On the evening of December 31, the author and her husband traveled to the Swiss village of Wilchingen, where two elderly women from Mariupol — Liudmila Palna and Liudmila Ivanna — were celebrating New Year’s Eve in a nursing home. A table had been set for them with tangerines, sandwiches, champagne and a small cypress decorated as a holiday tree. When the salad was placed on the plates, Liudmila Ivanna quietly said, “Just like home.”
Both women are in their eighties, move with rollators and do everything together. They met on March 6, 2022, after the war had already begun. Liudmila Palna had lived in central Mariupol and moved to Liudmila Ivanna’s house in the city’s Port district because of the shelling. In her haste she took a bath scrubber and five cans of condensed milk, but forgot clothes and her dentures. Later, in Switzerland, a local dentist made her new dentures free of charge.
On March 14, 2022, they were allowed to leave the city. Seven people set out in two cars: the trip through 17 checkpoints took 12 hours to cover 90 kilometers. They saw burning houses, an unexploded shell protruding from the asphalt, and a car hit by shelling where, they said, five people, including a child, were killed. After they left, Liudmila Ivanna’s house was destroyed by a bomb, while Liudmila Palna’s Khrushchyovka apartment block burned down and was later demolished.
At the holiday table, the women called relatives in St. Petersburg, Kyiv and Mariupol, repeating the same wish: that the war end soon and their families be reunited. Liudmila Palna recalled that she had worked for 47 and a half years at the Illich steel plant, and that her husband died of कोविड two months before Russia’s full-scale invasion. Liudmila Ivanna said her husband Anatolii Ivanych, with whom she had spent 60 years, took the news of the destruction of their home very hard, and she believes it hastened his death.
Both women have lived in Switzerland since the spring of 2022. They study German, went daily to an outdoor pool in summer, and try to save part of their small monthly allowance for trips organized for elderly residents. In the final minutes of 2025, they raised their glasses, lit sparklers and once again wished only for peace.