This article would never have been written, I would never have met all those people, had the war with Russia not come into the lives of Ukrainians, bringing pain and destruction along.
Hundreds of thousands of people without homes, with broken hearts and empty souls now have to build their lives from scratch. Some of them lost their family members, others lost their health.
Our heroes are volunteers who, like millions of other Ukrainians, feel fear, despair, anger and pain, but continue their difficult path of helping others.
“Old age is not about pain and weakness, old age is about loneliness.”
Maria is a volunteer at the Vsi Poruch charitable foundation, one of whose activities is evacuation of disabled and sick people to safer regions and hospitals. Having once arrived from Kalush in the Donetsk region, Maria remained there because she felt it was there that she belonged.
“I looked at that thin old woman with completely white hair sitting by the entrance and picking at her blue cloak with her skinny hands, and I think I felt that breath of loneliness,” says Maria, “when we put her neighbor in the car, with her daughter and her husband running around and constantly adjusting the slipping blanket on her.
The old woman lowered her head and muttered something. There was constant thundering in the background. The front that day was very loud, and it seemed to be very close. I took a bottle of water and some cookies from the car and approached her:
“Are you saying something, madam?
“Madam? You mean me? I’m not a lady, you’ve carried the lady out on a stretcher and are taking her to Dnipro in a carriage, and I’ll spend the winter here.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She must have been very beautiful when she was young. Big blue eyes, slim and petite, and what is very unusual for the surrounding circumstances, she was dressed up. Red shoes, a blue cloak and a shirt under it.
The lady in blue was called Olha. One of her sons went abroad the day before the full-scale invasion, and the other lives somewhere in Truskavets. None of them has ever visited her. The older one sends some money every month, and she talks sorrowfully about the younger one. Alcohol addiction and fear of the territorial recruitment center drove him into a hole near Truskavets, where he’s been living like a rat for three years, Olha says. She is 78 and totally alone.
“How do you choose who to visit and take away like a royal?” she asks me, when we have already loaded our woman, and her daughter and son-in-law sat next to her with a hundred of their bags.
Behind the insincere smile, I feel something else, which is still difficult to make out. I explain to her how our project works, that we try to help people with limited mobility and illness to go to hospitals in safer regions or to their relatives. She starts picking at her cloak again.
“Well, then I have no chance,” says Olha, “my relatives will definitely not submit an application to you, and I’m not mobility impaired either, I can get to the fifth floor by myself.”
And she left, with her head high as if she were walking down Broadway in her red shoes and blue cloak. It was as if the heavy artillery was not thundering in the background, but loud applause was heard in her honor.
When we got into the car and drove off, I went over our conversation in my head, replaying my words and thinking about what I should have told her, how to encourage and how to help. I had to jump out of the car and run back to that yard.
Olha was sitting under a tree in the middle of the yard, where there used to be a playground. Twisting like a snail, she bowed her white head low and pulled the threads from her cloak. And then, looking at that woman, I felt and understood what old age was and why it should be feared. Old age is not about feebleness and weakness, because when you are weak, your children will support you, your grandchildren will run to the store and call a doctor. Old age is about loneliness, about concrete crumbling and glass shattering around you, about the earth shaking, and no one loving and caring for you.
The next time we took Olha away. I made an application myself, arranged everything myself and acted as her great-niece. No one at work said a word. We took her to a shelter and handed her over to the volunteers we knew who take care of such lonely people from frontline regions.”
“Fatigue, anger at a passive society and fear for my loved ones change like a kaleidoscope every day”
Svitlana has been helping the military since the first day of the full-scale invasion. She has prepared thousands of first-aid kits and combat medic backpacks, and distributed tens of thousands of medicines for hospitals and stabilization centers. She is known and respected by brigade commanders and evacuation medics, and she battles her inner demons every day.
“I don’t remember the moment when adrenaline and endless energy gave way to fatigue,” says Svitlana, “you know, it’s like a dripping faucet, one drop at a time, and it’s all up to the top. I’ve never been able to abstract myself from pain and suffering, I lived through the death or injury of every guy I knew, I tried to do more and more each time I heard bad news that someone was on the shield.”
Outside Svitlana’s room, where she dispenses medicine, there’s a line of soldiers of various types. There are two tough mustached older men, three younger men with tattoos and tactical panamas, a girl with blue dreadlocks who persuades her driver to have a cup of coffee.
“Come on, have some coffee, you haven’t slept all night, come on, dear, let’s drink and leave, it’s so nice on the couch,” she pulled out an iqos and took a drag.
“Can we smoke here?” asks one of the young guys.
“You can do anything here,” the girl laughs.
“Yes, but not while Svitlana can see,” adds the mustached guy.
“Morning,” it’s her usual greeting, “I’m glad to see you all. Now, one by one.”
And they all start dictating or showing their lists and requests, and she hugs everyone and whispers something. The girl with blue dreadlocks was the last to come in and she didn’t come out for a long time, the driver took out a few boxes, and they left. Svitlana did not come out.
I found her in the back room. She just sat on the box with needles and looked at the wall, not moving and not saying anything.
“Are you okay?” a very stupid question, but what else can you say in such cases?
“Do you remember ‘____’?”
She says the call sign of a girl I’ve seen dozens of times.
It was a sweet girl, a sunshine girl, of course I remember her – she was two years older than my daughter. She was. Now she’s forever 21. A combat medic whom we always wanted to warm, feed or pamper. Small hand creams, lip balm for the winter, funny socks, vitamins for girls.
“I can’t stand it anymore,” she bursts into tears, “I really can’t.”
I hug her, we sit down on the floor together, someone closes the door from outside, and we sit in silence.
“How’s your fundraising?” she asks suddenly.
“As usual,” I say, “very slowly, as it happens when you are raising money for car repairs.”
“They really don’t understand how important it is, that these are lives, the saved lives of someone’s daughters and sons.
Svitlana talked a lot that time. About our fundraisings that stop halfway, about other universes in Kyiv and other cities, about evaders and Chinese tourniquets, about everything and nothing at once. She didn’t tell me then about her two brothers, one of whom is dead and the other is missing, about her son who just told the family bluntly that he was going to war, and that she can hardly sleep at night.
“Well, let’s go, we have to do our work,” says Svitlana, getting up from the floor. “Guys, are you there? Come in, one by one, my dears.”
We made Svitlana have some time for herself. We sent her to a volunteers’ retreat, then to some training, we walked around Lviv with her, drank coffee and wanted to be just girls, we went to the beautician and masseuse, took selfies and fooled around. And no one looking at us knew who this courageous and beautiful woman was, and how much she had done for the Defense Forces’ medics.
“Every living thing around felt the danger but not that woman in a housecoat.”
Andrzej is a Pole by birth, but Ukrainian at heart. He came to Ukraine in the first days of the full-scale invasion in his bus to deliver aid to the Donetsk region, and stayed there.
“I can’t imagine going back to peaceful Poland, eating, drinking coffee, walking around when people are dying in Ukraine. Children are dying. This is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. Innocent children fall victim to the shelling of peaceful towns and villages,” says the man, “A little girl in a yellow T-shirt came up to our bus on one of the evacuation trips. I remember her cradling a scruffy teddy bear in her arms and staring at our car in silence.
“Are you coming with us?” I crouched down and offered her two chocolate bars.
Her parents stood watching as we parked our car and loaded their bedridden grandfather.
The kid took two bars silently.
“She isn’t going anywhere, no one needs us there,” a woman in a housecoat came up to me, “take Grandpa, he needs to go to hospital, and we’ll be fine here, it’s our home, there’s no place like home, as they say.”
I’ve never liked idioms, it’s hard to understand what she means. And who needs you here, except for us, the volunteers who bring you water and food, give you warm blankets and every time persuade you to leave?
And this “who needs us” is getting more and more annoying. Every evacuation is the same, people cling to broken houses, live in basements, hardly see daylight, but refuse to leave for safer regions.
Live as you want, do as you please, but don’t hold the kids hostage, I want to shout at that woman and all those people.
“What’s your name, darling?” I turn to the girl.
“Her name is Liza, Yelizaveta. She doesn’t talk,” the woman in the housecoat says as if justifying herself, “I read to her, and when we had the Internet, she watched cartoons, but she doesn’t want to talk. To anyone. As soon as something hit the neighbors’ summer kitchen, that was it. Not a word.”
The air gets loud, Liza stands still, as if petrified, the chocolate bars begin to melt in her hand.
I don’t have my own children and I probably don’t have the right to judge such parents and this particular woman. But at the time I did. Anger boiled up in me, I wanted to yell at her, grab her by the shoulders and shake her so that something in her head would fall into place and she could feel the danger around. All living things around her, cats, dogs, birds felt the danger, but not her, that woman in a housecoat.
I think I hated her all the way back. For that dirty teddy bear in the kid’s hands, for her silence, for the basement where the kid had to live. I thought about that kid the evening after the evacuation, the next day the girl in the yellow T-shirt became for me a symbol of irresponsibility of adults for the lives of their children.
Believe it or not, but I saw her again. In the photos from an evacuation train. A few weeks after we met, the authorities announced mandatory evacuation of children, and they left.
At first, I thought I was mistaken and it wasn’t them. Liza was wearing a different T-shirt, the woman in the photo looked younger, wearing jeans and a fresh shirt. But it was definitely them. The teddy bear she was hugging while standing by the train car – I wouldn’t have mistaken it for anything else.
Several weeks have passed, I keep going on evacuation missions, and I see people clinging to their destroyed houses and old basements. Can I say that I began to understand them more? No. Will I stop helping them move to safe cities? Definitely not. Today, it’s my life, which I voluntarily dedicate to helping these people.
***
These are just a few volunteer stories out of thousands. It’s scary to think what would happen if these people didn’t do what they do. In a cynical world where broken international law and strange standards give murderers the same right as victims, such people’s service still leaves hope that mankind is not doomed. Someday, movies will be made about volunteers of this war and special chapters will be written in history books. Meanwhile, they, along with the military, support Ukrainians’ faith in victory and a peaceful future when humanity will once again be the greatest virtue.
Author: Valeriya Pimkina.
Supported by the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. The views of the authors do not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S. Government.