“Everyone knows the word ‘war’, but few people understand what it truly means,” notes 12-year-old Yeva Skalietska in You Don’t Know What War Is. Yeva is from Kharkiv, Ukraine, and this is her diary, providing a first-hand account of the early weeks of the Russian invasion. Before the war, Yeva would go bowling with friends, go to school and do her homework. But on the morning of 24 February 2022, she was woken by loud metallic noises echoing through the streets. When she looked out of the window of her flat, she saw a rocket go past and explode “with such force I felt my heart go cold in my chest”.
She and her grandmother, Iryna, quickly joined the residents of their building in the dusty basement, where they fashioned beds out of blankets and bits of cardboard and listened to the bombs dropping outside. The diary goes on to chronicle Yeva and Iryna’s movements as they flee, first to a friend’s house on the other side of the city and later over the border to Budapest. Eventually, with the help of a news team from Channel 4, the pair make contact with a family in Dublin who offer to take them in.
