. Go down and up from the basement. Unable to stand. See passing planes. Celebrating. He felt anger and sadness, but he was not overcome by resignation.

He knew that the Russians had occupied the houses in the neighborhood, robbing them of what they could. Looking for fuel because their tanks are not working. They are looking for food because they don’t have it. They are looking for shelter because their equipment is obsolete. If they see people on the street, they kill them directly. They ask the remaining residents through loudspeakers to leave the city or stay in their homes. It’s a spiral of madness. The Russians did not advance or leave. The Russians were imprisoned. As many as Olesya in her own home. By the end of March, he was able to get stuck in Bucha.

“I stayed my best. One day I went out. I walked five kilometers to the evacuation buses. I went to Poland, traumatized and in shock, “he said. He stayed in the apartment of some relatives and immediately felt Bucha calling him.” I felt that my lifelong city asked me to go there in some way and so I started writing poetry. “

Olesya never stopped writing. His writings are a way of having hardship and pain. People encourage him to keep it up. This is his catharsis. “I don’t suffer the initial panic, my body is no longer shaking. Writing saves me, but there is still a lot of internal work to be done ”, says Olesya, who is not afraid, who feels that nothing is worse.

The same Olesya who writes in her poems that this spring, the Russians have lost and a certain calm recovered, will not be the same. “This spring is not like that. I’m not like tea. It doesn’t matter what you wear, what you eat, what you smoke. This spring you suddenly woke up, trying to be strong and pretty brave. How many pages will you write with your poems … Hopefully my family and friends are around! This spring is not like the previous dozens, when he wanted, he joked, he loved, he could. The explosions in the heart are now the explosions of war, its damn impression on memory …”.