I write these lines while I am standing near a room that houses about 30 people who have been forced to abandon their homes where they were constantly in danger of being attacked by the Russian army.
I write shortly after two men, on a military base thousands of kilometres far from this country, discussed the lives of thousands of people as if they were clauses in a real estate contract.

For over thirty years, we have lived through conflicts.
We started in the 1990s in the Balkans, in what was then the first war in Europe after the Second World War.
We were moved by our own weakness: we had no direct experience with war and didn't know what to do, but we could at least avoid leaving those people alone.

At this time when war is increasingly relevant and increasingly "loved", I believe rhetoric is useless, I believe every word we say must be a commitment.
If I say I am against war, then I must live it.
Otherwise, it's better to keep quiet.
We are against war because we have spent many years among people who are on the front lines, who live or have lived there, in refugee camps, and I have seen that war, being a clash of forces, makes the strong win, and not who’s right.

20 November 2024

Ala and Bogdan, mother and son, have been in Mykolaiv for a month. Their home in Kherson is almost completely destroyed. Ala's husband, Bogdan's father, died at the front a few months ago. Ala held her husband's funeral alone. She has no one left here: all her relatives have fled Ukraine, and she dreams of leaving too. She hopes to go to Poland, but she needs money for a passport and time to learn the language.
Ala has the eyes of someone crushed by life, exhausted by a war that destroys almost everything. She never looks away from me, and her eyes cry out in pain.
And yet, every day at the center in Mykolaiv, Ala cooks for all of us, making sure we've eaten.
Bogdan is always playing with his scooter. He is a child of war—one of those who no longer dream of becoming an astronaut or imagining their future; he simply doesn't dream anymore. His eyes are flat, fixed on the only tangible reality he knows: playing with his scooter and holding on to his mother.
Bogdan is 9 years old. He desperately needs to see that there is more to life beyond the war, his father's death, his destroyed home, and his scooter. He needs to know that he, too, can dream of becoming anything he wants—that there is a future for him. Bogdan needs the gaze of a child who believes in dreams again.