Svitlana took her son to Italy, to strangers, and returned to Ukraine
Who is the woman with long dreadlocks you portrayed in Ukraine?
It's Svitlana. I met her in Medyka. She was just on her way to take her son, 13-year-old Elisha, to Italy, to strangers. She told me she would not stay there alone. She will be returning to Ukraine. At first I couldn't understand it: after all, she could have taken refuge in a safe place, in another country, close to her child, but she drove her son to the care of people she didn't even know, who pledged their help - just as everyone who pledged to take care of refugees did. Svitlana previously acted as a humanitarian in 2014 in Donbass, she traveled and continues to travel to help soldiers. Her husband is a sapper, one of those who liberated Bucza. She used to sew wedding dresses, now she makes Molotov cocktails. So imagine: parents at war in Ukraine, fighting for the country, child on the other side of the continent.
It's hard for us to comprehend that now.
After meeting her, I decided I would do a photo essay on the people who stayed. This war is very media driven, very Instagram-like, the Facebook pictures move in front of our eyes every day, they are also repetitive: we see explosions, dead bodies, hospitals - and these are all relevant. But what I miss in these photos are the stories of the people who are trying to live there despite everything.
Why did they stay?
The elderly don't leave because they don't have anyone anywhere, they don't know anyone. I say, "We've lived here all our lives, and what, are we now supposed to run away somewhere or go down to a shelter, live in the subway, hide? If we're going to die, we'd rather die in our own beds." And they remain in their homes.
Some, like Svitlana and her husband, want to fight. But it's not just with guns in hand. There are people for whom the struggle is just humanitarian aid, getting to where the hungry and cold are waiting. It's a fight for the other person. In Kharkiv, which is said to be such an intellectual capital, I spent a lot of time with Serhiy Zhadan, a Ukrainian writer. We lived in a former bank room, Żadan and his friends moved there and they put mattresses in the safe rooms, they sleep there and they have humanitarian headquarters there.
Serhiy has actually been fighting since 2014. For the past eight years, she and others have been helping humanitarian causes. For him, it's the same war. Previously, he traveled through Donbass, but now he has changed his route to Kharkiv. He donates food and medicine to people in the territorial defense, reaches out to people who have no electricity, gas or water, plays concerts in the subway for people who live there, or reads poems to soldiers at the front.
The struggle is everywhere, it is also in the maternity ward you photographed.
The hospital was under fire, so the doctors, physicians, and nurses moved the entire neonatal unit into the basement. As soon as they did, the bomb hit the building across the street. All the windows were blown out of the hospital, but no children were hurt. The baby girl I photographed was born five minutes early. It was for her birth, among other things, that doctors fought for her life.
One of my characters, Jana, is a therapist from Kiev.In fact, she has not yet graduated, but she is already helping others psychologically. It is in Dnipro. He talks to the soldiers. She visits them in hospitals, sometimes waits for a soldier to wake up after a leg amputation surgery, and is there for him at his most difficult moment. She herself doesn't quite know how to help them, she's not a specialized therapist yet, she just stays with these people and listens to them. For me, it's also a form of struggle. Jana has become important to me, even though I only have her portrait. The first time I saw her, she was full of enthusiasm, energy, and said she didn't want to leave because to her it was unacceptable for someone to invade the country, kill, rape, and steal their belongings. When I met her ten days later, she had a blank stare. I asked: "Is everything OK?" She nodded. She said: "Agatha, I don't know how to help you with the photos, I don't know what you would be photographing. As I sit on the couch and stare dully at the wall? Or as I talk to people, am I next to survivors?
How can I invite you to meet a young girl who tells me about the hell she lived through, who was raped several times by Russian soldiers? Before her eyes, the same soldiers raped her mother and later killed her. She is one of the survivors from Mariupol.
Tell me, how do I get you to a meeting with a man in front of whom his wife and several-year-old daughter were raped? She was a child. Do you understand that? And then they were both executed in front of him. He survived. No one knows why. Why they spared him. And I just try to be next to him and listen to him. When you asked at the beginning of our meeting how I felt, how I was doing, I told you OK. But it's not really OK. I feel like my eyes and my insides are empty of the stories I carry."
Have you talked to all your heroes and heroines?
With anyone. I needed to be close with them, to know more about them. Even if it was to be one photo encased in a portrait, like this photo of Hanna Kotelnikova and her family that I met in Dnipro.
Tell us about them.
They fled Mariupol, the daughter with her parents. They succeeded. If you could get away from there, it was only by car. Those who had it were running away. Hanna had a small company volkswagen polo that six people and three dogs got into, one she took from a shelter. From the first moment of the Russian invasion she wrote a diary, this diary is already interested in representatives of the UN and Human Rights Watch, because it is a testimony of war, a priceless document. Her mother remembers the war, so history comes full circle for her. Her father was an amateur photographer. He said he would very much like to return to Mariupol, because he left a lot of negatives with photos, valuable films for him. My daughter searches social media and checks photos from Mariupol, looking at which houses are still standing. "My house is gone, burned down," she told me. - Parents' house, too. The pictures of my father will be gone, he will never find them."
The woman you are talking about is clutching a pillow in your picture.
When they left, she took only two things: the journal she kept and the pillow she had slept on at home all her life. It's the only thing she has left.
Did people open up during the conversations?
Very. They have a great need to talk, to tell stories. Something terrifying, unimaginable to us, befalls them. Some see their neighbor's house burning across the street and wonder when the bomb will fall on their block too. Whoever I met started talking about their anxiety and fear. In Kharkov, I saw a man, Alexander, in front of a building, cooking soup over a fire. As soon as I approached him, he was very eager to show me the document that just a short time ago he lived in a block of flats that no longer exists. All that was left was his address. The only things he took out of the apartment were the clothes he was wearing and the one pot. His wife and children live underground, in a cage in the block that still survives.
In Kharkov, I also noticed an elderly woman, Zinaida, in the window. The windows in the building were taped so they wouldn't fall out from the explosions. She invited me inside with her daughter. They said they sleep in the basement in a neighboring block, but during the day they go into the apartment to hang out there, like they used to, with their cat.
You traveled around Ukraine for a month, mostly on trains, sleeping at people's homes, in shelters, on the subway. There were times when you didn't wear a bulletproof vest.
Yes, I had a vest because it was required by accreditation and safety. Especially if you want to move somewhere with your military, such as a dangerous place. But I can't imagine going into apartments wearing a bulletproof vest and talking to people who don't have those vests, who are vulnerable. And yet they persist in this place.
Some are already returning to their homes.
We can't imagine it, but people in Ukraine want things to be as they were, they want to live in their homes, they don't want to be exiles. The women I photographed on the train were returning to Dnipro. The mother, her two daughters Nikol and Lima and her dog Fiona moved to the outskirts of the city at the start of the invasion. They previously lived in a 19-story building on the top floor. Each explosion caused the entire block to shake. For two weeks they lived in a hotel, but the mother decided enough was enough, it was time to go back. It got relatively safer in Dnipro, so they moved again to the 19th floor. And it's also kind of a struggle for me - fighting for my space, for my corner.
Others are also struggling to remember. One of my characters, Svitlana's aunt, a Ukrainian lecturer, collected everything about Ukrainian history for 25 years: books, trinkets, folk costumes. She made a micro-museum at the university. I asked if he was afraid of these things. She said that at most she would pack everything in a bag and carry it out on her back. To me, this is an example of the struggle for Ukraine, for identity, for a language that is supposed to be forbidden to them.
Are the people you met hopeful that the war will end quickly?
They persist in waiting. They believe they will find loved ones, and they do everything they can to find them. I met a girl who lived through a horror story. Her family stayed in Mariupol, in the occupied territories, her one managed to escape. She lives in such limbo all the time: she does not know what is happening to her relatives, whether they are alive, whether they have not been harmed, whether they have not been deported. I say, "I'm not giving up." All the time he is looking for his own, through humanitarian organizations, wherever he can.
The lack of contact with loved ones is a drama. I met an elderly couple in Mala Rochani, I was surprised that they lived there, because Mala Rochani was practically wiped off the face of the earth. They don't have any heating, they sit on the couch in jackets. They don't even move to the underworld. Their apartment is the only one with windows. This woman told me: "This is our home. Where should we go? To strangers? No. And we won't be hiding in the subway all the time. At home is best. If we die, tough." Her children are in Kharkiv region, she has no contact with them.
You met hundreds of people and photographed many of them. How to show war without taking away the subjectivity and dignity of people? The media is full of pictures of the victims, after Bucza, pictures surfaced that went around the world.
It all depends on the context. On the one hand, I think pictures of victims, of civilians, are important. It is difficult to speak of war within the bounds of any morality, but there have been wars in which there were some rules. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is zero principles of any kind. Large residential areas where there are no military points are bombed, hospitals are bombed. Cluster bombs, which are prohibited, are used. Civilians are executed, women and children are raped. These are war crimes. We need to photograph the victims, the survivors. Publish those photos that are evidence, but in a way that does not take away the dignity of the victims or survivors. We must look and we must not look away.
Will you be returning to Ukraine?
Yes, I'm already thinking about it. I really want to find the people I photographed and find out how their lives turned out.
Autorka: Monika Tutak-Goll
Zdjęcia: Agata Grzybowska
The text was published in „Wysokie Obcasy” a magazine of „Gazeta Wyborcza” on 7 May 2022
