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“My life without Kherson is just impossible, I live with this Ukrainian seaport in my heart,” Vadym, a savvy seaman from Kherson, who worked all his life as a chief mechanic on a variety of foreign ships, squatted at the bumper of his modern crossover. “Look, you see so many holes from mortar mines. The windshield is in cracks too… I got them just two days ago…”

After another sea voyage and the involuntary stay in Kyiv for several months, Vadym took a risk. He went driving to his big private house built in Korabel rayon, in Kherson. His neighbors called him and said that his house windows were wrecked, and the roof looked like a ruined riddle after relentless arty ruptures.

Having left his wife in Kyiv, the naval veteran, Vadym dashed to his native city. The way to his hearty homeland was not far-off, his car flashed fast…

The spacious splendid two-storey house he lived for so many years looked like a hardly living and heavily breathing creature ready to bite the dust. However, it was still alive and ready to be reanimated. Vadym took several barriers of plywood and rolls of transparent plastic, distributed by local authorities, and covered all windows and roof holes with them.

“One more problem is connected with marauders. For somebody war is an evil aunt and for another it is a birth mother. On my second day of stay in Kherson, I was shocked while seeing my neighbors driving away a group of men looting their damaged houses…I just don`t have any words…”

On reflection, Vadym continued. He decided to transport some of the valuable things, like a big plasma TV set, a desktop computer and a generator, to his apartment on Beryslav highway.

After taking the following group of goods, the cargo ships veteran pulled over on Korabel square to pick up a hitchhiking middle-aged man with a ten-year old daughter. Suddenly, after the car driving off, they heard a hasty thud right on the place where the passengers were taken.

“Five second delay could be mortal for all of us,” Vadym went on. “However, it was not the end of the story, the next mortar mine exploded at the next crossroad just fifteen seconds later. My intuition saved me… I stopped the car at the split sec before a sudden strike. The distance was not more than fifty meters. It was not an odd mortar double tap… We were tracked and targeted. I sped up and left the zone of explosions as fast as I could…”

“I dropped off the faint father and his frightened daughter far away from the city but before that we pulled up at my apartment to leave some gadgets from my house…There I found out that one of my neighbours, a good-hearted woman in her fifties, was struck by a random Russian artillery shell…All her life long, she worked at school, sowing what was wise, what was good, and what was true…”

Vadym and his passengers got lucky in this war-time Kherson race for survival; they managed to stay alive and to get the third chance to live in war-torn Ukraine. The good-will woman, the pleasant and peaceful lady, failed…What did she do wrong in this world?