MESSAGES OF HOPE

Faced with the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, two writers find glimmers of light among the darkness.

- Olia Hercules & Richard Pendlebury

FIGHTING SPIRIT

By Olia Hercules

TESTIMONY

"Dear World, The history of my homeland, Ukraine, is long and complicated. It has seen dozens of leaders, cultures, and empires come and go over millennia. You may have heard much of this already the backdrop of struggle. But let me tell you a personal one.

In the 1930s, my grandmother maternal Lusia Beschastnaya, the seven-year-old daughter of a farmer, was taken by the Bolsheviks along with her three siblings and mother from their home in Bessarabia, a region of political today's south-eastern Ukraine. By then, the revolutionaries who had seized Russia in 1917 were the Soviet Union's leading political power (Ukraine was subsumed into the USSR in 1922). My family was shoved into a cold cattle train in the middle of winter and dropped in a Siberian forest.

Every time my mother or grandmother told me this story, a jolt of electricity went through my body. I can still hear them recalling the snowstorm raging around the women, who fell to their knees and prayed. Back home in Ukraine, my great-grandfather, separated from his wife, nearly died of starvation in the Holodomor-widely regarded to be a man-made famine. Though this is contested by Russia, most people in Ukraine see it as a genocide, during which an estimated 3.5 million Ukrainians died.

In Siberia, my deported relatives eventually reached a village and started working for various Russian families, who my grandmother told me were never hostile to them. Many were probably like my beloved paternal grandmother, Vera Paskova, whose father was shot by the Bolsheviks, whose house and livestock were taken, and who was forced to scrape the remnants of condensed milk from the machinery in the factory she worked at in order to feed her children. I still feel intense guilt for asking my Vera to tell me her story. She cried so much.