My son has a friend who was forced to leave the Ukrainian city of Dnipro with his family last year. My son’s friend is a serious and studious boy, the kind of child able to excel even in a radically different environment, away from the people and things he loves.
Another friend has a stepdaughter from Dnipro. The stepdaughter was forced to flee to Poland after Russia attacked Ukraine.
Both of these people just want to go home. It’s what most displaced Ukrainians everywhere want — to go home, to put their feet up in their living rooms, to hear familiar voices on the radio, to hug friends, to pet dogs on familiar streets again.
One of the most striking images from the Russian attack on a residential building in Dnipro last weekend is one half of a gleaming, cheerful kitchen with a bowl of apples on the table. The family who had lovingly decorated this kitchen lost their husband and dad, Mykhailo Korenovskyi, a well-known and respected boxing coach, in the attack.
Fathers feel solid, everlasting, until they are gone from your world.
When I look at this kitchen all I see is the flat I grew up in, the flat my grandparents lived in, the flat my cousins lived in because we all had two stool tucked under the kitchen table just like that. pic.twitter.com/2vNHi84HXu
— Алiнa 🌻 (@alinavictoriaw) January 15, 2023
In the immediate aftermath of this horrific crime, someone stood and numbly filmed the scene. You can hear the agonized screams of the people under the rubble. It’s a soul-rending sound, an unbearable sound. You can’t make sense of the barbarism that has been inflicted on these people, this city, this land. Its heart of darkness remains elusive.
“Thank you, God, for a peaceful sky overhead,” my father, who had known war intimately, used to say. I always thought that I knew what he meant. Now I realize that I knew nothing after all.
For an auction benefiting fighters in Ukraine, my artist friend, Olha Pryymak, did a painting of me and my son. It was specifically inspired by a picture of us napping one cold Christmas break in Kyiv. My son is very small in that photo, and even in my sleep, I realized that I look protective. Above us, our upstairs neighbors must have paced, then there was the old roof that has sheltered my family for generations, and then a sky full of stars. We had all that anyone would want in that moment — love and peace, a warm blanket. The things that matter, truly matter, are fragile.
The love in my heart is greater than the hate, but hate has uses in times like these. I want Putin and his acolytes to suffer, as much as the ravenous undead can suffer. I want them to feel fear.
Then I’m reminded that the ghouls fear what they can’t understand: dignity, resolve, self-sacrifice, courage. People who think they can buy and sell anyone have no concept of such things. This is, again, why my love is stronger than my hate. True love can be a fearsome thing. It has teeth and claws. It’s a protector.
We always owe the dead more than we can give them. It’s one of the great challenges of being alive. But the dead call to us, they show the way.
The world is growing weary of the war in Ukraine, but Ukrainians are simply doing what needs to be done. I let that sense of duty propel me too these days. Everyone should. Sometimes, I’ll pause and I’ll cry. It’s OK to cry. Then you keep at it.
The Russians who started this war, who destroyed those families in Dnipro, don’t expect us to keep at it. So let’s keep proving them wrong.
Image: A Russian rocket turned a residential high-rise building in Dnipro into ruins. Flowers and toys were left in memory of victims. By adm.dp.gov.ua
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