After two military campaigns thousands of Chechen children have grown up. They were hurt by the wars mentally. Children were refugees, lived in camps, tripped mines and lost relatives and friends. I remember the moments when my mother and I ran into a basement during bomb attacks. I saw a corpse when I was 14, I heard explosions. I was lucky – my father and mother survived. But many children became orphans. One of the victims of the wars is David Naumkin. Before the war he was a Jewish boy living happily in Grozny with his parents. He couldn’t imagine he would have to wander from one rehab clinic to another for 15 years. But David lost both parents in one day in the military campaign of 1994.
Several years ago the Chechen authorities decided to transform orphanages and shelters into rehabilitation centers. They explained that the reason for this was the mentality of Chechens, which doesn’t allow children to be raised in such conditions, if at least one of their relatives is alive. At that moment David Naumkin was at the social institute in Shali. Every time school breaks came, children left the center to visit their relatives, and only David stayed with his favorite minder, Tamara Talkhigova. It was she who stopped Davod’s orphan life. She became the boy’s guardian. Tomara Talkhigova decided to raise her foster-son in Shali.
In his new family David has three sisters and a brother. The male side is sure the boy should be raised as a man and be prepared for life. After 15 years David has been in several rehab centers, he was always in the society of little children. At 21 he is still watching cartoons.
News that David was adopted was a pleasure for the Shali rehabilitation center. Nobody knows about David’s relatives. It is only known how he lost his parents. “His parents were killed during the war. His father and mother died during artillery shelling,” the deputy director of the social-rehabilitation center said.
Recently, representatives of Moscow Jewish organizations found out about the boy. Trying to find the boy’s relatives, Tamara wrote about him on the internet. Soon she received a letter from Moscow, which suggested sending the boy to a special care home. Tamara convinced David to go. But after several months in Moscow he decided to come back. So the Talkhigovs became guardians of the boy. David has been living with his new family for more than a year, and he is now called Daud.
In the mid-1990s Murad Soltamuradov lost connection with his relatives, but he didn’t go to a foster home. Until 1994 he lived in the Grozny foster school for sight-impaired children. After the war had started, one of the carers took him home. Later the foster home stopped working. In 1995 the six-year-old boy appeared in the village of Achaluki. A policeman, Magomed Tochiyev, found the child near a Chechen border post and took him home. The lost boy had been living among policemen for several days. “When he came to our family, he began to call me Dad at once. When I took him home, I told my wife if tomorrow she complains I have taken a stranger home, I would give him back; but if she complains in a month, I would leave her,” Tochiyev remembers. So the Chechen boy stayed in the Tochiyevs family.
The war didn’t pass by a Grozny boy Zelimkhan Nikiyev. His parents could meet their 12-year-old son only after seven years of absence. In 2008 he returned to his parents, but spoke only Danish and communicated with them only by means of a dictionary. The way home was closed by the authorities of Denmark. After the war in Chechnya his grandmother took the boy with heart-disease to Denmark. But there she was deprived of guardian rights because of an overdue notification of power of attorney from his parents, and Zelim was sent to a special foster home in Copenhagen. The Danish authorities were not quick to let the boy return home. For several years diplomatic negotiations have been taking place. However, Russian diplomats and lawyers have managed to return Zelimkhan home.
