Orphanage staff hid children from Russians in their village
STEPANIVKA, Ukraine — Fifteen-year-old Katia remembers rushing out of the orphanage just in time, minutes before the Russians arrived to take the other children away.
It was Oct. 19, and the occupiers of their village outside Kherson were preparing to leave.
The Russians had shown up at the orphanage here months earlier, in armored military vehicles with 15 children in tow — Ukrainian orphans they had whisked away from the village of Novopetrivka in the previously occupied Mykolaiv region, about 35 miles north.
The 15 children had lived here since then, under the care of the orphanage’s headmaster, Volodymyr Sahaidak, 61, and under the supervision of Russian soldiers.
But the Russians didn’t know that about a dozen other local children — including Katia — were also living in the same quarters. Each time the Russians came, the teachers would hide the children in their rooms, Katia recalled, “for nap time.”
Now, the teachers feared the Russians would find those children and take them, too. So a small group of staff members came up with a secret plan to sneak the children out and hide them in their own homes.
One of the teachers at the orphanage, Halyna Kulakovska, 44, and Mr. Sahaidak helped most of the dozen or so Kherson children in their center reunite with relatives and family members..
“I didn’t have the time to think about it,” Ms. Kulakovska said. “There’s a Ukrainian word, treba, that means, ‘You must do it.‘ I had to do it. I am responsible for the lives of these kids … we had to protect them.”
Before the war began, 52 children had lived in the pink-walled orphanage, a center for social and psychological rehabilitation in the Kherson suburb of Stepanivka.
At the start of Russia’s full- scale invasion of Ukraine, many children were picked up by relatives. Some children who were old enough managed to apply to colleges and leave. But the remaining dozen students were left to live with the sound of constant shelling just one village over.
During a recent visit by Wshington Post journalists, a Lego set was still laid out
on a table in one of the home’s common areas, right next to a cracked window, marking a spot where an explosion sent shrapnel flying toward the orphanage. At the time, six boys were sleeping in the room next to it.
One of them was 9-yearold Misha, who recalled a
teacher telling him to quickly drop to the floor.
“It was just a strange feeling,” he said. But he said he wasn’t scared.
The boy’s father is incarcerated and his mother died, his teacher said; though the 9-year-old seems to believe his mother is still alive.