She grew up in a “troublesome house,” as she put it. Her dad and mom met as artwork college students in Odessa, Ukraine. When Kravchenko was 3 and her sister 5, they misplaced each their grandfather and father to homicide in a couple of quick months. Their grandfather, a high-ranking commander within the Soviet army, was temperamental and belligerent and presumably mentally ailing, Kravchenko mentioned. He was killed when an assailant strangled him and torched his home. Ola’s mom, Tania, was suspected within the arson and spent virtually a 12 months in Soviet detention. (In accordance with Tania, his physique was exhumed, and new proof cleared her of the homicide.) Shortly after, Ola’s father’s physique was discovered, hanging from a tree in a forest. He had been a penniless artist in St. Petersburg, “terribly proficient” and “hypersensitive,” in response to Tania. Nobody is aware of how he died, although mates of his later informed her that they’d seen two males chasing him within the woods. Ola’s household moved in with Tania’s mom. 4 years later, they immigrated to Israel, settling in Katzrin.
Kravchenko discovered it onerous to slot in. She labored on shedding her accent and prevented the kids of different Russian or Ukrainian immigrants, who make up a couple of third of Katzrin’s inhabitants. She usually wandered out of sophistication, disappearing into nature. The college repeatedly known as her mom to come back discover her. She distinctly remembers the primary time she heard voices. She was 17 and driving house along with her mom. “She began saying all these disagreeable issues about me: that she didn’t wish to drive me house, that she was uninterested in caring for me, that I used to be at all times nagging.” However when Kravchenko seemed over at her mom, “her mouth wasn’t shifting.” Quickly the voices turned quite a few and frequent, disguised because the voices of individuals Kravchenko knew effectively. “They had been at all times important of me, at all times nasty,” she mentioned. “There was no telling them aside from actual voices.”
Across the similar time, Kravchenko’s mom advised she attempt meditation, and he or she began attending lessons led by a charismatic Chilean-born guru named David Har-Zion. Kravchenko fell underneath his spell. After a number of months, she moved in with a gaggle of his followers. She slept on a yoga mat with dozens of individuals in a big corridor. Members had been forbidden to kind relationships with the skin world and had been required to give up their private possessions to the group. For 3 years, she lived in “digital enslavement,” she mentioned. Har-Zion later fled the nation, and Kravchenko discovered herself abruptly unmoored and alone. “I had no life expertise in any respect,” she mentioned.
When she was 20, she met Habany on the streets of Tel Aviv. She was elevating donations for Har-Zion’s group at a neighborhood market, and he helped his father run a clothes stall there. They started to take lengthy walks on the seashore collectively, smoking marijuana and speaking about their pasts. He was 19, bookish and opinionated, and he impressed her together with his information of Hebrew literature. He confided in her that at 17 he was dedicated at a psychiatric establishment exterior Tel Aviv. (The court docket later indicated that this was for conduct dysfunction.) Moderately than alarm her, this “solely pulled me nearer,” she informed me. Inside six months, she moved in with him. “I used to be completely his,” she mentioned.
There had been warning indicators, however Kravchenko selected to disregard them. “The intercourse was violent, however I used to be drawn to it.” By 2005, Kravchenko felt more and more remoted. Returning house from work one night, she began speaking with a gaggle of younger individuals who frequented a public sq.. They provided her vodka. The subsequent factor she remembers, she wakened bare in her condominium, her physique aching, with Habany screaming at her: “What is that this? What did you do?” Kravchenko doesn’t know the one that raped her or bear in mind a lot about that night — “I’ve flashes of the man,” she informed me — however when Habany noticed her, he kicked her within the head and abdomen, dragged her into the bath and urinated on her. Habany later informed investigators that he “peed on her,” as a result of he “felt prefer it.” An investigator drilled into this: “Your accomplice, your lover … was raped in response to you by one other man, and also you peed on her?” Habany informed him, “It’s my private enterprise — not yours.”
After that night time, Kravchenko mentioned, Habany turned obsessed along with her whereabouts. He didn’t enable her to socialize or exit with out him to anyplace besides work. “I didn’t understand that I used to be being abused,” she informed me. “I nonetheless needed to marry him, have youngsters with him.” In 2006, they ran out of cash to pay lease and needed to transfer in with Kravchenko’s mom, in Katzrin. Tania was involved about how Habany handled Kravchenko and tried to warn her daughter. However by then, Kravchenko had misplaced her sense of self. In a sketchbook from that point, she drew a girl warrior with a sword coming into her personal elements. “I even purchased myself a canine collar,” she mentioned.