Our call was only scheduled for an hour and a half but went on for three hours. Once Maria started telling her story of escape from Mariupol through check points and Russian ‘light’ filtration detentions she had to tell it all.
Maria and her husband are artists - she refers to him as a “skinny boy” and laughs - their flat was on the 5th floor of a Mariupol apartment complex. Her husband a graphic design professional is Ukrainian. Maria isn’t. In order to obscure her identity I will not be naming her country of origin but will say it was a part of the USSR during the Cold War but now one of the many independent nations born after the fall of the wall.
While Ukraine was still asleep on February 24 the US was reading the news they were under attack. Before dawn in Mariupol Maria’s phone rings. A friend from the states tells them: the war has started.
Maria and her husband are confused: it is all quiet here…
Then they hear explosions in the distance. Then they knew.
This is where their story begins about escaping Mariupol.
Here is where I have to stop. I need to explain things to readers about reporting on trauma. I take my lead from subjects who trust me with their stories and lives.
Yesterday Maria got word to me that she is nervous about any story I would write. That even mentioning certain details about [REDACTED] or the route they took to escape [REDACTED] could harm those she cares about still living through the Russian assault Ukraine.
She still wants to make sure her story gets out. She has consented to my using some of our audio from our call. I told her I will take her lead.
But what does this tell you about the situation? What does it say about the onslaught facing Ukrainians? A woman - any woman - manages to get out alive through all the literal horrors (the bodies, the mines, the shrapnel ripping through walls of the flat) to a safe(r) place but remains terrified.
You could be forgiven here in the west for thinking that her fears of Russian tracking her or any of her friends is overblown; maybe a relic of ancient history where Soviets tracked down dissidents. Maybe you think this is disproportionate response to trauma.
But the forgotten history by the world of the experience of Ukrainians and half of Europe is working against you. And me.
Post World War II Stalin sent secret police (and what would become the KGB and now the FSB) to European nations to find Russian civilians living abroad during the war and bring them back to the “Motherland” promising no harm would come to them. But of course they knew: this is how I will die.
The system of Russian gulags predated WWI and lived on through different iterations until the 1980s. These camps spread first throughout the Soviet Union then to countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and throughout the Post WWII Soviet empire. Ukraine suffered uniquely under this system through starvation, disssapearing, forced labor camps and mass murder.
This is still palpable - in Ukraine but throughout the former occupied nations that only started to be “free” after 1989.
I am going back to Maria this week to discuss a way forward where she is comfortable and safe. This is part of the work. When reporting on trauma I take my lead from the victim, the survivor.
More soon.
Thank you