![]() ![]() Walking through Lviv’s Polytechnic National University late one night, I looked up at an illuminated window and saw two female students weaving threads hanging from a wooden frame into a rudimentary net. ![]() I can’t imagine this, it’s just like an older brother attacking the younger brother, like the biblical story of Cain and Abel.” The weavers and the creatorsĮven amid the tense columns of tired, cold civilians dragging themselves to the West, it was impossible to ignore the calm energy with which Ukraine’s civil society came together to care for their countryfolk. “It’s crazy,” Bortz told The Times of Israel from the safety of her temporary Kyiv apartment, “especially going through the other war when Russia and Ukraine were fighting together. But when he finally accepted what his family was telling him, the man died, heartbroken, days later. In the bizarre reality of war, they were allowed through checkpoints by Russian soldiers eager to help once they heard that her husband was a decorated Soviet World War II veteran.ĭuring the early weeks of the war, he couldn’t grasp that Ukraine was fighting Russia. She was forced to move several times during the blockade of Mariupol, before fleeing with her husband and niece. Holocaust survivor Elvira Bortz holds a photo of her husband in her temporary Kyiv apartment, August 2022 (Lazar Berman/The Times of Israel) A tall Ukrainian veteran wearing a camouflage backpack explained brusquely that he had been called up to fight. One gregarious German man was heading to Kyiv to extract his mother-in-law. I wasn’t alone on the platform as the sun, and the temperature, went down.Įveryone had their own reasons for going into the maelstrom while others were trying to leave. Two weeks later, I found myself standing in the border city of Przemysl, waiting for the next train carrying thousands of refugees from Ukraine to arrive. ![]() Plenty of blood had been spilled in these lands over the years, but ground wars in European capitals were a thing of the past, I was sure. Though tens of thousands of Russian troops were massed on Ukraine’s northern and eastern borders, and intelligence agencies in NATO countries were sounding the alarm, things seemed too orderly, too civilized - too logical - in Kyiv. There is no way war will actually break out, I assured Dani Gershcovich, the Joint Distribution Committee’s Kyiv-based representative, as we discussed the challenges of providing aid with swirling rumors of an impending invasion. One year and one week ago, I sat in the lovely Taki Da kosher restaurant in Podil, Kyiv’s traditional Jewish neighborhood. ![]()
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