Only three days before the bombing of the drama theater in Mariupol, Denis and Oksana were still hiding there with their two children. They recall how about a thousand people gathered in the building, and how they helped children and old women.

However, on March 13, 2022, the parents felt particularly restless and decided to take 11-year-old Katia and 9-year-old Hlib out of the drama theater. In a few days, the only ruins left at this place, and that forever marked one of the worst tragedies in our country’s history.

The Ostapenko family didn’t panic when the full-scale war began. The entire eastern side of the city was protected by DOTs, so Denys and Oksana were sure that the shelling would soon stop, as it was in 2014. However, no one expected that the russians would enter the city from the opposite side.

When the city began to be constantly shelled, the couple took at their home in Mariupol residents who had lost their homes one by one. The couple helped everyone who needed it with all their might. “Every day I went to volunteer and said goodbye to my wife and children like it for the last time because we didn’t know if we would meet again,” Denis recalls those times.

Two weeks later, an enemy missile took away their home as well. That is how they ended up in the drama theater, and then they were forced to flee to Zaporizhzhia. To enter the territory controlled by Ukraine, people had to stand at Russian checkpoints for several days. Fortunately, the journey for the Ostapenko took only 6 hours. Later, the family found out that they were driving through mined fields. Denis still says that God himself led them through that hellish path.

From Zaporizhzhia, the family went to Khmelnytskyi. Here they slept on the floor of a bakery for several months: parents, children, and their cat, which the family took from Mariupol. Despite the inconvenience, one thought warmed the soul in those nights: they are alive and together.

The story of the rescue of the Ostapenko family cannot be called anything else but a miracle. And the Save Ukraine team is glad to be a part of this great miracle. We offered the family to settle in one of our modular houses in Khmelnytskyi under the Fort Home program.

Today, the family has finally regained the lost peace and sense of security in their new home. Katia and her brother Hlib, who bravely went through all the horrors of the war, now continue their favorite activities sports and drawing with the care of their parents.