28. On the eve of the invasion

Some personal reflections on the eve of Ukraine's invasion

The tenth of September 1939 marked the first time a major European city was bombed systematically by an enemy Air Force. In all, some twenty-five thousand civilians (and six thousand soldiers) were killed, as a major population center and historic European capital was bombed at the beginning of an undeclared war.

So writes Timothy Snyder about the German attack on Warsaw during World War II. Hitler took over Poland country in approximately two weeks. When the army moved in after the bombings, some cities had more corpses than people. After languishing on my shelf for five years, I finally read Snyder’s book — Bloodlands — immediately after Ukraine was invaded. The timing wasn’t accidental.

Reading Bloodlands gave me both historical and emotional context. Embarrassingly, it made me feel better. In my hazy and grieving mind the invasion of Ukraine was made bearable by it being something that has happened before, something we — the Slavs, humanity? — have survived. I took refuge in the fact that Poland still exists as a country and people. A low bar, yes. But denial seeks many outlets.

A close friend (in whose apartment I learned of the war’s start) gave me a book of poetry by Carolyn Forche. In What it Cost, Forche describes a forced march during an unspecified conflict in Ukraine: “In the pink tintype earliest hours, we were moved out of Kiev.”

Each slept where he sat, one window

in the whole place, beyond that

muslin snow mounded where

feed piles were left.

We each thought we knew someone

still alive who would butcher dogs

to cook.

This friend’s name runs in damp sweat

until it bleeds enough, cannot be read.

We were young,

the children ate flesh

pulled from pyres.

Mothers wrapped dead babies

in blankets and carried them.

As we will never know what it means,

we will know what it cost.

Is it so surprising that Poles have been singularly welcoming to Ukrainian refugees? They know what it means. They know what it cost.

The war has changed my family. After weeks of air raids, my grandmothers moved out of our city in northeast Ukraine. Many people, like us, took extended family members into the States. It has turned into a year of mostly peaceful, familial bickering. At parties, Ukrainian immigrants who’ve been here for 20 years good-naturedly gossip about hosting refugee family members (“when I moved here I didn’t have anybody to take me around in a car and pay for my gas”).

This New Year’s Eve, my family watched the president’s address to the Ukrainian nation. Zelenskyy stood in a dark courtyard with no festive tree or roaring fireplace. A montage flashed of Ukrainian soldiers, of battles, of the dead, of cheering people celebrating liberation. I idly thought about how good the president’s video team were. My usually stoic octogenarian grandmother cried, and I hugged my other grandmother. She was unnaturally still.

I was visiting San Francisco a few months ago when a Ukrainian helicopter went down and crashed into a kindergarten. Children died and many were hurt. My friend and I cried about those children during lunch, over plates of salad and Beyond Burger. I was in Berkeley when Mariupol was being occupied, when we found out about girls kept in a basement in Bucha. The world absorbs tragedy like a stain seeping into fabric. 

This year I stopped being cavalier about my ethnic origin. When I was little I would sometimes say I’m Russian, opting for the identity I saw as a superset of being Ukrainian. People knew what being Russian was. This year drew hard lines. I am this. You are that. I am not Russian. I am not you. This year I stopped reading Pushkin and creating Russian-language Spotify playlists. My Moscow-born friend told me she felt ashamed before meeting me for drinks. She remembers asking her partner, “How will I look Anya in the eye?”

Those first few months, the war felt like a prickly, burning, engorged thing in my brain. But it’s amazing how we get used to things. My small dramas eclipse the play. The question is both: how can I possibly do X, when there’s a war on? And: who am I to not do X, when other Ukrainians are?

I think a lot about what it means to watch a war that concerns your people but doesn’t concern you. Because I live in the US, because I carry forward into a safe future, I have the dubious distinction of ignorance. I donate thousands of dollars, I vote the right way. What else is there?

In Citizen, Claudia Rankine captures the feeling of wanting to do more with one’s privilege: “And of course, you want the days to add up to something more than you came in out of the sun and drank the potable water of your developed world—”

Yes, I want my days to add up to something more. The question is how.

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