Interview: Nataliya Yefimkina
“My name is Andrei Kolesnikov, I am 45 years old, and for the last 5 years I was a Landlord.
I am always open to international things, on the one hand, and on the other hand I had a lot of experience working in international companies. There were 25 trips a year to different countries, and I lived there for a while – in China, in Europe, and I also studied in England at that time. That’s why I and my wife are very open-minded.
And one day we went to Sweden, saw how they do it and decided to make our own guest house.
I sent the family to Europe long before the war, the day Russia withdrew their ambassadors, I think it was February 11, 3 hours after the ambassadors left, I bought tickets to Europe for all of them.
My wife left, my younger child and my in-laws who were just with us, my parents stayed in Kiev.
I knew that the Second World War started at four o’clock in the morning and somehow I couldn’t sleep the night from 23 to 24 and I got up at three o’clock, I still had to help my son with the motivation letter for the university.
And I thought I should have this motivation letter ready by 4 o’clock and send it to him because if the war comes, there is no more internet at four o’clock and I won’t make it in time and then the child suffers because he is not ready.
I had finished the letter at quarter to four and at half-past four two rockets flew over us.
During this time our permanent roommate Pawel was with me, he used to be a pastor in one of the churches here and until the end he believed that God would save us from this, and when the mine hit there were two of us, I was on the second floor, Pawel was in the stairwell, on the third floor.
We were really lucky that nothing happened to us, but the hotel suffered quite a lot and the front door warped it and it didn’t open anymore. I didn’t want to make any more noise because there was broken glass everywhere, and according to the calculations, the mine launchers were about 500 m. away from us, so we would have attracted attention and they could have killed us.
It is very scary when you get up in the morning and understand that there are tanks around your house and that they will surely come to you in a moment and so it happened. At 7:30 in the morning, the remaining glass on the front door was knocked out and Russians came into us. They shouted – Who is there? and we said civilians, civilians.
The oldest one found that I was an international spy.
Because of the American and Canadian visas and the decision was the following, to let Pavel live and to shoot me and until the end, I believed that it is a joke, a joke, guys I said – yes it is visas we go to Europe and to America, this is a normal lifestyle, normal life.
They put me and Pawel in the kitchen, Pawel a bit further away and me on a chair in such a niche and they pretended to go to discuss something and then Pawel said to me – pray! And it sounds banal, but I prayed for the first time in my life and I heard a very fast machine gun row through the door.
Only then did I understand that I was being shot at. Out of the five bullets, only one hit me, grazing my leg. I started screaming – Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” and I ran out of the other door, which is by the front door, and saw the person reloading his machine gun and I screamed, “Don’t shoot!”.
“Are you alive?” “Yes, I am alive”. “Then you were lucky”, and I to him- “you promise not to shoot anymore”, and in front of his fellow soldiers he said- “yes I promise”.
We went out of Irpin on foot, all civilian movements were suspicious, that’s why on the street there were cars with shot people in them, on the streets there were dead civilians, so terrible, so terrible, we had to go to the center of Irprin, and to Cathedral Street, and then we walked towards Romanovka where then volunteers received us.
That’s how I was saved.”