"YAHIDNE, Ukraine — The elementary school’s former custodian carefully turned the key to the green door leading to the basement and walked down the stairs, shining a flashlight. Eventually, he paused the beam on a calendar scrawled on the cement wall and on the list of names alongside it. It is how the people imprisoned there by Russian occupiers kept a record of who died and when. ‘People were dying, people couldn’t take it,’ said the former custodian, Ivan Petrovich Polhui. ‘There was not enough air. We spent a month there — 28 days.’ Mr. Polhui has become something of an unofficial keeper of the memories of the school and of the suffering that Russian soldiers inflicted there in March, when they held him and more than 300 of his neighbors, including children, in the dank and desperate confines of the basement. ...”
Yahidne last month. In March, more than 300 residents, including 77 children, were marched from their homes at gunpoint and forced into a cramped school basement.
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