DIARIES

 

JOURNEY TO UKRAINE THROUGH A SNOWBOUND LANDSCAPE  DECEMBER ‘22

 

We boarded the train leaving Warsaw at 5.30pm.  A lonely kitbag stood by the stairs leading up to the platform.  UKRAINE was painted on its side.  A soldier’s kitbag.

We were in a tiny compartment - me jammed up against the heater, taking off layer after layer as the temperature rose.  At 19.53 the train halted at Lublin.  Memories of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short stories…and didn’t Marc Chagall come from a shtetl around here…?  It was starting to snow, people were standing motionless on the station platform, waiting for phantom trains.

 

Twice in the night we were abruptly woken with shouts and blinding lights.  The compartment door banged open, ‘Passports!’  First Polish border police, then two hours later, Ukrainian border police.  Each time the shock drove me bolt upright in the bunk.  But as the dawn light filtered in through the compartment window, I stared at the miles of snowbound landscape, dotted here and there with lonely cottages and was enraptured by the mystery of being on my way…

 

 

THE SHOWS, THE PEOPLE, THE DESTRUCTION  DECEMBER ‘22

 

Alex Borovensky, the Artistic Director of the ProEnglish Theatre, met us off the train.  He dismissed an elderly taxi driver swathed in a fur hat and enormous coat, saying he’d charge a fortune.  The following day we found ourselves flung unceremoniously out of another taxi, by a furious driver who had started shouting when we asked him to drive us back to Kyiv.  We never knew why he was so angry - he was beside himself, taking corners on two wheels - screaming what must have been abuse.  And when we finally left Kyiv many days later, our driver - another one - was yelling out of the window into the darkness - it was 11pm.  A woman’s face swam out of the shadows as she approached the car.  She was yelling back - but what were they both saying?  And what is it with taxi drivers in Ukraine, that they all yelled?  We encountered, everywhere we went, so much courage and resolve…perhaps the taxi drivers were expressing the collective agony of the nation…

 

A couple of days later we went to Bucha and Borodyanka, now notorious.  Borodyanka is a small, sad town occupied by the Russians for forty days.  They’d bombed thirty or forty buildings, including a couple of apartment blocks.  The residents had taken shelter in the cellar.  It became their coffin, their bodies lying there until the Ukrainian army retook the town.

 

The film crew I’d found - Simon, Krystyna and the rest - drove us there.  Simon knew the town and wanted us to document what had happened.  The horror of what Russia is doing is there, in those buildings.  We climbed up as far as we could go and stared into the ruins of what had been family homes.  Mountains of smashed crockery, a few intact photographs, children’s playthings…Later that day we visited Bucha.  Outside the town is what is now called the Car Cemetery.  Cars are piled up, one on top of the other: rusting shells, silent witnesses to their owners’ frantic attempts to escape.  The cars remind you of those human beings, all scrambling to get away, but machine-gunned and shelled by tanks.  One car still bore the traces of a woman’s hair and brains, after her head had been blown off.  These places are immeasurably sad.  They bear terrible witness to Putin’s grotesque dreams of conquest.