On a sunny but chilly Monday, after class had already started in Kyiv schools, scores of grim-faced teens filled a crematorium hall at Kyiv's main cemetery instead.
They had come to say goodbye to their friend and classmate Danylo Khudia, a 17-year-old whose coffin stood next to those of his parents, Viktoriia and Oleh, around the fire pit where their bodies would be cremated after the farewell ceremony.
The Khudia family was asleep at home when a Russian missile struck their apartment building on April 24, killing 13 people in Russia’s deadliest attack on Ukraine's capital in almost a year.
Danylo’s younger sister, 14-year-old Yana, was the only person in the family who survived the strike. A video of her dusty, expressionless face gazing out from the wreckage, while first responders struggled to lift the concrete slabs and pleaded, “Hold on, Yanochka, we’ll surely get you out,” went viral online.
Yana couldn’t come to the funeral of her parents and brother on April 28 due to her injuries. Her two surviving older siblings, a brother and sister in their early 20s, stood in the front row, opposite a teenage girl with long brown hair – Danylo’s girlfriend, whose mother had to hold her up with an arm around her waist as she approached the caskets.
“Danylo was the brightest person I had known in my eighteen years,” said one young man when everyone was invited to say something about the family.
When short speeches were said between the towering crematorium walls and the priest had finished the rites, hundreds of people slowly flowed past the coffins, leaving flowers and speaking to the dead one last time.
One soldier put scarlet red carnations on Oleh’s casket, who was also a soldier and had been recovering from a battle wound at home.
Young boys whose chins had little more than peach fuzz came up to Danylo’s casket to place flowers, as Danylo’s grandmother in a wheelchair cried out next to them: “Dania, Dania! Why?”
For most of the ceremony, Danylo’s closest male friends looked stoic, standing in a close-knit group behind his surviving relatives.
But when Danylo’s casket was lowered inside the fire pit, following the caskets of his parents, many young men covered their faces, biting back tears and clutching each other’s shoulders.
After the strike, Danylo’s friends had stayed behind the red tape cordoning off the wreckage for the whole day, hoping he'd be found alive.
“We were recording videos: ‘C’mon, Dania, we’re waiting for you!’ Or writing to him,” said Varvara Shustova, 15, a member of Danylo’s friend group. “No one believed that he had died at first.”
“I couldn’t ever believe that it could happen to us. To Dania. That all of us will be going through this together,” she told the Kyiv Independent after the funeral.
Natalia Yermak
