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Orphan saw father die, now awaits future in Ukrainian shelter

Idium – one building in The recaptured but ruined Ukrainian town of Izium It’s full of people who have reached the end of their lives. It smells of unwashed sheets and unbathed skin, needing more heat to fend off the approaching winter.

Now an orphan wanders the cold corridors among the old and crippled, his eyes fixed on the phone in his hand. Until a few days ago, 13-year-old Bodin had his father. Now he has no one.

Bohdan’s father wasted weeks in the corridors of a shelter for the wounded and the homeless before finally contracting stomach cancer on October 3.

“He ran up to me and said, ‘I love you, Daddy.’ Hmm.”

A small facility in an eastern town opened in January as a rehabilitation center for people recovering from surgery and injuries. When the war started a month later, Russian troops soon engulfed the town. Within weeks, airstrikes, artillery and fires left traces on almost every building.

Those who had no means of escaping the city quickly survived in frightened cellars, without electricity, gas or running water, but that was all. fell into A disorderly retreat from Izium and other towns.

But their departure did little to reduce deprivation in Idium. His 39 sleeping in a rehab center have nowhere else to go.they are weak and poor their home was destroyed and the rest of the family dead or missing.

The realization of it all brings tears.

And this is how Mykola Svirid and Bodin got here. Svyryd was already dying when the war began. Two years ago his Bohdan mother was stricken with cancer.

The boy himself was born with a brain injury that doctors hoped his father could eventually treat with surgery. Between the timid stare and the shy smile, Bodin mostly speaks only a few short words at a time.

“He was born disabled. He never went to school. I taught him to read a little and write numbers and letters,” Svyryd said of his son. .

Svyryd, a retired former worker at a factory that made eyeglass lenses, fled with his son from a Russian attack on the town where all the windows in his apartment were blown out. As his health slowly deteriorated, his neighbors helped as much as they could.

“We had to sit in the basement for three months. increase. By the time he spoke to his AP reporter, he was bedridden and emaciated, his voice almost higher than a whisper.

Bodin hugged his father gently. He whispers to Ukrainian pop music and plays small-screen video games with as much enthusiasm as a teenager.

It doesn’t seem strange that she is an only child in a building with many elderly people, but she doesn’t particularly interact with them. Wearing a knit cap and a blue hooded hoodie, he wanders anxiously under the trees in the small courtyard of the rehab center.

Svyryd was buried in a simple grave in a cemetery outside Izium. A wooden cross and a bouquet of colorful artificial flowers mark his final resting place.

After his father’s death, Bohdan would often sit in the room he shared at the shelter and stare into the distance. He is currently sleeping elsewhere in the shelter, but the staff hope the new environment will ease his pain a bit.

The operation, which had been postponed due to the war and his father’s illness, is finally scheduled for the next few days. Eventually, Bohdan ended up going for adoption, becoming one of his many Ukrainian orphans.

But from time to time he still asks where his father is.

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Follow all AP articles on the war in Ukraine at: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

https://www.local10.com/news/world/2022/10/14/orphan-watched-dad-die-now-awaits-future-in-ukraine-shelter/ Orphan saw father die, now awaits future in Ukrainian shelter

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