22/7
We said goodbye to everyone at camp including our lovely interpreter. Always hard to take when people so effusively thank you for coming to their country during war and for helping them. Feels like we can do so little and they are so grateful… 
After arriving at our hotel and checking in we sat down to have a coffee and plan our next move. As we sat down, I noticed a soldier come in with his wife. He had a prosthetic leg. After our coffee we went outside to catch a taxi and I noticed John talking to this soldier. I approached them and John said, “I know this guy!” Turned out it was the French soldier he had met in the rehabilitation centre in Lviv. His English wasn’t great, but he was able to tell us that he had just got out of hospital/rehab, and this was his first night with his wife in many months (hence why we backtracked on inviting him to dinner!!) He showed us his sturdy looking prosthesis encased in an army boot and then proceeded to tell us that he was going back to the front. When? Well, he didn’t know but he had two days with his wife, who was Ukrainian, and then back to base to await orders! He smiled as he demonstrated stepping forward with his prosthetic leg indicating he’d use that ‘leg’ to check for mines…. His smile then disappeared as he told us that the mines are very bad and are everywhere…. I couldn’t imagine having to go back to fight after having stepped on a mine and having lost my leg. But he spoke as if there was no other option and he had to fight! We exchanged numbers and photos and told him we would pray for him and parted from him with heavy hearts.
Max heading back to the front with one leg…
We headed off to the Holodomor Memorial and museum.
The Holodomor was yet another dark period in Ukrainian history. Similar in horror to the Holocaust yet much less known with many countries only recently recognising it as a genocide officially. I had known about it since childhood as my grandfather had lived through it. There were huge books that listed all the documented victims and there was a massive volume for each district. It was sobering to see one of these volumes for the district my grandfather had been living in.
The Holodomor was a man-made famine that occurred in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933. It was a genocidal policy orchestrated by Joseph Stalin’s regime, aimed at suppressing Ukrainian nationalism and resistance to collectivization. Through forced grain requisitioning, export quotas, and other oppressive measures, the Soviet government deliberately withheld food from Ukraine, resulting in the death of millions of Ukrainians. Some of the evils were described in great detail including the smashing of implements and millstones so that not even gathered acorns could be ground into a substitute flour after all their other foods were stolen – leading to mass starvation. The Holodomor remains a tragic and deeply contentious chapter in Ukrainian history, with estimates of the death toll ranging from several million to over ten million people. It is recognized as one of the deadliest famines in human history and an act of political repression and mass murder.
Memorial to the Holodomor
The millstones represent when the Russians smashed the millstones so starving Ukrainians couldn’t even make flour out of wild acorns…
Holodomor memorial
The millstones represent when the Russians smashed the millstones so starving Ukrainians couldn’t even make flour out of wild acorns
Holodomor museum- stolen grain
It was pouring rain as we came out of the Holodomor Museum and so our hopes of walking around the parks and lookouts were dashed. We headed across to a small café to grab a bite to eat and see if the rain would settle down. We had some delicious mushroom soup and potato and mushroom pancakes and coffee.
Potato pancakes and mushrooms
Out of the blue a young American guy popped in and said, “Are you Aussies or British?” Turned out his name was Garett, and he was a law student on his summer break who had come to help at the Civil Liberties Tribunal with documenting war crimes – mostly the detention of civilians. It turned out it was an organisation that we had tried to get in touch with and were wanting to talk to, so he took our contacts and was going to help with that. The rain hadn’t abated so we headed back to the hotel and got some rest.
23/7
John & Elsie headed back to Lviv and I’m staying on in Kyiv before heading off to Kryvyi Rih. Helping them get on their train we saw lots of soldiers heading back to the front – jumping on trains with place names well known to us now from reports of Russian shelling. The hotel we stayed in had lots of soldiers and it was eerie sharing elevators with them, watching them with their backpacks and their sleeping bags and thinking that they in a day they might be in a trench fighting for their life. Some of them had wives or girlfriends with them, holding on tightly to them. Others we saw holding their small children and hugging them. It was very hard to think of what was facing them.
Our hosts had only booked the train ticket for John & Elsie last minute, so they were in different compartments which wasn’t ideal. I gave John a crash course in Ukrainian – he at least could remember the word for wife – I figured if he could explain that Elsie was his wife, he might be able to get someone to swap with him. Was a relief to get a big thumbs up from the train and see that the swap had worked – John poked his head out the small gap in the window and called out “Divchina (wife) is a great word!!”
Poster in the train station
Headed back to the hotel as wanted to use some of this down time to work on the video of Mark the chaplain. It was emotionally gruelling to feel the weight of his words as I watched him speak on the video- knowing that he had died only a day before, shortly after speaking to me.
I sat in the hotel cafe for a lot of the day and during this time a young soldier came in and sat down to meet a middle aged man. The soldier started talking to him with a British accent. Following the conversation it sounded like he was talking to a British journalist. This young guy described in detail some very harrowing scenarios where they were outnumbered or ambushed by Russian soldiers but still managed to fight their way out. There were vivid descriptions of dead bodies and close calls. He then offered to show and send him videos on his phone from their GoPros and I could hear the sounds of intense gunfights. It was all a bit surreal and disturbing.
