The week before classes started, I went to Kyiv (not Kiev, which is the Russian spelling). My friend Jared is a journalist I know from our Minneapolis days, and he’s been living there for the last two years. Twice last year he came to visit Berlin when the frequent air raids started to fray his nerves.

Jared has bet on Ukraine: he bought an apartment in the historic center of Kyiv, near Independence Square, site of Ukraine’s multiple revolutions in the last 35 years. He now works for the Kyiv Independent, an employee-owned paper with Ukraine’s largest English-language distribution. They’re doing good and important work, and I recommend you follow them. 

While Jared was here earlier this year, he extracted a promise from me to come visit once the apartment renovations were complete. It was an easy promise to make in the abstract, but this fall, he came to collect.

In between messages about his latest professional triumphs, personal drama, and links to articles, the invitation came. He assured me that Kyiv is not actually that dangerous, and that in any event, in winter the bombing would probably be worse, as Russia attempts to take out heat and electricity for as much of the country as it can. Over a week or two he lobbied me, telling me that he wanted me to have the information that I needed to feel safe. This worked until he went a little too far, leaving me a voice message that said, “My new apartment is in a very safe area. Most of Kyiv doesn’t have electricity, but I still do!”

He also, at one point, uttered the phrase, “I can guarantee your safety.” We had a good laugh about that later.

I don’t know about you, but my understanding of safety has always included, “Don’t be where the bombs are falling.” So while I did not necessarily feel safe, I trusted Jared’s assessment of the situation, and that he would do what he could to keep me safe. I told him, “We have to be careful, because if I get blown up by Russia my mom will never forgive me.” Plus, I am allergic to the notion of safety for me, but not for thee. In the same way that I saw red when, in 2012, a handful of white opera singers I was working with mounted a rebellion against rehearsing in Dorchester on the grounds that it was too dangerous, despite it being a totally normal residential area with churches and schools and businesses and stuff, which just happens to be predominantly Black and poor, and in the same way that I wrestled with my colleagues who found it threatening when locals parked in “our” parking lot in the predominantly-Black North Minneapolis, the idea that Kyiv was safe enough for Jared to build a life, children to go to school, actors to put on plays and orchestras to play music, but not safe enough for me to visit, struck me as precious to the point of preposterous. Ok, maybe not in the same way; the hysterical fears of white Americans, whipped up by centuries of racist fairy tales we’ve whispered to ourselves, are not equivalent to the actual threat of actual weapons of war, but my point is that while I don’t wish to take stupid risks, I choose to define safety by the standards of those who are best equipped to judge a situation, i.e. those actually living it.

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It takes 24 hours to travel from Berlin to Kyiv. There are no passenger flights in and out of Ukraine, so one must travel through Poland and change trains there. One must also book those train tickets in two different apps: the Germany-to-Poland leg can be booked in the German or Polish rail app, but any trains going into or out of Ukraine must be booked through the Ukrainian rail app. It was a complicated process.

No one tells you that Poland is beautiful, with its birch forests, their yellow leaves that quiver as you speed by.

My visit was fortuitously timed, in the brief window between the announcement of the Budapest meeting between Trump and Putin and its cancellation. The day I left, the meeting was called off, and that night, the bombing started up again with a vengeance. But while I was there, all was relatively peaceful.

Kyiv is a beautiful city. It’s built on the side of a hill, and has over the centuries crept down towards and eventually across the Dnieper River. In among the colorful, ornate old buildings and the imposing, starkly glamorous Soviet additions rise thick tufts of trees, resplendent in autumn colors during my visit. There are isolated signs of bombing — some monuments remain boarded up and some basement windows sandbagged — but mostly any disrepair is due to age and the relative poverty of this European capital. But the signs of the war are everywhere. 

The metro stations were built during the Soviet era to serve as nuclear fallout shelters, and now serve as shelters when Russia’s drones and bombs fall. This irony — Russian shells damaging the symbols of Russia’s claim to Ukraine — is everywhere you look. Likewise, what was once a bilingual country is no longer, as Ukraine continues its cultural deRussification. When much of Ukraine was colonized by Russia in the 19th century, the Ukrainian language was outlawed, and during the Soviet era, Ukrainians were depicted as the bumpkins of the USSR, Ukrainian as a stupid peasant language. Now, while Russian can still commonly be heard on the streets of Kyiv and no one bats an eye, I saw no Russian written anywhere.

On the train out of Kyiv, after the sun came up and the coffee and tea were served (in glass cups precariously fitted into metal holders with handles), I sat with my compartment-mates, a woman about my age and an older couple. The old woman asked if it was my first time in Ukraine. I told her it was. She said, “You see how we are Ukrainian. Not Russian. You see how we are very different.” I assured her that I did. Everyone made it very clear, their Ukrainian-ness. If the cultural identity was vague before — and I somehow doubt that it was — it is unquestionable now.

To a person, Ukrainians refer to the war that began in February 2022 as the “full-scale invasion,” a term that stretches out a hand toward their fellow Ukrainians living under occupation in Crimea for the past decade.

Every young man has a military haircut. Perhaps this is because they have served or are serving. Perhaps this is in solidarity with their friends at the front. Perhaps this is an attempt to avoid conscription. Maybe by now it’s just the fashion. And I hadn’t been in Kyiv half an hour before I saw a soldier, probably around 50, standing in the metro in full military uniform, one sleeve pinned neatly where his arm had been, his cap in his other hand. It is not just the young who fight in Ukraine’s military.

Kyiv has long been a city of murals, but now instead of surreal Slavic art, at least half the broad expanses of wall bear memorials to the fallen: boys with poets’ eyes peer down at the street wearing benign smiles, blue and yellow wrapped around their shoulders and bandoliers across their chests. The majority of ad space is dedicated to military recruitment. The few ads I saw for makeup and jeans felt jarringly frivolous. 

There has been a curfew in place since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, so concerts and plays begin and end early. Bars close at 11pm, and those caught out after midnight are subject to immediate conscription, as I understand it. 

On Saturday, my first day in Kyiv, Jared threw a party so I could meet his friends. Jared has a talent for knowing interesting people, and his friends in Kyiv were an incredible bunch: intelligent, worldly, warm, welcoming, and down-to-earth. Most of the folks at the party were Ukrainian, but I also met a Chinese-American ex-pat and two British diplomats. One guest, 53 years old, is a colonel in the army. 

Berlin is a city of immigrants, and a city of transience. Kyiv, especially these days, is not. As Jared has pointed out, everyone who is there is on a mission. On Sunday night, we met two Portuguese people on a literal mission from the UN, a Portuguese-Ukrainian journalist who had been reporting there for her Portuguese paper when the full-scale invasion began and hasn’t left yet, and an Italian magician who had been in Gaza for the last year and a half, and was headed out from the peace of Kyiv to frontline Kharkiv in a few days’ time — for a bit of a reprieve from war, he said. He showed us a picture of a pizza he had made in Gaza when the privation became too much: 12” or so across, beautiful crust, a scrape of tomato sauce or maybe ketchup on top, two olives sliced and scattered across it, and squirts of mayonnaise in place of the cheese. “This is a $500 pizza,” he said, “but it was worth it.” (He also taught us how to make wine with nothing, and spit a few of the funniest, darkest jokes I’ve ever heard. I got the impression he was holding back a boatload more.)

Though I was certainly helped along by Jared’s imprimatur, I felt immensely welcomed and appreciated in Kyiv. In Berlin, telling someone you’re a physical theatre artist is met with a mild sort of shrug that suggests, “ja, ok, another one.” When I told people about my work in Kyiv, they immediately said things like, “There are lots of companies you could work with here!” or “Wow, you could really do good work here!” I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t seductive.

Life goes on in Kyiv. I ate well while I was there. Twice, by coincidence, we ate at restaurants whose purpose is to serve Ukrainian food using only Ukrainian-sourced ingredients. Both restaurants pre-date the full-scale invasion, and both were excellent.  

Ukraine is also an emerging hub for fashion, nurturing lots of boutique designers, many of whom bring elements of traditional Ukrainian clothing into contemporary styles. While I was there it felt like the right thing to do to support some of these entrepreneurs, so I did. 

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On Sunday, Jared had booked us a private tour of the area around Hostomel airport, where the invasion of Kyiv was prevented at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, as well as Bucha and Irpin, two affluent suburbs north of Kyiv where Russia committed well-documented war crimes in just over a month of occupation. This tour was led by Svet, a Ukrainian man in his mid-30s with the typical military haircut and build, who drove us to these places in his Honda Civic with blistering paint and half a million kilometers on the odometer. When we met him, he was doing push-ups on the pavement.

Svet’s tour was well-researched: between stops, he had us watch informative contextualizing videos from reputable sources on an iPad that slid around his dashboard as he careened through traffic. 

Our tour began at Babyn Yar (not Babi Yar, again, the Russian spelling), a beautiful wooded ravine where in 1941 the Nazis murdered over 33,000 Jews after their takeover of Kyiv. Svet wasn’t clear on how to draw a connection between Babyn Yar and Bucha, but he was sure there was one. He seemed to want the connection to be “everything is Russia’s fault.” The pretext for the massacre at Babyn Yar was a series of bombs the Soviets had rigged before their retreat; the Nazis knew it was the work of the Soviets, but they blamed the remaining Jewish population anyway, which Svet swore the Soviets knew the Nazis would do when they laid the explosives.

It is an axiom both in Stanislavsky-method acting, in which actors draw on their own experiences to find emotional expression, and the preaching of sermons, which similarly require personal revelation, to “preach from your scars, not your wounds.” 

Svet was not preaching from scars. He was full of nervy energy, anxious to prove his arguments, offered robust psychoanalysis of Putin’s motivations and the best way for dealing with him, and professed a cynicism tinged with conspiracy-theorizing (Jared called it “taxi driver politics”). He told us several times how emotionally draining these tours were for him, but also made no attempt to soften the impact as he thrust the iPad in our faces, revealing cell phone snapshots of bloodied, burnt, or decomposing bodies of Ukrainian civilians, often as we stood on the very ground where their lives had ended. 

Our tour lasted six hours. Much of what I learned is relatively common knowledge, so I won’t recount it here. Follow the links if you’d like to learn more.

Living in Berlin for the past year, I have developed a somewhat different relationship with brutal histories than I had. Brutal history is in the ground of every place where humans live, whether we choose to remember it or not. And life — beautiful, mundane, astonishing life — has also always gone on in those places, sometimes right alongside the brutal history, and nearly always on top of and after it. Maybe the right response, when acts of unspeakable horror happen, is to stop everything, to forbid a return to normalcy, to mark that place as a place of agony, and to keep a wailing watch forever. Maybe if we had done that long ago, there would still be pure places on this earth. But that’s not what we do. Instead, we live again, which is its own kind of tribute. But even the young history of the Berlin wall, torn down 36 years ago, and whose scar I cross every day, or the overwhelming and excruciatingly close history of the Holocaust, marked by the brass paving stones under my daily steps, feel like history to me. 

Bucha and Irpin are not history. Not yet.

In Bucha during the occupation, video from a CC camera shows nine civilian men crossing what came to be known as “the road of death,” hands on their heads, half-crouched before the Russian rifles. We pulled into the parking lot of an apartment building. We got out, took a left at the front stoop, and turned into the little dirt yard at the back of the building. There, in the 15 feet between the back wall of the building and the fence separating it from the house next door (whose occupant watched the whole thing from his upstairs window), these nine men were forced to their knees and shot, execution-style. The back stoop of this building, where families still live, was covered with lanterns left in memory of these men. There was a mural on the wall, a Ukrainian flag waving. Eight trees had been planted, all still shorter than me. One man, despite his injuries, managed to escape when the Russian soldiers took a smoke break after completing their task. He dragged himself the half mile or so across the line to where the Ukrainian army held their ground, and was saved. 

As we stood there, hearing this story, a middle-aged woman in a well-tailored outfit of green came around the corner and interrupted Svet. She spoke in Ukrainian. When she realized Svet was the only one who understood her, she kept her gaze on him alone. She wanted to make sure he was telling the story correctly, because her husband was one of those who had been executed. Her eyes stayed dry and clear. She and a few others were there to maintain the site. When she had assured herself that Svet had the story right, she turned and left. She has been a widow less than four years. 

But Bucha and Irpin are not unique, either. 

When the Russians occupied Bucha, they set up their base camp in a kindergarten, with 200 families living above them, human shields.  

When the Russians occupied Bucha and Irpin, they were given orders to shoot anything that moved. The well-off suburb of Irpin had many CC cameras. While the Russians were jamming cell phone signals and had shut down internet to prevent information from getting out, the cameras themselves were solar-powered, with internal hard drives that kept a record of everything that happened there. When Ukraine retook the cities, the truth came out anyway.

They say it has a way of doing that.

There are images of bodies, left lying in the open for weeks. Some of these have names that have taken on the weight of archetype: The White Van, which carried four women and a girl and was burned black; The Man with the Bike; The Woman with the Painted Fingernails; The One with His Hands Tied. 

The civilians in the occupied cities were under orders not to retrieve or bury the dead, under pain of death themselves. So they watched from behind closed curtains as their neighbors, wives, brothers decayed.

I thought of Antigone, the heroine of Greek tragedy whose determination to bury her brother, in violation of the king’s order to the contrary, condemns her to death.

Eventually, at the urging of the residents, a local priest petitioned the Russians to collect the dead and bury them. Behind a stark, white Orthodox church on a hill, they dug a mass grave. The closest houses are perhaps a football field away, the view from their picture windows turned nightmare. 

But when the Russians retreated, more bodies were left behind. The official Russian party line is that Ukraine itself brought bodies from the morgue and laid them on the street to besmirch the Russians’ reputation. The upside of using dead crisis actors, I suppose, is that they don’t require payment.

Inexplicably, Svet’s tour did not touch on the rampant tales of torture during those weeks of occupation. Perhaps those stories are too heavy for him to carry right now.

Svet had brought hot tea and coffee in thermoses, and from time to time we would stop and stand around the open trunk of his car, warming our hands around our cups, while he kept talking. It became clear by the end of the tour that he had not served, and Jared and I wondered if some of his spiky energy wasn’t guilt. But half the fee for the tour goes directly to those serving at the front, and many of Svet’s clients are dignitaries and journalists — those who need to see and know. The others are war tourists, in it for the gruesome testosterone thrill. 

Svet also has an infant son. Repopulating Ukraine is also a contribution to the cause.

As we stood on the famed Romanivsky Bridge, our last stop of the tour, looking down at the twisted metal and concrete that had been the “green corridor” for so many of those fleeing Irpin in the early days of the war, Svet mentioned that often, after this six hour slog through the worst humanity has to offer, he takes his clients to the shooting range.

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Privileged life that I have led, this is the closest I have ever been to war. The few days I spent in Kyiv have given me new antennae. War means something real to me now in a way it never has before. When I read about Gaza or the Congo, I picture normal, resilient, exhausted people holed up in their neighborhood convenience store, a mundane point on the map of their days suddenly ablaze and awash with terror. My body can feel, however quietly, the weary dread of a midnight air raid alert. I can smell the stairwell and sense the weight of the blanket wrapped around slumping shoulders on the way to the shelter while the Shahed’s buzz crescendos. When train tracks are sabotaged, I can picture the yellow birch woods of rural Poland quaking sadly with the blast. 

And I know how much I don’t know. I was in a safe city for four peaceful days. “The front” — its sights and sounds and smells, the faces of goofy childhood friends and gentle past lovers turned defenders, warriors — is still out of reach for me. But it’s closer than it’s ever been before.

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I’m doing some work for a beautiful magazine called The Ukrainians, editing English translations of their articles. It’s a fun challenge, walking the line between honoring the voice of the author and the voice of the original translator, while also making the writing clear for a native English speaker. I’m learning a lot about Ukrainian geography, history, and culture, as well as more than I or they ever wanted to about Russian ordnance. 

These people are writing for their very lives, and I am entrusted to help shape and amplify that message. It is an honor to do that work. And it is a gift to be reminded, once again, that it is in the details — a dog named Molly taking her morning walk through Odesa’s rubble-strewn streets after a loud night spent shaking in the stairwell with neighbors; purchasing a bouquet with an even number of flowers in it (even numbers are for the dead, and odd numbers are for the living); a young, intelligent women who will not take a long-dreamed-of motorcycle trip through the Balkans, because the one with whom she dreamed is dead — that we come to see clearly the true and incalculable costs of war — anywhere and everywhere.

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Links:

Photos from my trip (let me know if you have questions about any of them!)

How Kyiv Transformed its Subway into a Bomb Shelter

The Horrors of Bucha

The Romanivsky Bridge

‘Shock therapy:’ War tourism in Ukraine attracts foreigners to see scars of Russia’s invasion