Tymofiy Seidov’s drawings today are “full of vivid characters and vibrant landscapes”, according to his proud mother, Rita. They are, she says with evident relief, a world away from the art the nine-year-old was producing a year ago. Then, Tymofiy was the only child left in Kutuzivka, a Ukrainian village on the eastern outskirts of Kharkiv, a major city close to the Russian border and an early target of Vladimir Putin’s invading forces.
Once war broke out, home for Tymofiy and 23 others, including his mother, aunt and grandparents, was a dark, cramped bunker under a bomb-damaged kindergarten, in the centre of a village once populated by 1,500 residents, reduced to 50 within months. All the other children had been evacuated but Tymofiy’s family had nowhere to go and no money to go there. For 87 days, Tymofiy, terrified by the barrage of violence above him, drew his pictures under a tiny LED light, in the corner of the otherwise almost completely dark basement. Tanks featured a lot in his art, as did Dalek-like monsters.
All that changed, though, when Tymofiy’s story in the Guardian, Drawing Monsters in the Basement, caught the attention of a reader in Switzerland last May.
They wanted to help get Tymofiy and his family away from a village that, though liberated from occupation in late April, remained under regular Russian barrage. The reader offered to help the family navigate the processes of settling in Switzerland under the country’s refugee system. It was then a matter of Rita, 33, persuading her son and the rest of the family that, with the Ukrainian army’s support, they could risk leaving the imperfect safety of the bunker and making their way west.
As they emerged from the basement, on Sunday 22 May last year, Tymofiy begged to go back down. But Rita held his hand and they persevered, travelling to Kharkiv with an army escort, then taking an eight-hour train journey to Kyiv, where they rested in the station before making the 13-hour journey west to Lviv. Then it was another train to Krakow in Poland, one to Vienna from there and a final train to Geneva.
It was days of travelling and life was not easy, even on arrival, as Switzerland struggled to deal with the influx of Ukrainian refugees. The Guardian reader helped them settle but the family was ultimately moved from one refugee centre to another, city to city, under a system that favoured distributing refugees around the country. They decided they needed a more permanent home and made contact with a family friend in Poland. Their new life began there.
Today, they live in a bedsit in Świebodzin, a town in western Poland. Rita has found a job in an Amazon distribution centre; it is hard, unforgiving work. But Tymofiy is thriving. “At first he was even afraid to go out of our apartment, scared shots and explosions would start at any moment,” she says. “Two weeks after we arrived there was a fireworks display and he was traumatised by the noises and explosions. But it took a month and he became calmer and now he isn’t afraid of open spaces.”
Guardian readers donated more than £13,000 via a JustGiving page in response to the initial story about the family’s life in the bunker. “For us, this was a fantastic amount of money,” Rita says. “We were just in shock. In my entire life, I’ve never had anyone give us anything for nothing. I couldn’t even imagine that it was possible, that strangers would just help us out of the blue.” She has put the money away for Tymofiy’s education: “We want him to get a decent profession, so he can earn a comfortable living on his own. He wants to study in the US.”
For now, however, Rita, while grateful to have escaped the war, is determined to get back to Ukraine. The Russians have been pushed farther back in recent months and Rita’s parents and sister have recently returned to what is left of Kutuzivka, where they are rebuilding their homes and lives. Tymofiy is, naturally, nervous. “He said, ‘What are we going to do in Ukraine? There’s a war going on there, isn’t there? We won’t be able to go anywhere.’” But home is home, Rita says. “It is scary but we trust in fate.”
