Bucha: My Visit to the Past

“We can choose to pay attention to what we’ve lost, or to what we still have. We can become embittered by trauma, or we can cling to the part of ourselves that is innocent and unburdened, that remains open to wonder and joy.” 
— Edith Eger, The Choice 

November 17, 2024 

Ukraine is fighting for light. Last night there was yet another attack on the energy system—120 missiles, 90 Shaheds, some deadly ordnance hit its target. I've reached that level of adaptation (or exhaustion) where the explosions from downed Shaheds reach me through sleep—they wake me briefly, and then I slip back into a doze. Because that is real rest compared to what it was then. 

We’ve grown used to calling trauma’s territory simply then. That holiday that will always be with you, for the rest of your life. February–March 2022. February, March. Back then, too, the worst always happened at night. The loudest explosions, the most chilling uncertainty. But I would curl into my corner on the floor by the wall: a fur coat on a mattress, covered with a blanket and sheepskin coat, my head wrapped in a headscarf, and sleep. And I would dream of the sea... It’s strange how, in the midst of hell, you can dream of the bluest, bluest sea—but that’s how it was. 

I made my little corner in a dark room the day a distant neighbor, through the last scraps of internet, wrote: “The orcs are driving down Yablunska Street, there’ll be shelling, take cover.” After entering our neighborhood in tanks, the Russians shelled all the buildings. Ours was hit too, and lying on the floor, we felt the impact. Later, neighbors told us it had been fired from a BMD (ballistic missile defense) and showed us a piece of the shell. That was the signal: move to the floor—if you hadn’t already managed to escape to safety. 

Sometimes, a tank would drive out onto Yablunska Street. Around 9 p.m., when it was already dark, everyone wrapped up in blankets, trembling with fear of the night. The tank would fire straight ahead, the ground would shake, and everything inside us would freeze and drop. The first time it fired, I was terrified it had hit the kindergarten nearby. 

A dark room right in the middle of the house—there we were, my mom and I, with two cats. There was no basement, but even if there had been, no one would’ve gone down there. Now I understand what madness it was—just sitting in the house, stunned, waiting for something. But we had no other choice. The shelters were too far away, and in the end, the Russians drove everyone out of them. One of the shelter organizers was shot. 

Since then, I’ve become the proud owner of knowledge no one in a 21st-century European suburb should need: that tracer bullets fired into a yard really do make a "pew-pew" sound, and that mortars whistle. Knowledge that could have easily remained unknown to a civilian. But Russian cave-dwelling evil has its own plans: to destroy progress, drag everyone into the darkness of caves, freeze them there—and rule. 

A memory from April 12, 2023

It was so fucking cold then, in 2022. Heating, gas, electricity, water, internet, and other signs of civilization disappeared the moment the Russians came. We’d come out into the sun to warm ourselves, crawling out like crocuses, and the sun shone—but it didn’t warm us. Just scraps of corrugated cardboard flying through the air, and Epicenter hypermarket was on fire. (OMG, I just remembered sweeping up that cardboard in front of the house—along with some random piece of metal whose origin was unclear. Beckett would’ve applauded me from his grave.) 

And I, having burned Pinker’s books, completely lost my rational bearings. I kept making little wishes to myself: once those damn crocuses bloom—we’ll win. But they wouldn’t bloom… Even under the sun. They were afraid. Probably opened after March 21, and by April 1 for sure. Seems rationality isn’t always good for your health. But this year they sprouted like crazy! I tell them: you better bring us victory, or I’ll make saffron out of you. 

I need to explain about Steven Pinker, or more precisely—his book Enlightenment Now, which I translated into Ukrainian back in 2019. The publisher sent me five author copies. I gave away a few; the rest were stored at home. Who could’ve known that a book with such an enlightened title would literally serve to start a fire? 

Around the seventh day of occupation, those few neighbors who hadn’t evacuated no longer cared about anything. Everything except survival lost its meaning. For instance, Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. I burned one author copy in rage, because it said that life in the world had gotten better. Fewer babies dying, smallpox defeated. Poor people not as poor as before. Seriously?! Then where did these tanks come from, these explosions? Why does the exhaust vent reek of sulfur? 

Maybe Pinker was looking at the world without Russians? No, he actually has pages in his book dedicated to that evil—he’s aware of it. He just focuses on other parts of the world. 

But now I have a signature recipe. It’s called Pork Roast à la Pinker.

You take a big piece of meat from the freezer that’s already leaking because there’s no electricity, wrap it in several layers of foil, place Enlightenment Now under the grill (because there’s barely any firewood, but Enlightenment is in ample supply—three more copies still lying around). You put the wrapped meat into a roasting pan, cover it, and let it slow-cook for about an hour and a half. 

It’s actually really tasty! 

And while this fine dining experience is slowly roasting, you step outside now and then to check on it. And you gaze in awe as a shell flies overhead—from the direction of Borodianka toward Irpin. And then another one flies back, from Irpin toward Borodianka. Somewhere near Ostap Vyshnia Lane and the glass factory—dry bursts of automatic gunfire. That’s where people are being killed. 

But you feel no fear for your own life. That ended along with Enlightenment, which by now is charred and nearly burned through. 

A shell landed in front of the house across the street? “Oh.” In the morning, everyone comes out to look at the damage. Here’s one damaged house, and over there—they’re shooting down missiles. And one neighbor says, enchanted: “Look, a mushroom cloud—they shot down a missile!” And we’re like, “Yay, a missile got shot down…” Unfortunately, the missiles didn’t run out—because they aren’t Enlightenment. 

Eventually, all of us few who stayed behind in our little corner, who didn’t evacuate, just got tired of being afraid. Because even the worst horror becomes dull and monotonous over time. Being in an active war zone (from March 4 to March 21) created a kind of break in my consciousness.  

I describe it to myself as a chasm. On one edge of the abyss is your former peaceful life: work, friends, travel, the steady warmth of daily routine. And then, suddenly—you’re thrown into the Mariana Trench of war: dark, cold, with a primitive fire burning just to cook food. And around the fire—there’s you. Lost, stripped of everything, left with only what’s inside you—and the people around you, who, in the same conditions, reveal both the best and worst in themselves. 

And on the far opposite edge—there’s a new life, if you make it out of the abyss. But the distance to that new life feels insurmountable. 

The longest journey of my life was 9 hours, 30 kilometers, from Bucha to Kyiv. We were lucky, if you can call it that. We got out of hell 10 days before the de-occupation of the Kyiv region—thanks to an old LG push-button phone, charged from the car, which miraculously caught a jammed Kyivstar signal; to kind people who gave me information about the last evacuation from Bucha; and to a family with a small boy, who took in my mom, me, and our two cats, and dared to break through several checkpoints under the barrels of entrenched tanks. 

A fairy-tale rescue, the eye of the hurricane, an angelic intervention. An empty Yablunska Street, a yellow Bohdan minibus at the turn to the garages (as we’d later learn, with corpses inside), everything around covered in the gray ash of war (or maybe that’s a mental defense mechanism), and slowly crawling down the street—a black Volkswagen. A Russian soldier slowly emerges from a trench-ambush at the corner, his eyebrows just as slowly rising in surprise. 
 
"Evacuation is over," he said. 
 
"You won’t make it home, they’ll shoot you," warned another. 

They tried to take our kind driver’s phone, but he must have had some kind of magic—some charm that softened even the ugliest monsters—so instead, they let him just break the SIM card. Then they advised him to drive very slowly along the highway and to stop if anyone started shooting. The moment we finally crawled to the Bucha City Council felt like unreal good fortune. In central Bucha, people walked the streets fearlessly, carrying water (a woman in our district was shot dead for just that—for bringing water. Even now, in 2025, I walk past the entrance door of her building, riddled with AK bullets—the door she tried to hide behind). In front of the city council, they were distributing humanitarian aid—saying it should go first and foremost to our neighborhood, but nothing ever reached us, because no one could get in. 

History has no subjunctive mood, but I do—for you. If our car had turned left on Yablunska instead of right, we likely wouldn’t have survived. Who could have known that to the left lay the road of death, strewn with bodies in some mad satanic sacrifice? We found out after the de-occupation. 

Diary entry from March 21, 2022 

“What’s on your mind?” Well—two sunflower seeds. I pulled them out of the pocket of my terry cloth bathrobe before tossing it in the wash. When did I even manage to put sunflower seeds in my pocket? 

That day the shelling was heavy—it was the day of the battle for Moshchun, the decisive one in the battle for Kyiv. I heard there would be an evacuation and ran to the neighbors. I knocked. They opened the door: “Where do you think you’re going? Do you hear what’s happening outside? They’ll wipe us out. Want some sunflower seeds?” 
 
I shrugged and took a handful. Going out under bullets or cracking sunflower seeds—there was no longer any real difference between those two actions. I went back home, poured the seeds into an oval dish, put it on the table, and started cracking a few. And then—someone knocked on the door… “We’ve decided to go. Get ready.” 

The car—a Volkswagen Touareg—had been left behind by a neighbor who’d taken off with his family and dog in a Lexus back on February 24 or 25, at the very start of the fighting. Our rescuers were his friends from another building in the neighborhood, where for some reason things felt even more terrifying than where we were. The Touareg was stuffed to the brim with bags and suitcases—it was being driven to Boyarka for its owner. There was basically no room for people, but hey—if the guy hadn’t loved his stuff so much, we wouldn’t have had that car at all, right? They had two, after all. 

I stuffed those two sunflower seeds into the bathrobe pocket and ran to pack up myself and mom into jackets, and the cats into a sports duffel. If not for the miraculous weight loss that came with occupation, we wouldn’t have fit in that car—but from the left side, it was pretty well protected from shrapnel (if it came to that). Not so sure about bullets, though. 

The first Russian checkpoint was near the lake. When the Buryat soldier saw a black SUV slowly crawling down the gray, empty, apocalyptic road, he couldn’t hide his shock—he climbed out of the trench, his eyes practically popping out of his head. 

The second checkpoint—on the Warsaw highway past the bridge. My heart dropped there, because they all came out to meet the car—disciplined, well-equipped, armed to the teeth... and there were abandoned Bucha dogs running around at their feet. Meaning—they were feeding them. They let us pass too, after some persuasion. 

Near city hall, a crowd had gathered—people with animals, waiting for buses. And then, traveling in a convoy with the buses, we had to pass 10 more checkpoints. At one of them, we encountered an absolutely surreal character from the depths of Russia. He kept apologizing profusely to everyone he made open their trunks: “Please open it, you understand, it’s my duty.” 

Here it’s worth recalling how, at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a video went viral of a woman in Kherson telling Russian soldiers to put sunflower seeds in their pockets—so flowers would grow from their corpses in our soil. To this one too—I wish him sunflower seeds in his pocket. I wish all of them that. 

It was a spectacularly eerie day. And mortally fascinating. As you can see, memory gently nudges me toward evacuation, toward escape, toward a fortunate alignment of countless circumstances, toward the warmth of my Kyiv den, which we reached like cave dwellers, rushing to wash ourselves, because for a whole month we’d only seen water in bottles (the same kind neighbor A. kept bringing us—because we needed it. And he brought it to other neighbors too). 

I pulled off the hat I’d been wearing nonstop for a month, and half my once-lush hair stayed inside it. And memory—beneath what’s left of that hair—keeps leading me onward: To flee, to save myself, to shut my eyes, cover my ears, to not remember all of that. Because even now, when my body has grown stronger, even somewhat healed, it’s hard to endure. 

I write these lines from the perspective of Present-Me—From the opposite side of the abyss. 

A lot of time passed after being rescued from the occupation before I was able to feel anything at all. At first, the numbness and deadness were so strong that I couldn’t even feel the warm summer wind on my skin. My hands were constantly shaking. I dreamt of the howling dogs left chained by their owners on Yablunska Street. Those dogs could sense death, and we didn’t know it. We were lucky. The eye of the hurricane. 

Fortunately, I had my work. With trembling hands, I typed out translated texts on the keyboard, sitting in my thick cocoon and feeling a sinister depth appear in my words—something that hadn’t been there before. Suffering drags out either the worst—or the best—in you. Depends on your luck. 

Here’s my note about work: 

June 22, 2023 
 
“The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.” 
 
This book... no, really—a Book... had long been a source of personal shame for me, a crushing sense of helplessness, and a love for language that seeped through every crack and crevice of the translator who couldn’t quite find the words, couldn’t summon them, couldn’t match the richness—because how do you grasp and convey the entire treasure trove of the English language? I was supposed to submit the translation on March 1, 2022, well past the original deadline. There was no more time to delay. And so I worked intensely. 

When darkness from the North fell upon us, this book became a source of strength for me—I trudged into the iron wind, trying to translate and proofread it when there was no more light, no more heat. And just before the laptop screen went dark for good, the book spoke to me in the words of Dr. Marinus: “We are in the eye of the hurricane.” And indeed—we were exactly there... 

I kept reading under the blanket on my e-reader, and the imprisoned heroine Orito helped me stay sane. I comforted my neighbor by telling her about the life of Otane, the Japanese herbalist, who lived in a hut on the mountain, exposed to all the winds. How she warmed her teapot over a fire and secretly prayed to the Virgin Mary. 

After the occupation, this book literally pulled me out of the abyss by the hair—it helped bring me back to life, speaking to me again and again beneath the wailing of Kyiv’s air raid sirens—with its refined language, with Psalms (Psalm 37—the one about the wicked being cut down?), with stories/History, with Jacob’s steadfastness on the Watchtower. 

This book is a touch of eternity. What joy it is that a translator can touch it, even with just fingertips and brain neurons. The quality of the edition is stunning. Embossed hardcover, luxurious paper. The quintessence of delight in the verbal magic of David Mitchell. 

I wish brave scribe Jacob a great voyage. That entire path he traveled... The one we traveled. Fantastic. And yet, real. 

After the rescue, I still couldn’t reconcile this reality with the one we had just lived through. Something didn’t align, the gears wouldn’t catch, wouldn’t turn. I drifted in the cocoon of trauma. It’s a very empty and eerie place, and also quiet—despite the constant wail of air raid sirens in Kyiv. In the cocoon of trauma, you simply can’t grasp what this whole reality is for. Where to place it. Just a few weeks ago, your entire being had been reduced to animal terror, immersed in a primordial nightmare—and now you even have cookies on the table. Though... you had cookies back then too. But those were a different kind of cookies. 

Looking back, I can confidently say that the most meaningful confirmation of the words quoted in the epigraph by Edith Eger is laughter in the worst moments — and the broken, crumbling cookies from the Bucha Delicia factory, which kind people brought us by the sack as a substitute for bread, the kind that keeps you from dying. Those cookies were so tragically delicious that I still can't bring myself to eat them. 

We really can choose how to respond to all this horror—to tremble like animals or to laugh openly, standing between buildings in the ringing silence between shellings, without even thinking that your laughter might attract the orcs. Laughter as protection, as a saving nervous reaction of the nervous system that keeps you from drowning in the darkness. 

Though most of the time, there wasn’t much to laugh about. Once—I can’t remember the date—an elderly neighbor called me from the little hill by her gate. (Her face, as foreign authors would write, was a mask of horror.) She said looters were going around, stealing food; they had already come to one woman wearing masks, took all her food and her phone. She asked me to carry her food down into her cellar because she couldn't go down herself after surgery. And what kind of food was it? A bit of honey, a few jars of preserves, some onions, something else minor. Not even potatoes. Though earlier she had sworn to me she had everything—even water. 

It’s amazing how differently people define everything. We thought we had nothing! I mean really—is that food? Just a bag of rice, a bag of wheat groats, some peas, a basket of potatoes, an opened jar of flour, coffee, white and brown sugar, and a full freezer that we tried to save however we could: we gave some away, cooked some over a fire, and when we left, we handed out another bundle of supplies. 

But what I really beat myself up for was my own stupidity. My whole life, I teased my mom: “Why are you so in love with canned food? What do you even need that for? It’s gross, you can buy and cook fresh food. Those Soviet-style canned goods are expensive, tasteless, and take up space.” So under my pressure, she didn’t buy much. 

At the time of the invasion, we had three cans. One each: tuna, cod liver, sardines. And we didn’t even eat them—we packed them in a backpack with plastic spoons because, well, who knew where we’d end up or how we’d need to survive? 

We opened the tuna when we got to Kyiv, and there was nothing there except half a bag of old rice, a two-day curfew, and an almost empty Novus store. I’ll never forget those long aisles in what used to be a luxurious supermarket, where after a few days, German oatmeal started appearing. Kyiv was under siege, but even in those conditions, you could survive. 

It’s still unbearable for me to think of the people in Bucha who died of hunger. The artist Liubov Panchenko… Just a few days earlier, the local store shelves had been overflowing with food! And so now, I am officially the third generation in our family traumatized by the Soviet legacy. Now, in my cabinet, whole towers of canned goods stand tall. 

We thought we were going to die, but ended up in Kyiv 

I used to admire Kyiv from a distance. Noisy, joyful, green, lush, anciently young. It takes your breath away when you return in the summer from some lazy, sun-scorched place, and here everything is leafy, energetic, fresh. A city of power. It has its own unique, many-eyed spirit that watches you closely wherever you go. It always felt to me like it was distant but kind. Or at least that’s how it seemed. 

And after a month in that orcish pit, with the constant threat of execution and dozens of checkpoints, there was nowhere else for us to go but into the arms of Kyiv. It had its own problems and heavy wounds, but I was so beaten down I didn’t even understand how serious they were. I just clung to the city like to something strong, because it never even occurred to me that it could be weak and unable to protect us.  

I didn’t understand why everyone kept telling me to go farther, not to stay... But the strength here! Warmth, water, food—it was all there. Checkpoints, tank traps, barbed wire on every corner. For every person carrying a loaf of bread, there were twenty more with Kalashnikovs. It gave a sense of safety, of assurance.  

So what if our car was one of the only ones on the highway heading toward Kyiv, not away from it? So what if the streets were empty, the streetlights off, the signs of street battles everywhere? After Bucha, this place was paradise. I didn’t feel anger here, as some have written. Just tension. Dragon-like. Predatory. Merciless to the enemy and kind to its own.  

Kyiv clearly didn’t have time for me then, but I quite literally felt it accept me and embrace me: “Cry, daughter, I’m standing here beside you with a shield.” One can only imagine what this dragon with its Zmiyovi ramparts has seen over the centuries. It can’t be frightened by anything. And what is it really, the spirit of Kyiv, and what stands behind it—we don’t even know half. We can only feel. Because truthfully, I don’t know—did we hold the city, or did it hold us? 

January 5, 2025 

Yesterday I watched the feature film Bucha. I cried, but I kept the trauma under control. There’s a woman in the film who is killed simply for being Ukrainian. And as a Ukrainian, she loved planting flowers—she saw it as her way to survive. That is absolute reality. One of my most surreal memories: it was deafening outside, explosions overhead, a dogfight going on in the sky, and the mother of a neighbor’s wife was out weeding a garden bed. One foot under the awning, the other on the soil. It helped her not to lose her mind. “You really shouldn’t be out here,” I told her, “it’s dangerous.” She just waved her hand. Because after the Russian tanks, our Ukrainian flowers will grow—they just need the soil to be prepared. 

The filmmakers captured well the central motif of the events in Bucha and the answer to the helpless question “why” you must look evil directly in the eye and fight it. And we exist to fight. Not to curse our fate, but to accept that this is how it is, and to choose: are we on the side of light or darkness? Fear belongs to the dark side. Those orcs who cowardly commit acts of evil against us are themselves trembling with fear. And we must fight endlessly. That is our destiny, whether we like it or not. 

Instead of an epilogue. March 24, 2022 

One month since escaping occupation. On March 21, we—shell-shocked refugees—were given tulips in Bilohorodka, where volunteers welcomed anyone who had survived and made it. The tulips were sad and wilted, their heads drooping, just like us. 
 
And today, I walk into the kitchen, and there—there they are. We will rise, too. 

Text of Olena Liubenko; Translated by Kate Tsurkan; Photo by Viktoriia Cherniahivska.

The article was first published in Ukrainian and Polish and is the result of the collaboration between the IWM and the Polish online magazine Dwutygodnik.

Olena Liubenko is a translator of fiction and film, she translates and edits movies and TV series for the dubbing studio 1+1 and collaborates with various publishing houses. Over 23 years of her career, she has translated more than 30 books and numerous films and TV series (including dubbing, voice-over, and subtitling). She lives in Bucha.