Odessa city councillor Oleksandr Ivanytskyy was the first to speak about the 13-year-old boy who saved 15 children during a fire in Odessa’s Viktoriya camp. The boy’s name is Maxim Tikhonchuk.
He carried children out of five rooms». That’s 15 children’s lives! And on Monday he just went to school with burnt hands…», Alexander Ivanitsky wrote on Facebook.
«Despite everything he’s been through, Maksim is really a second day in class,» says Maksim Tihonchuk’s teacher, «Maksim is very modest, he doesn’t like to talk about himself. This boy is a real hero. When a fire broke out in the camp, Maksim was in another building. But when he saw that the building next door was on fire, he reacted immediately — he ran straight into the building to get the children out. According to Maksim, the fire broke out very quickly. Maxim broke windows and doors — he got the children out. He saved a lot of people. He couldn’t just get into the room where the three girls had died. There was nothing he could do — the door had melted down and would not open. Maxim is very worried about this. He even blames himself that these children died… I don’t think every adult could have done what this child did.
A fire at the Victoria Children’s Health Complex started in the late evening of 15 September 2017. The building where the fire broke out burned to the ground. Three children died in the fire and two others were hospitalised.
Eyewitnesses report that several children jumped out of the windows of the building during the fire.
