The Untold

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The Untold: The Rescue

18/04/2022

The Rescue

BBC Radio 4 - The Untold, The Rescue

Sue Mitchell follows as 35 orphans are rescued in Ukraine and settled into a safer place.

BBC reporter Sue Mitchell follows the rescue of 35 orphans from behind Russian lines in Ukraine: once they're safe the focus shifts to helping them try and recover from the ordeal.

The children were finally rescued, on Sunday March 13th: they were dazed, cold and hungry as they were led out of the shelter. Over the next few days their lives begin to change and the rescue team feel the relief as the orphans  bed down on a sea of mattresses in a gym in Lviv. The children finally let the tension seep from them as they giggle and read to each other. But this is only the first stage in a long road to recovery, as BBC reporter, Sue Mitchell, discovers.

Anastasia Ovsyanik, who before the war had been living in Kiev with her family, was involved in the rescue effort and stays alongside the children as plans are made for where they should go longer term.  We hear her answering difficult questions as the youngsters try and make sense of what's happened. Some of them are too traumatised to speak about what they've been through and like seven-year-old Larysa, they go at their own pace as they gradually start to play and relax. 

Anastasia is helping redesign these makeshift  buildings: in this case a gym in an old residential school, with chipped paint and crumbling walls. It's cold and neglected and volunteers quickly fill it with metal beds and other basics; the warmth and love flows from them as they set their own lives aside to help the children. They bring pictures, outdoor play equipment, toys, books, sofas and lots of donated blankets and clothes.

This focus on making these places feel special is reinforced by the support mechanisms put in place by psychologists like Sherri McClurg, who says the work to help youngsters recover will be slow and difficult: “We’re not talking children that are born and raised in the comfort of their own home; we're talking kids who have been separated from that home. So, these are kids who already have a baseline of trauma.

“Now we've got this going on, and they don't they have any control. So, these kids are probably a lot of them are almost numb, they're just moving with the system. But internally, everything's getting a little bit more heightened and a little bit more heightened and a little bit more heightened. You see it on the news, you see the surface damage, you see the buildings destroyed, you see all of that, what is really the thing that concerns me more, and the real damage is what's going on in the insides of these kids’ hearts and their minds."

Reporter: Sue Mitchell

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Factual: Life Stories

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