Iryna Slavinska: "My Personal Shelter"

The following scenario has already been described countless times before: the sound of explosions; a call from a colleague; I’m brushing my teeth; I drink a glass of water; I’m sitting in the car (thank goodness the tank is full!), and I turn on the radio...

The first air raid siren went off during the broadcast when it was not yet clear how to finish one’s sentences correctly and avoid scaring the listeners, followed by quickly packing up our things and heading underground. We sat in a bomb shelter together with the guest of the program; he joked to comfort us a little. No wonder, I thought. He was a General officer, and some mere siren wouldn’t scare him out of his wits. Rumors of a landing party and an attack on the city’s center came from unreliable sources. For the first time, I realized that there were situations where I would rather die quickly than face the prospect of getting captured by Russian troops. Thankfully, focusing on this for too long was impossible because there was still so much work to be done after the air raid siren ended. Work would become a life-saving routine in the days following the start of full-scale war.

We spent several nights in another apartment, where I picked up a book for the first time since the start of the invasion. A strange feeling, a strange memory.

It was a sunny morning, somehow too clear for the horror around us all. There was a library in one of the rooms of the apartment, and on its shelves was a collection of poetry. I opened it randomly and got my fill after two pages: Yevhen Pluzhnyk on one, Pavlo Tychyna on the other. I couldn’t read anymore after that; my brain refused to concentrate. Those texts did not offer any specific wartime lessons, but they did give me something else. I plunged into the memories and tragic fates of our authors from the 1920s, precisely one hundred years before our time. Even now, I still cannot understand how those artists managed to create art when people were dying, and there were explosions all around. I've been left wordless and thoughtless after each piece of news about mass burials, the exhumation of bodies of those killed by Russians, or the Russian torture chambers discovered in Ukrainian cities freed from occupation. Our relatives live in one of those cities. During rare phone conversations, when I was lucky enough to reach them, I heard more details about everyday life under the Russian occupation: for example, the impossibility of obtaining vitally necessary medication. But the day following that town's liberation, I realized that my relatives lived in a reality where a torture chamber was located in one of the occupied buildings. Everyone must have known about it.

On another wartime day, I stood at home with a collection of poems by Serhiy Zhadan in my hands, feeling that he had already written everything possible about this war; this is the vocabulary we rely on to express ourselves these days. It was August 24, Ukraine’s Independence Day. I was getting ready to go on air and selecting lines from his poetry that I would read to the listeners of Ukrainian Radio. But I quickly understood that I couldn’t make it through the entire poem, let alone one stanza: I began to choke on my tears, and it was impossible to maintain the stoic composure dictated by my profession. I managed to read two lines from the poem, just enough words before I started crying. Then I drove to the radio station to go on air and thought about how the twenties of our century turned out to be full and alive — as if everything that once matured and manifested itself in separate flashes suddenly came to light. But in the 1930s, that flourishing of creativity was followed by Stalinist terror and repression. What would become of us? The Holodomor, the killing fields of Sandarmokh, the Executed Renaissance, all terrible events on which the burden of untranslatability has laid for too long... I remember one dialogue from the past, where I, a teenager studying abroad, had to answer something in French on Ukrainian history. I pronounced the word "executed" and the word "renaissance" and added the word "Holodomor," but together, they meant nothing to foreigners. I began to add explanations and details that resembled crutches. I sounded off the names of our dead scientists, writers, poets, and translators. I tried to convey family memories passed down of the Holodomor. And for the first time, I understood that it was a dead end: they did not understand me. Twenty years would pass, and in the reality which emerged after February 24, all these explanations were still needed. Today, people are more ready to listen to them, to carefully follow the intricacies of Cyrillic names. In order to understand Russian war crimes, the world will need a better understanding of history and the previous war crimes committed by Russia. Perhaps, for the first time, the world would look at the history of the USSR as the history of war crimes committed by the occupiers on Ukrainian territory.

By the way, while I was working live on the radio for six hours on Independence Day, our entire team had to go down to the shelter three times because of air alarms. Our colleagues did the same three or four more times at lunch. So did I, but by then, I was already at home.

The following day I wrote and drank wine in the kitchen. Twenty-four hours passed since the last air raid siren went off, and the people of Kyiv had to stop whatever they were doing to go down to a shelter or hide in a corridor according to "the rule of two walls." Many of my acquaintances moved during the first few months of the war: some fled for their lives, while others found new apartments in buildings with a shelter or a parking lot to hide during the air raid siren. I began writing this text shortly after one of my best friends buried her brother, who died at the front. A good friend of hers lost her son at the front not long before that, and my former colleague and good friend was in Russian captivity. Several friends, colleagues, and relatives–women and men–have taken up arms since the start of the invasion. Some of our relatives even liberated the city where other relatives lived from the occupying Russian forces. This text and the time of its creation are like my personal shelter. After all, it turned out that many things can be a  kind of refuge, like a warm jacket with large pockets, a comfortable pair of sneakers, a big enough backpack, a charged laptop, access to the Internet, hot water, or the ability to make coffee. There's also the news that my older nephew, who fled a region under fire, started going to a new school in Kyiv. It's my former school, and I know every corner except for one detail. As it turns out, the building contains a nice underground shelter that can fit all the students and teachers. I swallow my tears and think I should visit it somehow, letting my nephew give his aunt a tour.