Texts and photos by Monsi A. Serrano
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it unleashed more than tanks and missiles. It ignited a storm of human suffering. We saw the headlines: burning cities, shattered homes, fleeing families. What we didn’t see—what cameras couldn’t capture—was the slow, silent robbery of dignity in places too dark for light and too painful for memory.
One such place is Yahidne, a village in Ukraine’s Chernihiv region. Unknown to most of the world, it became a chamber of terror. Over 3,000 Russian soldiers overran the area and locked more than 360 civilians—including 70 children and the elderly—into a school basement. For 27 days, they lived in darkness. And in darkness, the truth rotted—both literally and figuratively.
Children fear the dark. That’s natural. But imagine children confined in pitch blackness, no beds, no toilets—just buckets in corners. Twenty-seven days. No sunlight. No certainty. Only fear.
I can’t begin to describe how unthinkable that is for those of us who weren’t there. The stench alone—urine, excrement, blood, sweat, decay—would make you wish for death rather than endure another minute of it.
This was not a hiding place. It was a prison. These civilians were hostages, human shields. Ten died. Some from disease. Others from despair. Many went mad.
As a Filipino journalist who has witnessed war, I thought my heart was prepared. I was wrong.
In April 2022, I stood in Prague, watching Ukrainians line up at a refugee center. Some clutched plastic bags. Others had nothing. I spoke to a schoolteacher whose building had been bombed. Her voice trembled—not from fear, but guilt. Guilt that she survived while others didn’t.
In May, I traveled through Warsaw and Kraków to Ukraine’s borders. Each kilometer unwrapped another layer of grief: missing sons, mass graves, bombed-out homes. The faces changed, but the stories didn’t. Children I interviewed then still hoped the war would end. It didn’t.
From 2023 to 2025, I returned—not for headlines, but to understand survival. I walked through rubble in Donbas, Kharkiv, Poltava, Kyiv, and Lviv. I listened to stories too raw for broadcast. But Yahidne was different.
Hell on earth
The school basement was a prison of despair. Infants starved. The elderly prayed for a quicker death. Ten corpses—left beside the living for days—decomposed in the foul air.
The smell still lingers.
I descended into that darkness. The chill clung to my skin. Leaking pipes dripped onto a damp floor. Children’s books and toys lay scattered. Mold rotted the wooden desks. The walls seemed to whisper.
Some children had stopped crying—not because they were brave, but because they were too weak. Food was fuel-soaked pasta and moldy bread. Russian soldiers laughed. Some filmed the prisoners as if they were toys.
A witness told me one child fainted when he saw sunlight again. Scratches on the wall marked the days—not counting life, but preparing for death.
I walked the basement’s rooms. I touched the walls. I listened. And I felt the cruelty linger in the silence. This place had no light. No mercy. No reason.
I debated whether to write this. But my duty as a journalist—and a human being—won out. To know the truth, tell the truth, and deliver the truth. If I don’t write this, the story risks being buried. And that’s what Russia wants—to replace truth with propaganda, to drown memory in lies.
As Goebbels once said, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”
The witness described how the dead were moved—using a wheelbarrow to a makeshift morgue, just meters away. Survivors buried them with bare hands. I stood there, imagining that moment.
And I realized: this story must be told. It cannot be buried—not in rubble, not in memory, not by the world’s short attention span.
I am Filipino. I come from a country familiar with extrajudicial killings, with impunity, with propaganda amplifying the lies of powerful regimes. That’s why I write this. Not just for Ukrainians. But for every silenced voice.
Yahidne is not just a village. It is a mirror. Their suffering is not fiction.
One mother begged a soldier to let her baby out when it began suffocating. There was no formula, no milk. Mothers tried to soothe their babies with sips of water. It was inhumane.
At one point, the Russians brought newspapers into the basement—Komsomolskaya Pravda—declaring Kyiv and Chernihiv had fallen. “Come out, work for us, and you will live,” they said.
This was not information. It was manipulation.
I remembered Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: prisoners in the dark, seeing only shadows, fed lies as truth. That’s what Russia tried to do—keep people in the dark and make them fear the light. But Yahidne did not submit. They did not believe. They knew the Russians didn’t come to liberate. They came to dominate.
Many far from Ukraine think staying neutral equals peace. But silence, in times like this, is complicity. It is the sin of omission.
That’s why I return—to Donbas, Kharkiv, Poltava, and now Yahidne—not for bylines, but to preserve memory. Because silence only emboldens perpetrators.
These are not numbers. They are people. Mothers. Fathers. Teachers. Children. Their pain is real. Their voices must be heard.
“Move on,” people say. But those who survived Yahidne cannot. I will not.
Somewhere right now, another basement may be filling with silence. Another child may be staring at moldy bread. Another mother scratching marks into a wall.
We must not wait for the world to care. We must make the world care. We must tell the truth—no matter the danger.
