The words scream out in red letters, in the unmistakable scribble of a child learning cursive: “No War!!!”

On the walls of a dank school basement are drawings that might have been made by any children, anywhere. There are hearts, green trees with brown trunks, yellow suns with blue skies, butterflies, a sailboat, a perfect matchstick. Under a loopy “privit” — “hello” in Ukrainian — is a palm tree under a beaming sun, along with two drawings of figures that appear to be embracing.

But those two words in red signal that there was nothing ordinary about the condition of the children who made the drawings, in the village of Yahidne in northern Ukraine.

For four weeks in March, after Russian forces swept into Yahidne, they imprisoned 300 townspeople, including 77 children, in several rooms of the unfurnished basement of the village school. The civilians served as a human shield for the Russian troops based there, protecting them from Ukrainian fire.

Ivan Petrovich, who had served as the school janitor, and a fellow detainee, Oleh Turash, were among the few men allowed out of the school premises — for the purpose of burying those who died inside. On one of their forays, they found some crayons and paints and brought them back for the children.

In the same room where the children drew pictures, people died before their eyes. Ten captives died while the people were held in the basement.

These drawings were in the largest room, which had the basement’s only source of air: a tiny hole the detainees made themselves.

In a room across the hall, on a wall next to a list of those who had died in the village, some children, most likely older ones, had drawn a store with little puffs of smoke coming out of a chimney. Birds fly above the trees and under the clouds.

There in the cold of the basement, in a school surrounded by trenches and destroyed tanks, an observer might expect a sinister portrayal of missiles flying in the air. But instead someone had drawn a meteorite hurtling toward Earth. It’s clear only because the artist specified with an arrow and a caption saying “meteorite”. Below it are a soccer field, a bank and a road leading to an unspecified destination.

Underneath it all, “BOOM!” written in chunky block letters. And just above that: “R.I.P.”

(New York Times News Service)