MESSAGES OF HOPE
Faced with the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, two writers find glimmers of light among the darkness
Dear World,
The history of my homeland, Ukraine, is long and complicated. It has seen dozens of leaders, cultures and empires come and go over millennia. You may have heard much of this already – the political backdrop of today’s struggle. But let me tell you a personal one.
In the 1930s, my maternal grandmother Lusia Beschastnaya, the sevenyearold daughter of a farmer, was taken by the Bolsheviks along with her three siblings and mother from their home in Bessarabia, a region of southeastern Ukraine. By then, the revolutionaries who had seized Russia in 1917 were the Soviet Union’s leading political power (Ukraine was subsumed into the USSR in 1922). My family was shoved into a cold cattle train in the middle of winter and dropped in a Siberian forest.
Every time my mother or grandmother told me this story, a jolt of electricity went through my body. I can still hear them recalling the snowstorm raging around the women, who fell to their knees and prayed. Back home in Ukraine, my greatgrandfather, separated from his wife, nearly died of starvation in the Holodomor – widely regarded to be a manmade famine. Though this is contested by Russia, most people in Ukraine see it as a genocide, during which an estimated 3.5 million Ukrainians died.
In Siberia, my deported relatives eventually reached a village and started working for various Russian families, who – my grandmother told me – were never hostile to them. Many were probably like my beloved paternal grandmother, Vera Paskova, whose father was shot by the Bolsheviks, whose house and livestock were taken and who was forced to scrape the remnants of condensed milk from the machinery in the factory she worked at in order to feed her children. I still feel intense guilt for asking my Vera to tell me her story. She cried so much.
Somehow, years later, my family found their way back to Ukraine where, in the late 1940s, my grandfather Viktor (Lusia’s husband) was arrested for picking wild plants to eat. He was starving – living in abject poverty – but Soviet law at the time decreed that all plants and crops were state property. He was sent to a labour camp by Sakhalin Island, in the very east of Russia, and left to perish. Only after Stalin’s death in 1953 was Viktor released and able to return home. My mother was born five years later.
This is the history of my family – both Ukrainian and Russian. Can you imagine growing up with all these memories? They are intense and nightmarish, but there is also so much light to be found in them, so much love and support, kindness and courage. I take these stories and turn them into tools that energise me and give me strength.
We are all feeling this strength once again, like an electric current, as we see history repeat itself. I feel it myself, watching from afar – my family in Ukraine, and me in London. It is agonising. The phone calls with my mum are getting shorter and shorter. She’s still smiling, but I can tell. My dad still has the energy to send me cute emojis on the family group chat. My brother shares videos from the frontline, where he’s volunteering to fight. Before this, he had been busy with an ecobike startup, but now he and his friends are desperate for bulletproof vests, which we have been trying to send him. It is unthinkable that we are even talking about this now.
A Ukrainian friend of mine told me he already said his goodbyes to his father, just in case. ‘But our spirit is unbreakable,’ he added. I understand this. The pain, but also the immense resilience and love of our ancestors flows within us now. I tell you these stories – just those from one family, my own – to shed a little light on what my homeland has been through. I want you to know its struggle, but also its strength. I want you to know that Russians, too, have suffered under unjust regimes, and this is why so many of them oppose what is happening today. Like my family, who survived so much, Ukraine has not died yet. We shall not give up hope. #CookForUkraine, co-founded by Olia Hercules, raises money for Unicef UK to help families and children displaced by the crisis in Ukraine. To donate, visit www.justgiving.com/fundraising/cookforukraine