Children's words, almost innocent and harmless, to describe the unnameable.
“I slept well, then I woke up, smiled and read 25 pages.
Also, my grandfather died on April 26.”
The author of these heartbreaking lines is called Yegor Kravtsov.
At the age of eight, he has just spent several weeks in a cellar in Mariupol, holed up with his family while the Russian army bombarded the city relentlessly.
“I have a back injury, the skin is torn.
My sister is hit in the head and my mum has torn the muscles of her hand and has a hole in her leg”, reads this little blond again from a page of his blue notebook, with an idyllic image of the Greece on the cover, which he filled in to keep busy.
“I so want to leave”
His family eventually managed to reach Zaporizhia, 225 kilometers northwest of Mariupol, in territory under Ukrainian control.
Under sunny June skies, Iegor plays badminton and rides his bike, a far cry from the images of destruction he scribbled in his diary with a blue pen.
We recognize armed men, tanks, a helicopter and buildings on fire.
In one of the drawings, we see the roof of his house collapsing following a missile strike.
"The noise scared me," reads the boy's diary.
On another page, he describes how family members heal each other or go in search of drinking water.
“I want to leave so badly,” he wrote again.
His mother, Olena Kravtsova, says she burst into tears when she first saw the diary.
“I showed it to the family, everyone was crying,” she explains.
"Maybe he just needed to express himself, so he wouldn't have to keep all his emotions inside him," she supposes.
The future in kyiv?
Yegor's older sister, Veronika, 15, who has a big scar on her head, hopes the diary "will be useful to someone in the future".
Images from the notebook were first posted on the internet by Yegor's great-uncle, Yevgen Sosnovskiy, a photographer who documented the battle for Mariupol before fleeing the port city in May.
After weeks spent in their cellar near the Azovstal factory, Yegor and his relatives are now housed in a shelter for displaced people in Zaporizhia and hope to reach kyiv, the capital, in a few days.
According to his mother, the boy is still in shock and reluctant to talk about what he has been through.
If asked if he wants to continue writing in the future, Yegor simply replies: “Probably”.
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