A prayer for Ukraine and the city of Lviv
Reaching out to global contacts helps at least one family flee the war
Families make their way through the main train terminal on March 5 in Lviv, Ukraine, many on their way to relative safety in Poland.
What is happening in Ukraine will not stay in Ukraine. While it may feel like an isolated regional conflict, it is, ultimately, a global one.
How do I know?
Well, the old cliché about how everyone is only six degrees separated from everyone else, it came to life for me this week. Stick with me for second as I explain this. On Tuesday I got a call from a Lebanese friend in Abu Dhabi. My friend’s brother is married to a Ukrainian and was living in Kharkiv, until the bombing by Russia made it impossible to stay there, so he and his wife and teenage daughter fled and were making their way to the border. Could I help, did I know anyone in Poland?
I contacted a mutual friend who is Brazilian but lives in Stockholm, and had gone to Warsaw where he has an office. There, he met with another friend — a Russian — who travels between Warsaw and Moscow for work. Together, they decided to drive to the border with Ukraine to wait for our mutual friend’s brother, wife and daughter. In this way a call to an American by a Lebanese woman living in the Middle East led to a Ukrainian family being looked after by a Brazilian and a Russian living in Poland. It would all sound like the setup for a joke, were it not so heartbreakingly true.
I spent time in Ukraine in
2013, traveling to the western city of Lviv on a Fulbright grant. My job was to give lectures about American literature and how to use soft power — book publishing — to build cultural pride and fight disinformation. I came to know a city that had brought together many different
cultures for centuries, an often painful history that also gave it sophistication. Instead of asserting its place in the world of letters, though, Lviv is now a focal point in a truly global war, one that pits Russia against the world.
Look no further than the groups of Nigerian and Indian students trapped in Ukraine by the fighting. These Black and brown students were seemingly abandoned and given low priority when it came to evacuation, which led to accusations of racism. (In this way, we see some of America’s problems reflected back to us from across the world.)
Then there is the news that the Pentagon believes Russia is recruiting Syrians adept at urban combat to fight and numerous reports of soldiers traveling to fight for Ukraine from the U.K., Canada (which has the second largest Ukrainian diaspora in the world), the U.S., and even as far as Japan and Jamaica.
Now the White House says there is a real possibility Russia might deploy chemical or biological weapons. Putin also has an arsenal of so-called tactical nuclear weapons that work in such a way that the ultimate fallout from their use literally relies on the way the wind blows. The use of any kind of nuclear weapon would have immediate impact on surrounding countries, including Poland, Moldova and Belarus, as well as the Baltics — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — and most likely Sweden and Finalnd as well. Chernobyl (we’ve all seen the HBO series) was bad, this has potential to be much worse and could easily affect more than 100 million people in Europe and tens of millions more in western Russia.
What happens in Ukraine literally cannot stay in Ukraine. It was never going to. After all, this war technically went international in 2014 in the Donbas region when a Russia-supplied missile brought down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. The attack killed 298 people, the majority from the Netherlands, but also Australia and Malaysia.
Before the invasions
Lviv is — and hopefully will continue to be — a lovely city. It is the cultural capital of Ukraine and was once the easternmost outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is why its architecture echoes that of Vienna. The great Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski, who taught at the University of Houston, was born in Lviv in 1945 and his family had to flee. The city passed through Polish, German and Russian hands before the end of World War II. The city is known for its cafes, where you can get superb coffee and cakes, and its Baroque churches, which are among the most dramatic and gorgeous in Europe.
It is also currently housing some 200,000 refugees from Ukraine, and — so far at least — hasn’t been bombed.
During my time in Lviv, I lectured, but did so much more: I recited Beat poetry on national television with a backdrop of sculptures of melting figures inspired by the Chernobyl reactor disaster; I befriended a Belarusian research scientist who studied the athletic biomechanics of Russian Spetsnaz special forces soldiers; I was invited to join a utopian tech commune for hippie, vegan, nudist, free-love computer hackers out in “the woods”; I had dinner at the house of a local politician whose dining room featured a life-sized painting of her statuesque daughter posing with a horse and whose teenage son insisted on showing me his collection of World War II memorabilia, which included an SS helmet with a bullet hole in it. Perhaps, most memorably, I was asked if the internet was a CIA mind-control device.
I met famous Ukrainian writers, like Andrey Kurkov, who writes in Russian and whose latest book “Grey Bees” is about the war in Donbas and was published by Deep Vellum Books of Dallas. I was tricked into reaching into the pocket of the statue of the writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch who wrote the novel “Venus in Furs” (which gave us the concept of masochism). I found a very NSFW surprise.
I cannot help thinking often about these people and praying they are still alive as I watch the images of war and resulting refugee crisis flick by on CNN, which I cannot seem to turn off. I know this place, these people — not well — but I feel connected to them. I had planned to return to Lviv again in 2014 to continue my work, but Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the subsequent start of the war in the Donbas region put an end to that. Still, I kept in touch with my friends in book publishing and the media and would report news from the region. They kept reminding me that Ukraine was at war — primarily a war of words, but also on the border — with Russia.
Watch out for bear
I have spent as much free time as I can muster from my day job reaching out to people I know, offering to spread their message — be it simply asking for help or helping them articulate and broadcast their outrage at this senseless, merciless war. This has led to some nasty exchanges, largely on social media, between people, friends and colleagues — in Ukraine, Russia and elsewhere across the world — whose day jobs in publishing require them to otherwise be reasoned and rational, educated and edifying, collaborative and creative.
I try to mediate, but everyone has a reason to be aggrieved: My Ukrainian friends ask for help and call for a boycott of everything Russian. My Russian friends say they in no way support the war and are being punished unfairly for something Putin — an evil anomaly of history — has done in their name, without their consent.
I write messages on Facebook, call on WhatsApp and send emails. Sometimes I get a response or even an internet phone call. It is quite amazing that I can still get in touch with people in a war zone, with the sound of air raid sirens in the background, and I cannot get my eighth-grader to answer her cell phone.
In watching the war progress on TV, I feel helpless to do more. Surely I could, but what? Send money, quit my job and travel across the world to fight? I am no soldier, just a journalist, and hopefully my work will help me get closer to the truth of what is happening. After all, the lies persist: a church-going friend of mine told me her pastor praised the war, telling her congregation that Russia attacked Ukraine to free Hunter Biden’s sex slaves.
My thoughts keep returning to some of the most vulnerable people I know there. One person I worry about in particular is my minder and translator from my trip to Lviv in 2013.
Olha, a woman of indeterminate age, wore an ill-fitting wig and drove a Lada. She was assigned to me by the U.S. embassy and brought her babushkaclad octogenarian mother with her everywhere.
Come to think of it, it was actually grandma who first reached into von Sacher-Masoch’s pants pocket. Olha bragged about how many “blood books” — her euphemism for mystery novels — she was able to pirate from the internet. Olha’s mother, who’d survived World War II, enjoyed ordering me around. Her favorite instruction was, “Get in Lada.” Her second favorite was the warning,
“Watch out for bear,” which she said every time I got into the car. Lviv is surrounded by forests and, apparently, there is a genuine risk of bears jumping randomly onto the roads and destroying your car. But she would say this even as we drove through the paved streets of Lviv itself.
When I think of them now, what comes to mind is the thought of Olha driving on narrow, traffic-clogged roads in her rickety Lada, friends and family taking up the extra seats, navigating her way to the border.
Her mother, now in her 90s, wedged in the back between two family members, giving the same instruction, now being recited like a prayer or talisman to keep the monsters at bay. Some are literal and have hair and teeth and some are figurative and have high-precision weapons that target maternity wards and hospitals and indiscriminately bomb “humanitarian corridors” and columns of panicked, fleeing civilians.
Watch out for bear, watch out for bear, watch out for bear …