'I feel guilty that I'm here living': The Grenfell children who survived the blaze

Sixty-seven children lived in Grenfell Tower when the west London block caught fire in June 2017. Eighteen of them never got a chance to grow up.

For many of the others, the traumatic loss, anxiety and PTSD that followed the disaster has shaped their childhoods and young adult lives.

They lost friends, family and everything they owned; spent months or years in hotels; and missed valuable school time.

In the seven years since the tragedy, more than 1,000 children and young people have been treated for mental health issues, according to the NHS Health and Wellbeing Hub, set up in the wake of Grenfell.

They were traumatised by what they saw or heard from friends and family, by having to cope with the loss of a friend or a neighbour, their natural sense of safety shattered on the night of the fire.

New referrals still come in each month.

This week, the Grenfell Inquiry releases its final report into the fire that cost 72 lives.

Sky News has spoken to some of the children who survived the tragedy. These are their stories.

Luana, 19: ‘I feel guilty that I’m here living’

Luana Gomes was 12 at the time of the fire. She managed to escape, with her sister and her pregnant mother, but they were in a coma for weeks. Her baby brother, Logan, was stillborn – the youngest victim of the disaster.

Now 19 and standing at the base of the tower, Luana can’t help but smile at some of the memories.

Pointing to where their flat was on the 21st floor, she recalls looking out the window and calling out to her friends in the park below.

“Every time my friends were down there I’d shout their names. I don’t think they could hear me,” she says, laughing.

She recalls how her friend Mehdi would knock on her door and be scared of her dog: “She was so tiny and sweet but he was terrified of her, which was funny.”

Eventually Mehdi won over his fear of the dog. He died in the fire along with his sister, brother and parents. He was eight.

Luana pauses, takes a deep breath and says: “I feel a bit guilty.

“When you think about your friends and family members and neighbours – I feel guilty that I’m here living and doing all this stuff, and they didn’t get the chance to live and do the stuff they wanted to at such a young age.”

The last seven years have been difficult. She has suffered from anxiety and depression. She missed weeks of school by being in hospital, and remembers being painfully behind when she went back to the classroom.

But she has found solace in dance. This month she goes to university to study it. It’s a cliche, she says, but “dance allows me to express my feelings in a way I can’t say in words”.

She doesn’t want to speak about the little brother she lost, but shows us a message to him written years ago on the memorial wall.

The message says: “Logan. I love and miss you so, so, so much and know that your big sister is always thinking of you. RIEP Brother.”

Abem, 12: ‘It could have been me’

Abem Abraham’s memory of his first home is hazy, but he remembers watching the tower burn, and he remembers the best friend he lost.

As the fire raged, four-year-old Abem was taken down the smoke-filled stairs by his parents – then to a friend who lived nearby. He was safe.

But before falling asleep that night, he looked out of the curtains.

“I see a tall building block engulfed in flames. I don’t know what it was,” he recalls all these years later.

“And then later I realised that it was my own home.”

The cruellest part of the tragedy was losing his best friend, five-year-old Isaac Paulos.

“He was my best friend from my school at the time,” he says. “He was a bit older than me, like a brother. Like a big brother.”

Abem is a kind, smart and energetic boy who loves Formula One, basketball and football. He plays a Manchester United song on the piano, and proudly shows me his new PlayStation 5 – a present from his uncle for having done well at school.

But this 12-year-old also has a message for the politicians and developers.

“They need to remove the cladding off of every UK building because that cladding is deadly. When it comes to fire, it can destroy houses within minutes, within hours, like it did to Grenfell. Everyone, please, please remove it.”

He wants the children who died to be remembered for their “bright dreams”.

“One of them wanted to be a footballer, wanted to be an engineer, wanted to be an architect. All gone in one flame,” he says.

“It could have been me.”

Ines, 23: ‘I was known as Grenfell girl’

As her family ran from the burning building soon after the fire started, 16-year-old Ines Alves grabbed her textbooks.

The next morning, with her home a smouldering ruin, she sat her chemistry GCSE exam.

In the days after the tragedy that destroyed her home, Ines became known as “Grenfell girl”. She has spent much of the past years trying to escape that title.

Initially, she was a viral inspiration. In the months that followed the tragedy, she gave interviews about the disaster and updates on her grades and results to eager journalists.

But it was the following year’s AS-level exams that triggered a mental health crisis.

“My biggest trauma was watching the building burning and people screaming, as I was revising for my GCSEs,” she says.

“So just revising and concentrating generally just kind of led me to dark places after that.

“When June came around it just kind of all came rushing back. And I had probably the biggest mental breakdown. It was just a horrible time.”

She ended up retaking the academic year. It was difficult seeing her friends go off to university without her – but she eventually found her own path.

For Ines, Grenfell is a story in her past, one she doesn’t want to define her future.

At university, she craved anonymity. One of her best friends didn’t realise it was her for over a year. “She just said to me, ‘that was you! What the hell?!'”

Now she’s graduated from Leeds with a degree in maths and has been travelling the world – Australia, Thailand and other parts of Asia.

“Trying to live life like a normal young adult,” she says.

“I kind of don’t really like to live life by knowing what I’m going to do in a month’s time.”

Yousra, 19: ‘They’re not just numbers’

Yousra Cherbika is angry. She’s angry about the fire, the friends she lost, the home she can never return to – and the way she feels other children and young people were treated after the disaster.

She was 12 years old when she watched the tower burn, desperately calling her friend Nur Huda who lived inside to “get out”. But she couldn’t, and her whole family perished.

“They’re not just numbers. They’re not just ‘part of 72’,” she says.

“They have names, we love them. They had stories to tell. They had full lives which were cut short.”

Yousra and her family lived on Grenfell Walk, at the base of the tower. Less is known about those residents who managed to escape, but they also lost everything in the disaster.

“There’s parts of my childhood that I just block out and I don’t remember, like the year after the fire,” she says.

“I don’t remember living in a hotel. We were in one room, five of us, and my mum was pregnant.

“I had no home to go back to, no school to go back to. And even when we did go back to school, it was different, because there were empty chairs in our classrooms.”

She feels as though their support as ‘Walk’ residents was much worse.

“We didn’t know what we were entitled to at first, and so many people turned us away.”

Today Yousra is a campaigner, a leader among local young people, volunteering in her spare time.

She is also training to be a primary school teacher, inspired by the form tutor who helped her through her lowest, darkest points in secondary school.

“I just stayed in bed and I just didn’t go into school. But she encouraged me. She motivated me.”

She feels outraged that seven years on, there is still cladding on buildings across the country.

“Why does it take 72 people to die for them to even think, oh, ‘maybe we should take cladding that might kill people?’

“And still, they haven’t done that.”

Watch Sky News’ special programme on Grenfell tonight at 8pm.

This article was originally published by Sky.com. Read the original article here.

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