Two years ago I first learned how missiles explode. At five in the morning, I went out to the balcony, lit a cigarette, and stared long at the red-orange glow on the horizon. My apartment windows on the 17th floor overlook that area – to the border with Russia, 40 km away. Just 40.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
It's a bit strange, but in the first minutes, hours, maybe even days, I close off myself into some kind of naive denial. It can't be! They're scaring us, these are dummy missiles, they don't have warheads. It was five in the morning. I was afraid to go into my daughter's room. I hoped she was still asleep and that when she woke up it would all be over and she wouldn't even notice.
I went out to the street with the dog. The panic I saw there shocked me. People were running in and out of the building with suitcases, women were screaming, children crying. Huge traffic jams formed on the roads, long lines stretched next to ATMs; and pharmacies and shops didn't open. I just wanted to yell at everyone "Have you lost your minds? This isn't real!"
I'm ashamed to remember myself like that, back then, two years ago, as someone who still couldn't distinguish between different kinds of explosions. Only when my daughter started getting sick in the basement shelter, when the animals lost weight to the point of being unrecognizable, when fighter jets buzzed above our roof – only then, finally, would I accept that it's all really happening.
Choosing between daughter and parents
On March 5, 2022, I wrote: "I would never wish for even a sworn enemy to have to choose between a daughter and parents. This is my personal hell, the crucible that will stay with me forever. The future film about the war will have to contain a scene from an ordinary bedroom in a sleeping area in Kharkiv, where against the background of loud explosions a mother and daughter wail trying to drown out the sirens. 'Mom, I'm sorry,' I told her. 'Anuchka, you have to survive,' she replied. I sent my daughter out of Kharkiv which had become the front line, leaving my parents in the city for a few months, where they would sustain daily air raids. They refused to leave. I didn't believe I wouldn't see my only daughter for a year and a half.
In time it will turn out that I won't be able to believe many more things. That is, I didn't doubt the facts; I just refused on a fundamental level to accept this monstrous worldview. Bucha, Irpin, the maternity hospital in Mariupol, the theater with the sign "children", the train station in Kramatorsk, the shopping center in Kremenchuk, the high-rise building in Dnipro, the northern Saltivka district in Kharkiv, where I guide foreign journalists through the ruins. And this unfathomable sea of yellow-blue flags in Cemetery Number 18 in the city. An ocean.
An abyss
It's impossible to pass by there without tears, without hysteria. The questions that will forever remain unanswered: Why? What for? Today we ask them less and less, even in the storm of emotions after another missile and more dead children. History simply spirals or travels in a vicious circle. Dwarf Putin thinks himself a god, a pure Aryan, or an eminent Russian czar? It's immaterial, as he is just a fanatic murderer of people, nations, and generations.
Lessons in propaganda from Russian TV
Mom died in August 2022, in my arms. She suffered a fatal stroke when she heard another explosion of a Russian missile. Dad lived another 44 days until his heart stopped. I stayed in Kharkiv. Because someone has to be here. To drive lemons with honey to the wounded, to clean up the rubble when a missile hits friends' houses, to help lonely elderly people. To live. Yes, someone has to live.
My girl arrived in Israel, finished her studies, and now works. On October 7 I wrote: "The world has gone mad – when in the 21st century you finally make contact with your daughter and the two of you shout to drown out the sirens – yours, in Kharkiv, and hers, in Tel Aviv. 'Sasha, are you safe?', 'Mom? Mom? How is it there? Can you hear me?'"
"The world is not black and white," a friend from Germany tried to convince me after October 7 when we spoke about the massacre Hamas carried out. "You have to understand the historical context and in general..." he fell silent. "Not everything is definite?" I helped him finish the sentence. We learned this phrase, "not everything is so definite," from the Russian propaganda, which also said it after the Bucha massacre and the destruction of Mariupol.
And after October 7, you too encountered the "context." Tell me: what historical contexts require expertise to justify the murder of unarmed youth at a music festival? What geographical mysteries need to be researched to explain torture, rape, looting? Those commentators, who spoke of Palestinian territories, were too reminiscent of the Nazis, who with verbal acrobatics built gas chambers.
The world is black and white
Five months later, I wake up to the sound of a "helicopter" –that's what a Russian Shahed drone sounds like flying right in front of the windows. The dog and I haven't even managed to get to the bathroom, which serves as our shelter, and there's already an explosion. Then another, and another, and another. Ambulances pour into our street. The air fills with the smell of something burnt.
Only in the morning does the full picture of the accursed night become clear: One of the Russian drones hit an oil depot. Diesel and gasoline merged into a deadly lava that started flowing downhill along the street. Houses and cars lit up like matches. A family with three children burned to death: dad, mom, and kids aged 7, 4, and six months. In the morning relatives provided DNA samples because the bodies were unidentifiable. The rescue forces had difficulty finding the baby's corpse. I couldn't help but think about that family. I imagined how in the evening the kids had built a snowman by the house, laughed, and threw snowballs at each other. And mom, with the baby in her arms, tried to convince them to come inside and eat dinner: "Come on, inside, you're totally soaked!"
An Israeli friend wrote to me: "I'm afraid they can't find the baby because its corpse melted together with one of the adults' corpses. That's how it was in our kibbutzim. They only identified corpses in CT scans." She was right: in the evening it was officially announced that the mother had hugged the baby.
The world is black and white. Everything is very unambiguous: The barbarians breaking into your home armed need to be destroyed. Glory to Ukraine! The people of Israel live!
Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!
