UKRAINE JOURNALS - A PRIEST AND A CHILD

Two new books, which give new perspectives on the war in the Ukraine are by a young pre-teen who experienced invasion first-hand, and a priest who saw the Ukraine in peaceful times, but presaged what is happening today.  I highly recommend these thin journals, which will take no time to read, but will leave the reader with much to ponder.

“As we reflected on our experience in Ukraine, I felt a deep desire to stay faithful to the Ukrainian people and to keep choosing not just for the individual poor, who need support, but also for the country that is so clearly marginalized in the family of nations.”

In 1993-94, HENRI NOUWEN, the Dutch-born priest and spiritual writer, made two trips to recently-independent Ukraine. There he led retreats, observed the resurgence of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, and connected with local communities working with handicapped adults. These trips were deeply significant to Father Nouwen. And yet the full meaning of his observations may only now become clear. At the time of his sudden death in 1996, he was planning to spend a semester at the school now known as Ukrainian Catholic University.

With extraordinary insight, he identified in Ukraine certain spiritual and moral qualities struggling to assert themselves—exactly the qualities, almost thirty years later, that the Ukrainian people are displaying in their struggle for freedom and independence. He found a people hungry for hope and healing, in need of the life-giving message he most wanted to share: that we are all “beloved of God,” and that God’s love meets us where we are most hurt, weak, and vulnerable.

Read today, Father Nouwen’s previously unpublished work is like a time capsule, a message from the past with special meaning for today. In an introduction by Borys Gudziak, Archbishop-Metropolitan for the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia, he notes: “This modest, seemingly simple book about a visit to a distant land is in fact a subtle tale of how encounter genuinely and radically changes the lives of people.” In his moving afterword, Nouwen’s brother Laurent Nouwen describes how for twenty-five years after Henri’s death he continued an outreach of solidarity and service to the people of Ukraine through the Henri Nouwen Foundation.

Father Henri J. M. Nouwen, who died in 1996, spent the last ten years of his life as the chaplain to the L’Arche Daybreak community in Ontario, Canada. The author of many spiritual classics, his Orbis books include Adam: God’s Beloved, With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life, Peacework, The Selfless Way of Christ, ¡Gracias!, and Community.

The second journal is by a young survivor of the war in Ukraine, as told through her diary entries, which she started just days before her country’s invasion in February of 2022. It is an inspiring memoir of resilience, in face of war and is ultimately a story of survival and hope..

YEVA SKALIETSKA’s  story begins on her twelfth birthday in Kharkiv, where she has been living with her grandmother since she was a baby, when her parents separated. Ten days later, the only life she had ever known was shattered. Her city was suddenly under attack as Russia launched its  invasion of Ukraine. Yeva and her grandmother took shelter in a basement bunker, where she began writing this diary. 

She describes the bombings she endured while sheltering underground and her desperate journey west to escape the conflict raging around them. Learning that her childhood home was in tatters, she became depressed. The attack on her home was, for her, an attack on a piece of her.  As she writes: “There were such memories there! Our Italian furniture, our fancy dinner sets, the glass table. All those memories blown to bits. Tears are streaming down my face, and that’s only a fraction of my sorrow. I don’t care as much about the things themselves as much as I do the memories they held.”

Yeva also mourns the loss of her city. She writes that “Kharkiv has loads of beautiful places. The city center, the Shevchenko City Garden, the zoo, and Gorky Park… There is a beautifully paved street that leads up to Derzhprom, a group of tall buildings in Freedom Square. And whenever Granny and I need to soothe our souls, we visit the Svyato-Pokrovs’kyy Monastery.”

There is an endless train ride west across Ukraine, to the border city of Uzhorod. The frightening uncertainty of what is ahead is balanced by the kindness of strangers who help them along the way. 

By day nine of the war, as Yeva and her grandmother are leaving the train in Uzhorod trying to figure out what to do next, she encounters Flavian, a reporter from a British TV station. Flavian and Paraic, an Irish reporter working for Channel 4, undoubtedly picked Yeva out of the stream of arriving displaced persons because she is photogenic and can speak English. They feature her in a news story and then help Yeva and her grandmother on their way. Eventually, they will support Yeva in publishing her diary.

After many endless train rides and a prolonged stay in an overcrowded refugee center in Western Ukraine, Yeva and her beloved grandmother eventually find refuge in Ireland. There, she bravely begins to forge a new life, hoping she’ll be able to return home one day.

“My goal was to put my experiences into writing so that ten or twenty years from now, I could read this and remember how my childhood was destroyed." 

                                                        Photo: Ger Holland