I’ve written before about my life in Kiev, that I met my partner there and that we left in 2018. I’ve written about her sister and mother and niece who were in Kiev until the day before the bombing started. I am pretty sure I followed up with the news that they were able to get out but they are now dislocated refugees. On the “good” side of what is now to me a factual “Good versus evil” story, the kindness in so many places has been amazing and they were given an apartment here in Spain to use for a year without having to pay rent. In addition the country of Spain as well as France and probably others opened rail passage so that tickets on long distance trains were no cost (these are tickets that normally cost hundreds of dollars).
So, yes, this is extremely personal and close to me.
The more difficult and hard to describe portion is the emotions. The family came and stayed with us for two days before taking the last train to their new temporary city (being “choosy” and trying to wait to see if a closer apartment opened up didn’t seem to be the best idea at all to anyone so the apartment is several hours away on the other coast), but anyhow, seeing her sister and mother and niece and simply feeling the gravity of the difference between their mindset and that of my partner was, well, once again hard to describe.
Let me explain that a little better. So, my partner Olga made the decision years before I met her that she wanted to be in Spain and then we came and she settled by her own choice but of course she is deeply connected to her 30+ years of life in Ukraine. She has been constantly connected with old friends in addition to her family since the war started and most of them stayed in Kiev and so it’s been working my best to play the absolutely supportive person and be aware of how deeply affected she has been.
But her situation is just a fraction of her sisters situation and even less of her mom. Seeing that in person, seeing what a person who has left an entire home, an entire life with no idea what the future looks like, no intention of leaving that home in this fashion and meanwhile just the week before they were living a normal modern life. Seeing that, seeing it close and personal, seeing the coping mechanisms in real time. It’s something I just haven’t seen.
So my feelings tonight are in those both scopes miniscule and yet I feel something new and sad and horrible.
Because of all of this connection I subscribe to real time feeds of content from Ukrainian sources. Part of me has felt like it’s a net negative but I can’t stop and then tonight it hit home in a different way. Tonight the notices came in and the notices and photos were of the neighborhood in Kiev where I had my first month long Airbnb. Tonight the bombs fell in Podil.
Podil is neighborhood that was — well, it was an AirBNB neighborhood — the kind of place that gets called “hip” or ”Vibrant” and that sort of thing. Ahhh, I finally thought of the comparison I have tried to come up with — Brooklyn. Yes, radically different but that mix of Old history and craft beer bars. A place with the double decker bus that the young entrepreneurs turned into a mobile coffee mobile.
Podil is probably 15 blocks square. Not a big place. Absolutely zero of military targets. Zero. It’s low rise buildings, a main drag with the trendiest restaurants, a Ferris wheel and I’m pretty sure I walked the entire grid and can guarantee that there wasn’t a target to be seen.
Tonight it’s on fire. I can’t say that I recognize these buildings but it still doesn’t really matter to me. The neighborhood isn’t very big and so I can say with certainty that this is somewhere within a couple of minutes walk from where I stayed.
Now I just think about my AirBNB host who was so nice and was just another entrepreneur who had worked and bought a couple of the older apartments and put so much work into renovating them. And yes, when I finish this diary I am going to look to see if I can find her listings and book a couple of nights as well.
So, I wanted to show a little more of what it was like there now.
I dug into my Google Photos. I love taking photos. I want to share the photos that I took there. The weekend of my arrival there was a festival in the square by the Ferris wheel and the historical buildings.
There were rock bands, marching bands, endless food vendors, lots of beer and there was a competition of what I think were high school squads who played drums and sort of cheerleading style performance. It looked to me like I would imagine a homecoming parade in the US might, just a little different.
The whole thing just felt like — well — it felt like people living a life sort of like lives in a hip part of a big city in the US or Europe, just a little different.
There was something deeply shocking about imagining my cool AirBNB which happened to also have a piano in it being blown up. The remodeled inside of the old building being destroyed. Some part of me got pulled back there even more than watching the emotions of those who I care about in my living room having their worlds torn apart — and meanwhile I was only there for a month. I had no deep roots there and I still don’t — meaning in Podil in particular.
But that combination of my feeling and the awareness that my feeling is a speck of a feeling, a blip of a feeling, a truly insignificant touristic feeling and I simply can’t imagine the weight of the feeling on the millions of people who it actually isn’t a touristic moment, who it isn’t just a place that was a nice memory at one point.
It shocks me the evil of this. It has the whole time. I have never been a freewheeling complete optimist but I’ve told people that I am “The most pessimistic optimist you will ever meet” — I actually started saying that for sure before I graduated college 30 years ago. That said, this has me firmly convinced that we aren’t all the same. That evil people are deeply evil and scarily real.
Anyhow, I’m getting too deep. I wanted to offer a feeling, a glimpse, a moment and that is all I can say right now.
QUICK UPDATE: I fixed the video (it was set to private) and watched it again an realized that the girls all have a Ukrainian flag as part of their outfit — I said this at the beginning of the war that the Ukrainians have a very strong national identity that I witnessed in 2017 and 2018 and that Putin was badly informed about how easy this would be. The flags here are sort of a small thing but I knew 5 years ago that Ukrainians in this day and age are strong and proud of their country — something that the entire world is very aware of now.