"I went to dig up my mother, I tried with my hands" - a documentary about deportation of Ukrainian children from Mariupol. PHOTOS
Director Olesia Bida made a documentary about Russian deportation of children from occupied Mariupol.
As informs Censor.NЕТ, it was made public in Facebook by Evheniya Motorevska.
"I went to dig up my mother, trying to do it with my hands because there were no shovels nearby. Airplanes were flying nearby. I was both scared at the time and wanted to help my mom. I dug her out so she could breathe, and then went to ask for help."
14-year-old Sofia met the full-scale invasion in Mariupol. The girl, along with her mother, brother, and younger sister, were hiding in the city's basements. One day, the family came under attack by Russian aircraft.
Her brother died immediately, and her mother died a few hours after she was pulled from the rubble. She was buried in the yard of the house.
After a while, the girls were deported first to occupied Novoazovsk and then to Donetsk. They were held in one of the city's hospitals.
At the same time, their eldest sister, who lived in Dnipro, was looking for the girls. As soon as she found out that the children were in occupied Donetsk, she went to get them. She traveled through European countries and Russia. The older sister was only 19 at the time.
While she was on the road, a Russian family came to "meet" the girls for adoption. Although representatives of the occupation authorities gave their word that they would not give the girls anywhere until the elder sister arrived.
Sofia and her younger sister were miraculously rescued from Donetsk. The girls now live in Dnipro. But this story is an exception.
For several months, Olesya Bida has been working on a documentary about the deportation. We have also identified a large group of children who were taken by the Russians from Mariupol in the first months of the full-scale war. Out of 31 children, we managed to return only 4.
"I made his dream come true, on his birthday I took a picture near the Bandera monument in Lviv. He says we should pick him up if we get to Moscow," says the boy's friend, who has been living in Russia in a so-called foster family for two years.
These children live under total control. They are restricted from using phones, cameras are installed in their apartments, and they are forced to change their names on social media. Many of them have relatives waiting for them at home. But it is now almost impossible to take a child from the territory of Russia. Those teenagers who dare to escape are detained at the border and returned to their "new parents."
I don't know if Ukraine will ever be able to identify all the children who were abducted from our territory. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of deportees. I am also scared to think that we will never bring some of these young people back home.
But we must record every Russian official, every collaborator from the east or south who is involved in the abduction of Ukrainian children. Sooner or later, they will be held accountable for this crime.
You can watch our movie in English here. And in a week it will be on the Ukrainian Truth YouTube channel.
