Kekhvi

Interview plase,date:Aug 14, 2008 10:54 PM
Interviewer organization:vollunteer journalist
Respondent:woman, 75 years
Story code:0080
Olia Kakheladze, 75: "I had been working for 44 years as a teacher at Kekhvi secondary school. The escalation began in 1989. Often I witnessed the situations that when entering the class, the students were not paying any attention to me and looking into the windows.
When children what was going on, they would respond me that there was an explosion. My course of action was notifying the director of the school and accompanying children to their own residences. So it started and we had to endure living in such conditions. There were cases when the rockets even hit the school that prompted us to continue studying at rail cars. We never stopped working. We never left the gorge. So was it up to recently. We would never had left our home stays.
That day my son came home saying that he was relieved for three hours and went to sleep. I thought I would prepare some food and started preparing it. My son is military and they had a post in Gori.
Out of sudden other Georgians rushed into our house and demanded to empty the gorge. My son contacted his superior who also confirmed an immediate withdrawal. We sat into my son's car and departed with the other car ahead of us.
While on the way the other car was hit by so-called "gaubitsa" – mortar grenade and everyone died inside the car. We wrapped the bodies in some fabrics and buried nearby.
Then we left for Gori. I have a daughter there who is married to Gori resident. This child is also her. We planned to stay with her. That evening we noticed that militaries camped nearby. I can not say who they were, as they were launching grenades and there were explosions. We moved to the garden where we stayed up to 3 am. Then I contacted my son to take us away. He came and took us. Now we are here in this nightmare. We were 20 people in the family of one of our relatives. Which relative will be able to keep a group of 20 people? You see where we live, we have no conditions.