“I am 60 years old and I lost everything in Mariupol. I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t started working immediately after the evacuation,” says Natalia Rovytska, director of our school in Warsaw.
On February 24, she came to the 66th school, which she headed for 13 years, to hide important documents. On this day, they and their colleagues encouraged each other that they would definitely return to these walls. On March 12, a bomb was dropped on the school from an airplane.
A powerful explosion destroyed everything, there were no green Christmas trees in the yard, which the graduates planted every year.
After the bombing of the Drama Theater, the death of people they knew before their eyes, Natalia and her husband dared to leave the city, on the same day their house was bombed with phosphorus bombs. The house burned for three days. There were still people in the basement, and the temperature there rose to 50 degrees. They were afraid to move, so as not to raise their own body temperature, and then managed to get out.
After everything she experienced, the opportunity to work at school brought Natalya back to life. She came to Poland on March 29 at the invitation of the “Unbreakable Ukraine” Foundation, and on April 1 she started working at the “First Ukrainian School” in Warsaw.
At the same time, she made a lot of efforts to restore contact with the entire teaching staff from her native gymnasium. For the fall semester, Natalya already accepted 400 children to school in Warsaw. “Ukraine must not lose its children. We have to develop their potential. Ukrainian schools in Poland were created to make it easier for these children to return to Ukraine. They are our future,” says Natalia.
If you want to read the detailed story about Ms. Natalia Rovitska, you can read this:
1) in Ukrainian on the ShoTam website ;
2) in Polish on the website .