As long as Palestinians are alive to record and share their suffering, the duty and dilemma of witness will remain. As we look, we must be aware that our outpouring of emotion has its limits, and its own dynamics of power. Grief and anger are appropriate, but we must take care not to veer into solipsism, erasing the primary pain by supplanting it with our own. As the Mojave poet Natalie Diaz has observed, empathy is “seeing or hearing about something that’s happened to someone and . . . imagin[ing] how I would feel if it happened to me. It has nothing to do with them.” Or, put more succinctly by Solmaz Sharif—“Empathy means / laying yourself down / in someone else’s chalk lines / and snapping a photo.”

Rather, we—those outside of Palestine, watching events through a screen—ought to think of ourselves in relation to the legacy of the shaheed. Our work as witnesses is to be marked; we should not leave it unscathed. We must make an effort to stay with what we see, allowing ourselves to be cut. This wound is essential. Into this wound, imagination may pour—not to invade the other’s subjectivity, but to awaken awe at the depth, privacy, and singularity of each life. There, we might glimpse, if sidelong, how much of Gaza’s suffering we will never know. This is where real witness must begin: in mystery.

Perhaps the fundamental work of witness is the act of faith—an ethical and imaginative leap beyond what we can see. It is a sober reverence of, and a commitment to fight for, the always-unknowable other. This commitment does not require constant stoking by grisly, tragic reports. Rather than a feeling, witness is a position. It insists on embodiment, on sacrifice, mourning and resisting what is seen. The world after genocide must not, cannot, be the same. The witness is the one who holds the line of reality, identifying and refusing the lie of normalcy. Broken by what we see, we become rupture incarnate.

What in fiction is enjoyable and beautiful is often terrifying in real life. In real life, shifts in collective understanding are necessary for major changes to occur, but on the human, individual scale, they are humbling and existentially disturbing. Such shifts also do not usually come without a fight: not everyone can be unpersuaded of their worldview through argument and appeal, or through narrative. Maggie Nelson, in The Art of Cruelty, punctures the high-minded moralism of art that seeks, through depicting suffering, to move an audience to do something about it. “Having a strong reaction is not the same thing as having an understanding,” she writes, “and neither is the same thing as taking an action.” It’s true that emotion and understanding are not the same as action, but you might say that understanding is necessary for someone to act.

Of course, the word recognition has another, very formal connotation in political discourse as a diplomatic or governmental action; states will recognize the sovereignty of another state or political entity, or a political or legal claim, or a right to life, a right to have rights. Cultural recognition of difference can form the basis of just societies, but recognition that remains solely that—a form of acknowledgment without economic and political redistribution—is an act of language that leaves out the plot of history, where a word tries to stand in for material reparations through the smoke and mirrors of discourse and ceremony. The recognition of Indigenous peoples by settler colonial societies, including acknowledging First Nation territories, might be a place to start, but it is no place to end. In the Palestinian case, the Oslo Accords of the nineties, which inaugurated a misleadingly titled “peace process” and led to an entrenchment of Israeli occupation, prominently featured letters of mutual recognition between the PLO and Israel. The PLO was recognized as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people: granted the mantle of statecraft without an actual state.

In the language of both law and literary form, then, recognition is a kind of knowing that should incur the responsibility to act for it to have any value beyond personal epiphanies, or appeasing the critics of the one doing the recognizing. Great effort is required to ensure that such a moment marks the middle of the story, and not the finale. Another act must follow.

The fact is, huge edifices do move in human history. Empires have fallen. The Berlin Wall fell, political apartheid in South Africa did end, and although in neither of these cases were these putative conclusions by any means the end of the story, they are testaments to the fact that, under the force of coordinated international and local action, Israeli apartheid will also end. The question is, when and how? Where in the narrative do we now stand?

In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.

“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed—that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”

The simmering fear of violence that we had felt every day now turned into terror. Kabul was shelled relentlessly for months. Food and water became scarce. Each day, we received news of more deaths among our family, friends and neighbours. I lived in an extended family of several uncles and aunts and my granny, and it became our family ritual to pray for the dead before eating supper. My grandmother would lead the prayers. My four little siblings and I would follow, scared and confused by death. My heavily pregnant aunt looked numb, all expression drained from her, as if she needed reminding to move her arm and her hand to reach the food on the plate in front of her.

Lily Hyde | The Atavist Magazine |October 2023 | 1,479 words (5 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 144, “Two Thousand Miles From Home.”

Oy, bida! Oy, bida bida bida
A ya ba, a ya baba moloda

LYDIA KUZNICHENKO IS SINGING a Ukrainian folk song to the baby she’s holding in her arms. The tune is cheerful, although the words translate as something like: Oh, woe is me! And I’m a young woman. Lida, as she is known, is still young. She has grey-green eyes and dark golden hair, a face not meant for grief. She laughs and teases the baby: “Yes, yes, is your grandmother young?”

Sitting with Lida on the bed in her small brick house in the village of Ridkodub, Ukraine, I am wearing a heavy bulletproof vest that is supposed to protect me from the war raging outside. The baby, buttoned into a white onesie and a little blue jacket, has nothing to protect him except his grandmother’s arms. He is very small, not quite three months old.

Outside it’s a cold, pale winter’s day, December 30, 2022. We are in the Kharkiv region, about 20 miles west of the Russia-Ukraine border, and seven miles from the front line of the war between these two countries. A set of shelves in the room is piled with folded baby clothes and blankets—pink, blue, lemon yellow, white. On the veranda outside, tiny clothes and socks are pinned to a line, having been washed by hand in water heated on the old-fashioned stove. The house is a simple Ukrainian village home, warm and quiet except for the crackle of wood burning in the stove. When there’s a long, deafening roar outside that makes the windows tremble, or a series of more distant thumps, I’m the only one who flinches. The baby wriggles, then sleeps.

Both of them do—there’s another baby in the room, on the bed. The infants have a good many adopted uncles in Ridkodub, men who wear camouflage, army boots, and bulletproof vests. They think the babies are twins at first. “No!” Lida corrects them. “They are daughter and grandson. They are nephew and aunty.” Their names are Vitalina and David, and they have seen more woe in their few months on earth than many of us could imagine in a lifetime.

If Lida were to tell these babies a story instead of singing a song, how might she start? Perhaps like this: There were three women—Liuda, Lida, and Lera. They were from two generations of the same family; they lived a few miles from one another, and they all became pregnant just a few weeks apart. But a war came between them and divided them from one another. One of them traveled 2,000 miles to come home; another was lost.

No. That story gets too sad too quickly.

Perhaps she could start like this: There is the story about David and Goliath. Little David went out to fight the giant Goliath, who threatened to destroy David’s whole nation. And everyone thought that Goliath would win in three days, but little David would not be defeated.

Yes, that’s a better way to begin.

1. FAMILY

LIDA’S FAMILY, the Slobodianyks, are a big, close clan. Arkady and Halyna moved from the Vinnytsia region, in central Ukraine, to Ridkodub, in the Kharkiv region, in 1986 with their four children. Lydia and her twin sister, Liudmyla, were still babies when the family relocated to work at the kolkhoz, the Soviet collective farm. Another daughter was born in nearby Dvorichna.

Lida and Liuda, as they were known, did everything together. Liuda was the eldest by five minutes. They studied at the local school and sang in the school choir. When they were 12, they started helping out at the farm, too, milking the cows. The twins performed together at local clubs and concerts, two girls with bright faces, harmonizing as they sang rich, plaintive Ukrainian folk songs. Lida had her first child—a son, Maksym—at 18. Liuda followed three months later with a daughter.

Maksym was a timid, serious baby. Lida bounced and tickled him, and sang nonsense songs to coax out his smile. The baby’s father left the family early on. Maksym grew up close to his mother; he had her green eyes and dark blond hair, but not her lively, outgoing temperament. A brother was born, then a sister as cheerful as Lida; Maksym remained the quiet, stubborn one.

By the mid-1990s, the kolkhozes had become private farms, but otherwise it felt as if not much had changed in their uneventful corner of Kharkiv region. Fields of wheat, maize, and bright sunflowers stretched to meet big skies, like picture postcards of the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag. The Oskil River wound past Dvorichna, between high, chalky banks overgrown with wildflowers and riddled with the burrows of steppe marmots.

As the children grew, the family gathered regularly; the farthest any of the five adult Slobodianyk siblings and their families had gone was to the regional capital, also called Kharkiv, where the oldest brother lived. Everyone else lived within a few dozen miles of one another in the district of Kupiansk. By the end of 2021, Arkady and Halyna had 15 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and perhaps soon there would be another: Maksym had recently startled Lida by bringing home a girl he’d met at agricultural college. Her name was Valeria Perepelytsia, or Lera for short. A girlfriend! Not Lida’s shy Maksym—who, by the way, was only 17. The young couple had already started talking about having a baby.

2. OCCUPATION

EARLY ON February 24, 2022, a sound like the sky tearing in half ripped through Lida’s dream.

It was dark, not even 4 a.m. The house in Ridkodub was quiet, her younger son, Dmytro, and daughter, Uliana, peacefully asleep. It was just a horrible dream, she decided. She dozed off, then woke again to another loud noise. Perhaps someone was setting off fireworks outside.

When she looked out her window, she saw that the sky in the northeast, toward the Russian border, was on fire. It was not a dream or fireworks. It was what the United States had been warning of, the thing no one in Ukraine wanted to believe could happen: Russia had invaded Ukraine.

Russian troops had amassed along the Ukrainian border for months, as Russian president Vladimir Putin declared that the neighboring country needed “denazifying” and “demilitarizing” while insisting that Ukraine was really part of Russia anyway. Despite U.S. and EU warnings, few Ukrainians thought there would be an attack beyond the eastern end of the country, where Russia had fomented a conflict in 2014 and effectively occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Kharkiv bordered Luhansk and Donetsk—and Russia. But no one was prepared for Russian missiles falling on civilians and destroying infrastructure all over Ukraine. On the morning of February 24, Russian tanks not only crossed the border into Kharkiv region, but advanced on Kherson and Mariupol in the south and toward the capital of Kyiv to the north.

Lida phoned Maksym, who was staying with Lera and her family in Velykyi Vyselok, about 17 miles away, across the Oskil River. The call woke him up. “How can you sleep,” she yelled, “when the war has started?”

Maksym had been watching the news closely and messaging with his older cousin in the Ukrainian army. But his cousin had not prepared him for this. Lera, however, knew exactly what war was. She had experienced it before, eight years ago in Luhansk. She remembered how her mother hid her and her younger sister in the wardrobe during the bombings, and shared with them the only food they had: half a loaf of bread per day.

Now she and her mother scrambled to dress her baby brother, Artem, and gather a few essentials. Lera’s instinct was to run, although she didn’t know where to go. Grad rockets roared right over the house. Lera’s younger sister, Alyona, had been five when the Perepelytsias fled their home in Luhansk region. Now the buried trauma surfaced. She crouched like the little quail—perepilka—of their surname, put her hands over her head, and screamed.

No one went to work that day. People hid in basements and root cellars as planes and helicopters flew overhead and columns of tanks and artillery drove through Ridkodub and Dvorichna. They were unmarked, and Lida’s neighbors weren’t sure which country they belonged to; it was only on the very last column, which came through at about 4 p.m., that they saw a Russian flag. The few Ukrainian defenses near Dvorichna and Velykyi Vyselok were quickly overwhelmed.

On February 27, the mayor of Kupiansk, the administrative center of the district, surrendered. Soon Kherson fell in south Ukraine. The remaining Ukrainian forces near Lida’s home retreated to defend Kharkiv, which for the next three months was bombarded as Russian forces sought to take the city. But in the settlements near the border, after that first day when Russian troops passed through, everything went strangely quiet.

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Maggie Levantovskaya | Longreads | August 31, 2023 | 20 minutes (5,624 words)

It’s been a month since Russia fired its missiles on the city of my birth, unleashing full-scale war. I’ve come to San Francisco to arrange burials for my grandma and grandpa. 

The funeral home is in the neighborhood I hated all my childhood in America. It made me feel like I would never get the sound of Russian out of my ears, like we had emigrated just to be among more Soviets. Across the street is the apartment building that my mom and I moved into the day we arrived. Next to it is the golden-domed cathedral we saw from our windows. On this side of the street, there is the bus stop where I wasted countless hours of youth, waiting to go to more exciting parts of town. 

My grandparents are still alive and Grandma is with me. My grandpa has a hard time walking and prefers to stay glued to the war, though how he handles seeing childhood streets reduced to rubble perplexes me. He also likes it when my grandma makes decisions for them both. She is pragmatic to a fault, but I’m not confident that she can handle this.  

“We’re vaccinated and boosted in this office, so you can take your mask off if you want,” the funeral director says. 

He is a tall, broad-shouldered man who speaks a honeyed, easy Russian, almost a different language in his mouth. I’m pleased because he’ll understand my grandma, but also envious that he can speak so fluently, despite not being from the Soviet Union. Only in death will I stop measuring my Russian against others’ and find mine lacking.  

I don’t remove my mask, throwing a glance at Grandma that says “Keep it on.” The last thing I want is to put her at risk while doing this. Her mask, handmade by someone else, hangs down below her nose. Because I tower over her, I glimpse her painted cherry lips. They’re part of a whole look, complete with flowy pants and coat, a cloche, and freshly painted purple nails. It tugs at me that she dressed up. I want to do her proud in front of strangers. How strange that we put on our best when meeting people who will see us naked, sick, or dead. 

We’re shown into a room that has a dining table made of oak and topped by glass. We sit down and make small talk while the funeral director hands us papers. He even makes some jokes that get a chuckle from my grandma. I watch in admiration as he puts at ease the person who is here to face her own mortality.    

“Did you come from Ukraine?” my grandma asks, bringing the small talk to a stop.

I freeze. She has no problem saying what is on her mind, but this is not a provocation. My grandma’s voice is low, more plaintive than questioning. The funeral director has a name that couldn’t be more common in Ukraine, but names get stuck to us in different ways and they don’t necessarily correspond to politics. My mother told me that this neighborhood has many Putinists and that one can’t be sure of the response when uttering the word “Ukraine” in Russian. Some people let out tears pooling below the surface, while others shrug and make vague statements about propaganda. The funeral director says he had a grandma who came over long ago. 

My grandma shakes her head and says, “This war, if someone told me, I would not believe them.”

He nods, his face a solemn mask. I understand now why she asked him. She had the urge to know whose hands she’d put her body in. 

After a tactful beat, he leaves us to look at the “menus” for the different services. I feel a little like I’m ordering for Grandma at a restaurant. The pressure’s on to translate and to help her choose while honoring her tastes and inhibitions.   

I tried to talk to Grandma about all this for months. Initially, her plan was to give me stacks of dollar bills she’d put away little by little since our immigration. She said that I could figure out the rest when the time came. This seemed daunting and inadequate. I wanted to do more, to let my grandma make decisions. I also didn’t want to fill out forms when the time to fall apart had already arrived. My partner had suggested I make arrangements now. We could prepare, avoid some of the cruelty of logistics. This made sense and still I dragged my feet, not knowing how to plan for death. But when the war came, for a reason unbeknownst to me, I felt the need to hurry. 

“What do you want?” I asked her months ago over the phone. My cursor clicked between sites that had words like “hills” and “view” right in their names.

Customization is a love language in this country, even when it comes to death. You see this on webpages with taglines like “My Funeral, My Cremation, My Way®.” But all my grandma could assert was what she didn’t want. She didn’t want to be cremated, per Jewish interdiction, I assumed. She didn’t want to be embalmed. She didn’t want to be displayed. This I was thankful for. I read a book once that talked at some length about embalming—the way the jaw is wired shut, orifices filled with cotton to prevent the body purging brownish fluids. This is some of the work it takes to make what the morticians call the “memory picture,” a final image of the loved one looking calm, at final rest. Since I knew what occurred behind the scenes, I didn’t want to picture it when looking for the last time at the people who helped raise me.

“Do you want it to be religious?”    

She said a service was too much, though she did want a Russian-speaking rabbi to say Kaddish at their graves. 

“What about us?” 

“If you have words to say, go ahead,” she said. 

I rolled my eyes but felt them well with tears she’d thankfully not see over the phone. My grandma, who had saved and scraped but always gave me extra cash, feared that a headstone would cost too much money. 

“What about clothes?” she asks the funeral director, who comes back with two folders stamped with gold foil font. 

At last, something my grandma cares about, despite not being what you’d call a clothes horse. 

“Sure, sure,” he says. “But we can also cover you in shrouds, per Jewish custom.” 

An image of my grandma’s lifeless, swaddled body flashes through my mind. I’ve never pictured her this way before, not even when she had her bypass surgery. I look at her to swap that image for the one of her alive, but now the images have fused, a terrible double exposure. 

“No,” Grandma says, “we’ll pick our clothes.” 

My thoughts spin out. When will they do this? Who will dress their heavy, lifeless bodies? And what if they die without the chance to pick out what to wear? I realize then that I had started to imagine I would lose my grandma and my grandpa at the same time. But the improbability of this is even sadder. One of them won’t escape losing the other. For years, I’ve wondered who’ll go first, knowing the whole time who would take it better.  

I knew that making these arrangements would be hard. I took them on to spare my mom some of the preparatory grief, a phrase newly added to my lexicon. She can’t do anything related to her parents’ deaths. Her job is keeping them alive. She shops for them and washes dirty linens. She bathes my grandma. She carries Grandpa’s walker even when her own leg drags behind due to old age and inflamed joints. She chides them when they don’t obey her orders and do risky, unsafe things. 

“I have two little children,” my mom says, and she won’t plan her children’s deaths. 

Whoever says Americans don’t talk about death has yet to meet my Soviet family. We’re all too superstitious, afraid to let death dance around our tongues as though saying it will make it happen sooner. We knock on wood. We spit over our shoulders. Sometimes we even wear those little evil eyes around our necks. When death can’t be denied, we’re terrified it will consume us. My family waited months to tell me my great-grandma had died because they didn’t want grief to distract me from my studies. But I am middle-aged now and it is my turn to absorb the pain while tying up loose ends.

After I drop off Grandma, I drive back to Oakland. I crawl through several San Francisco neighborhoods, each one with its own blue and yellow flag. It’s a fresh shock to see Ukrainian flags. I’ve never seen Americans root this hard for another country. The fact that it’s the country I am from—the country whose name I’ve said many times, only to have Americans ask “Where’s that?”—makes this show of support surreal. As I get on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge, its clanging, booming sounds drown out my stereo. I think about my grandma and I wonder if today was harder for her than she made it seem. I think about not knowing how I’d feel making arrangements for my and my partner’s deaths. I wonder if I will regret that I won’t have a child or grandchild to help me plan my end of life.    

“What would’ve happened to us?” My mom calls and asks. 

Before the war, I told her that she called too much. Now we talk every day. Though she can’t talk about her parents’ deaths, she needs to talk about the war and I do too, even if talking just means asking questions we can’t answer.

“I don’t know,” I say, pulling weeds in my front yard. 

She didn’t want to leave Ukraine—her job, her friends, her lover. I don’t remind her of this in our conversations. That would be mean and pointless. I didn’t understand her at the time, but then I wasn’t even 10. To me, America was home to Disneyland and people who could stomach Jews. But I have come to understand why, at the age of 30, she didn’t want another language and another country. Her life is split in half now, half of it there, half of it here. 

I’ve often said “we fled Ukraine,” but this sounds false when there is war. The images of people fleeing with their bags, their kids, and their pets are different from the scenes I see when thinking of our emigration. As difficult as leaving was, we didn’t have to outrun tanks and missiles. We didn’t have to risk returning to apartment buildings hollowed out by bombs. We got to choose the things we packed. We got to say goodbye over the course of weeks and months.         

A few days after I made our first appointment at the funeral home, a photo of a group of people who did not outrun a mortar appeared on my Twitter feed, a place where corpses can go as viral as memes. It showed four people, bent and lying in a gutter, with soldiers squatting nearby. The dead wore puffy jackets, with backpacks on their shoulders that suggested they were mid-escape. The photo made the front page of The New York Times but by the time I saw it, someone had identified the people it had captured—a woman named Tetiana, her two kids, and a man who tried to help them to evacuate. Their bodies tell the story of a sudden end, of death unplanned and unarranged for viewing. 

The photo made my throat close up. I was ashamed of being privy to somebody else’s tragedy without permission. The likes and comments on the photo made its existence seem a violation. Why did these murdered people have to be subjected to the gaze of the masses? What kind of memory picture will their loved ones get as a result? Later I read that the woman’s husband said the photo was important as evidence of war crimes. He, too, had first seen the photo online because he was away, helping his mother. He couldn’t bury his slain wife for days, her body “lying in a black bag on the floor” because the morgue was overfull with other bodies. Even in death, some have to queue for their resting place.  

The funeral director sent me home with paperwork. I call my grandma after reading the first question.

“Where were you born?” I ask and chuckle. 

I know she wasn’t born in Kyiv like the rest of us. I’m ready for her to say Khmelnik or some other former shtetl in Ukraine, but she does not. She makes a sound that I don’t recognize. I barely hear her over her TV in the background. I can’t make out the words but I assume it’s news about the war. As if on cue, she yells at Grandpa to turn down the volume. 

“Chir-chik,” she says again, this time breaking the word into its syllables. 

“Where’s that?” I ask, and type it into Google. 

“Uzbekistan,” she says, “in the evacuation.”  

I see the city on a map and realize that for nearly 40 years I didn’t know my grandma’s birthplace. 

“And Grandpa, was he also in Uzbekistan?” I ask.

“Hey Roma, you were in Sverdlovsk during evacuation, yes?” my grandma shouts because my grandpa barely hears these days.

I learn that when the Nazis came into Ukraine, my grandpa’s mom fled East with him and his two-month old sister. My great-grandpa put them on the train and went to war. My grandma’s father was permitted to accompany her mom and their three kids to Central Asia. His vision was so bad the army wouldn’t take him. In Chirchik, he repeatedly tried to enlist; he didn’t want to known as the “zhid who hid under his wife’s skirt.” They finally took him after my great-grandma became pregnant with another child, who would one day become my grandma. He fought at Kursk, a battle that the Soviets won but called a meat grinder; the notice that he had died came not long after his departure for the front. My grandma never met her father.

The paperwork in front of me is nearly blank, but I have my own questions. I want Grandma and Grandpa to back up and tell me more about the process of evacuation. When did they get to leave? What could they take? How long did it take to put thousands of kilometers between them and the people who sought to destroy them? 

My grandpa says he was too young to keep good track of time but he remembers seeing sky above their heads from open cattle cars. And he remembers when the sky was streaked with airplanes ready to spit bombs and it was time to run like hell into the trees. I’m shocked, at both his words and my naiveté. Somehow, I didn’t think beyond the notion that evacuation meant survival, safety, life. Perhaps because most of our relatives had been shot or burned, or buried alive because they couldn’t make the trains in time, or got sent off to become the meat in the meat grinders. I want to know more from my grandma too. She gives me scraps she heard after the fact and sends me to go see her oldest sister. 

“Ask her about the soup,” she says.

Intrigued, I make a mental note, but doubt that I will make the effort to rekindle the connection. 

Like other families, ours has attachments so fierce that, in caring for each other, we fight and nurse long grudges. Some years ago, my mom, my grandma, and her dearest sister came into conflict. I didn’t want to get involved, so I withdrew. Somehow this ended in my breaking contact with the person I had worshiped since our immigration. She was our sponsor, teacher, guide to the new country. I grew up within walking distance from her home, not thinking it would one day be a house I’d drive by without stopping.  

Now I sit at her kitchen table with my questions. It’s the same table where I’ve sat a thousand times, absorbing grownups’ gossip. 

Before she tells me anything about “the soup,” she feeds me soup, a brothy fish-based thing that proves surprisingly delicious. As I eat, I note the ways she has aged, her body now a folded concertina. And yet she opens drawers and flips on burners with the same intensity that always marked her words. Her burgundy-mopped head waves like a flag around the kitchen as she fusses with the second course, assuring me it’s all health-conscious. 

When she sits down, she tells me that they left their home in Khmelnik with such breakneck speed that my great-grandma could only grab some money and her keys. 

“She may have had some cloth to wrap the baby,” my great-aunt says, referring to the middle sister. 

Together with close relatives, they made a group of nine. They suffered through a journey that my great-aunt thinks took months because the trains took detours to avoid Nazi territory. They also paused at stations to camp and allow trains carrying wounded and supplies to pass through. 

At one such stop, the family made a fire and gathered round a metal bucket to make soup. The kids were famished, catching whiffs of steaming liquid that would probably seem tasty only to malnourished people. I brace for horror as she sets this scene, and it comes fast: When the airplanes arrived and bombs hailed down, everyone ran in all directions, some grabbing kids, some hiding under wagons, some falling to the ground, not knowing what to do. At three years old, my great-aunt didn’t register the war as urgently as she did hunger.

“I’m always starving, even to this day,” she says. Thinking the bombs were “just a game,” she seized the opportunity to fill the void inside her belly: “I wanted the soup, so I ran to it.” 

The crush and chaos caused the bucket to tip over, spilling the boiling liquid on her body. She screamed from burns but no one could hear her through the blasts that shattered cattle cars and murdered people in an instant. Her mother, with a baby in her arms, somehow found her. My great-aunt’s screams were so unbearable that others started pulling off her clothes, and with them skin. She cried from pain for days. Back on the train, she wailed so loudly that some passengers told my great-grandparents that they would throw her from the train if she wouldn’t stop.  

“That little girl,” she says, and for a second I don’t realize that she means herself. “My whole life I have seen her from above, running as bombs fell all around her.” 

“I didn’t understand it at the time,” she resumes. “The bombs were toys to me, but I would see them in my sleep and scream and piss the bed. I see them still. It’s as if my brain took a picture.” 

A few wrong steps and they all could’ve died during the shelling. The thought that my great-grandma’s death would mean I wouldn’t be alive occurs to me but doesn’t make me shudder. Not being born, to me, is not itself a tragedy. It’s tragic to be alive and have one’s future cut short by an act of cruelty; to be a child so hungry and in so much danger as to risk her life for drops of soup; to have to try and save a loved one from a rain of bombs; to wake up pissing and screaming in the middle of the night, yet be considered lucky for surviving. What’s tragic is to die in terror, to the soundtrack of explosions.  

I think about the photo of Tetiana, her kids, the stranger who had tried to shepherd them to safety. They almost made it, but did not. I think about the people who walked by their mortar-stricken bodies, but hurried on because it was too dangerous to stop. I wonder how my great-grandparents felt when the dust settled and they saw the corpses. Did anybody say some words over those bodies? Was there the time to bury them? 

My great-aunt’s eyes shine with the tears she keeps at bay. I didn’t think doing the paperwork for grandma would bring this much buried pain, but that was my mistake. Maybe there is no way to fill out forms for someone from Ukraine without revisiting the dead.

When I began to visit websites that advise on “advance planning,” I became struck by their pragmatism and cheeriness. So many offered visitors an “end of life checklist,” a string of words I’d never thought to put together. They warned that too few think about their death, and promised that those who do feel good about this thinking. Setting affairs in order, drawing up one’s will, declaring medical directives—these give agency to those who’ll die, and peace of mind to loved ones. Those who will die must make things easier for their survivors. Make your death neater, the sites say, so that no one’s undone by the mess that ensues. This sounded right to me, but it was also so American, so middle class. To sort out one’s estate requires having one. My grandparents do not. They don’t own homes or even cars. There’s nothing of financial value to split up, just objects to clear out or save for sentimental reasons. 

When I think about my inheritance from them, I think about the bungalow that they, along with my mom and my partners’ parents, helped us buy. I think about the tools my grandpa started giving us as soon as we moved in, two years before I would think about his burial. His hands were already too weak to grip the gadgets and appliances. My uncle didn’t want the stuff, so I was grateful that my partner said he’d take them. Even though I helped Grandpa with his projects when I was a child, I cared only about spending time with him, not about learning how to build things with my hands. While we prepared for emigration, my grandpa’s “instrument” caused several fights. We couldn’t take a lot of weight, and grandpa’s tools were heavy and, in our eyes, inessential. But he insisted and we all knew why. To him, they were identity and purpose. He was a worker his whole adult life, an electrician and a jack of all trades. 

It crushed me that, in his last years of life, my grandpa wanted to give up what I saw as extensions of his body. I thought it was a sign he’d lost the will to live. But he did not shed all his tools at once. For the first phase, we stood with him inside his closet and helped him pull plastic bins, repurposed jars, and cardboard boxes from the shelves. I reached up where his hunchback posture wouldn’t allow. The boxes contained drills and clamps and squares and screws and pencils stamped “USSR,” their prices marked to hinder profiteering. He rummaged in them with his meaty hands, those stamped too, with dark and map-like spots.  

“Does he need this? Or this? Or this?” my grandpa asked, referring to my partner but unable to ask him in English.

The process was chaotic, awkward. My partner smiled and took it all, though most were objects he already had or never would make use of. 

As I helped clear closet shelves, I faked a smile.

“Can you believe he has all this?” I asked my partner with feigned delight. Inside, I squirmed in disbelief that this was happening. 

Now that I’m thinking more about his and my grandma’s deaths, I see the scene a little differently. I don’t think he was giving up on life, but instead recognizing that its end would not include the objects that had once defined him. 

There was one thing my grandma did that showed she needed some control, some advance planning: She bought her and Grandpa’s cemetery plots not long after arriving in America. She and her oldest sister did this when their mother, my great-grandma, was alive. They wanted to be buried side-by-side in their adoptive country. Plus, there was the money issue. My grandma would need to pay off the plots over the course of many years. 

But before we could arrange for the burial, we needed to locate the cemetery; my grandma didn’t know the name. She’d visited her mother’s grave, but had been driven there. She had misplaced the paperwork and had no proof of purchase, which caused me frustration that I couldn’t share. I called the cemeteries I could find online, a grandchild pleading, “Do you have my grandma and my grandpa?” 

I stumbled on the place eventually, but almost hung up when they told me they had no one by the name Svetlana. Apparently, she’d given them her Jewish first name, and not the Slavic name she took to hide her Jewishness. She also spelled her birth name “Sarra,” likely not knowing standard English spellings for the name. We never called her Sara, preferring “Sanya,” a nickname my grandma gave herself during her student days, but in all documents, my grandma was known as Svetlana. It made me pause to realize that she used her Jewish name. Did she do this because she thought she had to for a Jewish cemetery, or was it meaningful to her to reclaim her birth name? 

“When did you change your name?” I call my grandma yet again, afraid I’d started to annoy her with all my questions.  

She tells me it was a few years before we left Ukraine. I am surprised. I had assumed it would’ve been in childhood or in youth, from knowing many Soviet Jews who changed their names. 

“They tortured me my whole life for that name—at school, at work, wherever you can think of.” 

By “they,” she means Ukrainians. I have heard comments like this from so many Jews I’ve known, both there and here. “Ukraine was like my evil stepmom,” someone in my family once said, and I knew what they meant. To grow up Jewish in Ukraine was to be hated. Even when I was little in the ‘90s, I knew my Jewishness was something that I had to keep a secret from my friends who weren’t Jews. “My family told me that you’re Jewish,” a playground friend had told me once. She didn’t seem to know exactly what that meant, but her face said she knew that she had something over me.  

“Abraham and Sarah! Abraham and Sarah!” my grandma says in mocking singsong, not rolling her r’s but keeping them inside her throat. 

I flinch. The sound is terrible because its purpose is humiliation and I imagine children taunting her this way. The joke was that Jews couldn’t roll the Slavic r, instead making it guttural. It was a tell-tale sign that one was dealing with a zhid. It is ironic that my grandma chose to spell her name with not one but two r’s in English, drawing attention to the sound that people of her ilk allegedly transformed from pretty trill to grating groan. 

I want to ask how, given all of this, my grandma’s and my grandpa’s hearts bleed for Ukraine. I’ve seen them suffer to the point where I have been afraid the stress would end their life. But I can’t get my mouth around the question. To do so seems obscene when I think of Tetiana and her children, when I know that her husband had to see her body in a bag.

The war has made me wrestle with my own connection to Ukraine. Because we left when I was 9, and I never called myself Ukrainian, it is disturbing to feel differently about this war than other wars I’ve witnessed from afar. I hate being reminded that we have more sympathy for people who we think resemble us or live in places we have been to. But where exactly does resemblance lie for me, an emigrant who never went back to her birthplace? In childhood, I was told that I was neither Russian or Ukrainian. We, Jews, were a third thing—mysterious and parasitic. Now people come to me and offer sympathy because they think the place you’re born is also where you feel that you belong and I don’t have the time to school them about Soviet Jewish problems. I want to tell them that it’s complicated. The war feels personal but words like “nation” and “identity” fail at an explanation. There is no easy answer to the question why, but I still grasp at reasons. Because I walked those streets, because I grew up with a homesick mom, because when my grandparents say Ukraine, I hear their longing and their pain, and I will lose them soon….

The war is now a month and twelve days old. We’re back in San Francisco to return the paperwork and make final selections. The funeral director takes us to the modest showroom with the caskets, urns, and tchotchkes whose connection to the end of life eludes me. 

“Jewish coffins must be made of wood,” he says. How deftly he can use his tone to make this comment and still sound sensitive instead of condescending.  

The truth is that he knows much more than us about what makes a Jewish burial. Despite my years in Hebrew day school, I never learned this detail about wooden coffins, maybe because I was too young. Does Grandma know? Her knowledge about Jewish laws and rites is patchwork, Soviet-style. I’m glad this funeral director has to know such things to serve the immigrants in this community.       

She goes to use the bathroom so I’m temporarily stuck, surrounded by the coffins, or the corners of the coffins that are there as swatches. I don’t know how to move my body in this space. Am I supposed to walk among displays as if in a department store? Am I supposed to squint at specs and make it seem like I’m considering the options? Should I be taking mental notes on what I’ll want one day? I know I want cremation. Like most, I’ve vaguely thought about this question many times in life. At times, I’ve thought about it more concretely. When I was diagnosed with a chronic illness, I feared an early death. Now I’m not worried about death. I’m worried about losing those I love. I’m worried that I’ll live so long I’ll die alone.    

My grandma reemerges and picks out a pair of simple wooden caskets from the budget section. It is exactly what I’d guess she’d choose. I’m thankful that she did it quickly and I’m eager to get out, to take her home. I’ve been exposing her to something hazardous. She’s been a sport but there’s no need to keep reminding her about her death.  

But when we get in the car, my mother calls and says that we should all go out to lunch because the sun is out and it’s a sin to waste a windless day in such a windy city. 

We’re sitting on a San Francisco terrace eating avocado toast. My grandma doesn’t know this is considered a bougie snack, she just likes avocados. We don’t say anything about the funeral arrangements. Instead, we talk about the war. We’ve read about the massacre in Bucha, a suburb that is less than 20 miles from where we all once lived. My mom talks loudly, per her habit. My grandma curses the perpetrators for rape and the corpses in the streets. I take some joy in seeing them get angry together, as opposed to at each other, but I feel the other diners’ eyes dart in our direction. Maybe they wonder if we’re Russian and, for a second, I imagine asking them to let us be; this is our language too. And yet it’s true that since the war began, the language has grown bitter in my mouth. 

A few days later I will watch a video of bodies dug out of a mass grave in Bucha after locals buried them in haste. The video will show a pit with boots and hands that stick out of the dirt, as if intending to crawl out. Now, at least some of those killed will be named and buried in a cemetery “humanely.” The video will show a cemetery worker saying that he recognized his friend when opening a body bag. This friend he will describe as: electrician, jack of all trades, a good person.      

But now, I’m outside in the warmth. I’m thinking of the fact that I have done what Grandma asked of me. A part of me feels lighter and relieved. Another part of me feels that nothing is as it should be in this fractured world. This is my memory picture. It contains sun, a terrace, and three women set apart by 20 years of life, respectively. It also contains all the planned and unplanned grief. It contains war, invisible, but on our lips.    

Maggie Levantovskaya was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and grew up in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Michigan Quarterly Review, Catapult, the LA Times, Current Affairs, and Lithub. Her day job is teaching other people to write at Santa Clara University. You can find her on twitter @MLevantovskaya and maggielevantovskaya.com.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Peter Rubin

In the language of this new war, McNulty is a “volunteer,” one of roughly tens of thousands of internationals and local Ukrainians who’ve devoted themselves to supporting the resistance against the Russian military. The roles they play vary widely, from humanitarians like McNulty to social-media celebrities fundraising for military units. There are brash foreign fighters and humble food drivers and furtive gunrunners and ancient babushkas knitting camouflage ghillie suits in community gyms. Some are volunteers in the literal sense, burning through their savings to subsidize their work. Some earn a small stipend; still others are profiteers who see nothing wrong with benefiting financially amid a nation’s war for survival. It’s proven dangerous work, too—in January, two British volunteers were killed attempting to evacuate an elderly civilian. In February, American Pete Reed, another Marine veteran, was killed when an antitank missile hit his ambulance. For all the differences in type and approach, the volunteer movement is unified by a core belief that this is a fight worth fighting, that Ukraine is worth defending.

Former members of Arkan’s Tigers are on Facebook, Instagram, and the Russian social media site V Kontakte, where some of them share photos of themselves in uniform, connect with other former members of Arkan’s Tigers, and boast about their past.

On Facebook, Golubović does not present that version of himself. He’s a motorcyclist. He’s a racer, an automobilist, and a musician. A DJ, a producer, and an owner of a music studio. There’s no mention of war — let alone alleged crimes — only his description of himself as a “commando scout high officer.”

In 2018, Golubović updated his Facebook to say he got married. In the comments, people congratulate him with heart emojis. One commenter, however, shares Haviv’s famous photo. “You bum,” he writes in Serbian. “Your time will come.” He adds a curse, one that roughly means: May all the dishonorable things you’ve done come back to hurt you and your family.

In Golubović’s Facebook photo, a bottle of Taittinger champagne balances on a motorcycle.

He’s Facebook friends with at least 10 men who appear to be former members of Arkan’s Tigers. Some of the men listed on the Serbian State Security payment list that Rolling Stone obtained currently work within the Serbian government, and others allegedly have links to organized crime. One former Tiger appears to have recently served as a bodyguard for Ceca, Arkan’s widow and one of Serbia’s most famous singers, who now has her own Kardashian-style reality television show. And at least one former Tiger is on the run from Interpol, having allegedly fled to Russian-occupied Ukraine in 2014 after refusing to stand trial for alleged war crimes he committed. One man on the list is serving 40 years in prison for killing Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić in 2003.

In the first week of war, an 82mm mortar shell hit our garden and exploded in the crown of a cherry tree. Our façade was riddled with shrapnel, there were shards of broken mirror on the dressing table—seven years of bad luck that don’t seem like much now. But as I listened to the first bursts and blasts at dawn on April 5, I wasn’t yet familiar with the acoustics of my city. And I hadn’t learned to count the whistle, didn’t know that those you heard couldn’t kill you. The whistle of the shell that will kill you is always heard by someone else. The whistle is the sound for the ears of the spared

Over the following days and months, I taught myself the sounds of weapons, their discharge and their projectiles’ impact. Mortar bombs, 60mm, 82mm and 120mm. Howitzer shells, 155mm, tank and cannon rounds. The solitary sniper shot, often from the vintage M-48 rifle. Or a more modern one, procured in the West. The detonation of an 82mm mortar shell down in the city, or on our hill, or on the next one. An explosion close by, followed by another a few dozen meters away, and immediately after, the patter of summer raindrops on the tree crowns in an orchard—the shower of shrapnel. To this day I feel uneasy when summer rain starts

And so what I desperately tried to do in the subsequent months and years was to preserve that Sarajevo of mine, save it from the nocturnal heist that took place just before the dawn on April 5, 1992. In a way, that’s the most intense identity reflex I’ve ever had in my life. It took me a long time, maybe all of these last thirty years, to learn to live as a foreigner, even in my own language, in my own country.

How did it come to this? Rozina Ali investigates:

What helped the Masts succeed was a set of assumptions that for many have become accepted truths: that those we kill abroad in the dead of night are terrorists, that Islam is inherently dangerous, that the courts are inherently just, that prosperity confers morality. In all the time that politicians, religious leaders, lawyers and federal and local government officials sought to help the Masts obtain custody of this baby, no one took seriously the possibility that she might have a family, and that they might care for her, too. Despite the rumors that spread through Bagram that fall, L. was not without a past or loved ones. She had relatives, and one day, they were located.

This is the story of a baby girl who was rescued by Americans in a battlefield they helped create. Ultimately, this is a story about the fictions we tell ourselves about the 20 years we spent in Afghanistan. “It’s the complete collapse of rule of law that allowed this abduction to happen,” Sehla Ashai, one of the lawyers who would go on to represent the baby’s relatives, told me. “And it didn’t happen in Afghanistan — it happened in America.”