Baby strollers stood there — either with no one in them already or with dead children inside

She was crying and sobbing. She said the train station was a nightmare — piles of bodies, masses of wounded, two missiles had hit. My husband and I immediately drove there to get people out. We called everyone we knew; everyone who could went there.

We picked up one man — he was wounded. When we brought him to the hospital, it turned out he’d been wearing two jackets and had lost them at the station, and his documents were in the jackets. We went back to the spot where we’d picked him up; they were lying on the ground. At the hospital, I had to go through every ward before I found him. There were so many wounded. Blood everywhere, everything soaked in blood. Most likely these were some kind of cluster munitions, because people didn’t have just one wound — they had many different shrapnel injuries, all cut up, all covered in blood.

We’re religious people, we’re church members; we understand that someone has to stay here and help people. We drive people to Kramatorsk train station, because it’s the only station with evacuation trains. We have one single road left to Dnipro; there’s no other road and no other way out. And they’ve already tried to blow it up twice — if they blow it up, that’s it, nobody will be able to evacuate anywhere.

We went into a room where they’d taken families with children, and I noticed a family there — they were shaking badly. A woman, a man, and a one-month-old baby. He was screaming, and they couldn’t calm him, because they themselves were in terrible shape. I immediately said: “Will you come with us?” They didn’t ask a single question. “Yes, let’s go” — they grabbed their things and handed me the baby. Only when we were already in the car did the man seem to come to his senses: “Who are you, exactly? Where are we going?” I explained, showed him my documents: “We have evacuation buses; we’ll put you on one and you’ll leave for Dnipro today.” He sits there and starts bawling: “Anywhere, just far away from here!” And then they told me — they’d been standing on the platform where the bomb hit.

They were thrown by the blast wave. They fell, and their baby fell too. When we were driving, he was wrapped up very heavily — in various towels, blankets — everything they probably had in their suitcases. I said: “He’s hot, that’s why he’s crying.” And they said: “No, if something happens, he could get hit by shrapnel or something…” Extremely frightened, they’d wrapped him in everything they could. They said: “He was in just one layer of clothes when we fell.”

I’d wondered what my reaction would be if I saw bodies — Mom had asked how I would react if I saw severed arms and legs. I thought I’d have a heart attack, my heart would stop. But as I walked through there, I had not a single thought — I just walked and looked for anyone still alive. When I came in, out of the crowd of people I spotted this family, who simply weren’t in any state to do anything for themselves, and they had a tiny baby. That’s it — I took them. I don’t know what else to say.

I love children so much; my heart has always ached for children. And when my parents called and told me they’d bombed it… I had one goal — to help the children specifically. I didn’t look at the elderly — maybe that was wrong… or at the wounded. Women and children. The only thing — to get the children out of there as fast as possible, so they wouldn’t see this. I can’t do it any other way; I can’t just sit still. I can’t leave for somewhere else, because it’s as if all these children are my own. I know that today 5 children died there. I… I saw that stroller with the baby.