13
The Trench was sTill There,
in the church’s shadow, when the
congregation gathered for Sunday
mass on April 10, their first since
the end of the occupation. Most
of the bodies had already been
exhumed and sent to the morgue for
identification and a proper burial. A
long plastic sheet was draped over
those who remained in the pit, to
keep the crows at bay.
Olha Ivanitska, an elderly
parishioner, saw two of her friends as
she limped into the church’s vestibule.
She embraced them and touched their
cheeks with her hands. “You’re still
alive,” she said. “We’re still alive.”
They knew they were lucky. As
they emerged from their homes, from
their basements and bunkers, the
people of Bucha often found their
friends missing or dead, their streets
full of wrecked military vehicles, their
neighbors’ homes shelled into rubble.
Some residents set out to assess
the damage and rebuild. Leonid
Chernenko, a janitor at School No. 3,
came back to work on April 10 to
check what the Russians had stolen.
“All the computers are gone,” he told
me while fumbling with the keys to
the boiler room. That was the least of
the problems. Sappers had not had
time to check the school for booby
traps and mines. More than a hundred
empty boxes of Russian artillery shells
lay in the schoolyard among empty
beer bottles and army rations. Most of
the windows had been shattered.
Around the school, many of the
victims of the Bucha massacre still lie
in temporary graves. One of them is
at the edge of the children’s summer
camp. Igor Kasenok, who lives across
the street, told me he dug that grave
one day in March. The man inside it
had made the mistake of approaching
the Russians on foot, Kasenok
said. The soldiers shot him and left
him there.Kasenok found the body in the
street the next day, when he went to
fetch some firewood for the stove in
his basement, a cluttered warren he
had shared during the occupation
with more than 30 of his neighbors
and many of their pets. Kasenok
gave the dead man the dignity of a
burial, fashioning a cross out of some
boards. “They could have shot me
too for that,” he said while showing
me the plot.
As we spoke, Kasenok’s wife came
out, trailed by a pair of cats. We began
to talk about their grandchildren. All
three of them live around Luhansk,
in a part of Ukraine the Russians took
in early March. Kasenok and his wife
haven’t heard from them since.
The urge to reassure the couple
made me stammer, and the only thing
that came to mind was the summer
camp across the street. I suggested
that maybe one day, after Bucha
rebuilds, the kids could come visit and
play over there. “Better to raze the
place,” Kasenok answered. “It’s a place
of killing now.” □△
Children’s toys and bicycles lie
inside a damaged apartment
building in Bucha on April 3