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My grandma was as hard as nails. She had just turned 17 when the Nazis entered her village in the Kyiv region, near what is now the city of Bucha. She hid in the attic to avoid being taken for forced labour. They didn’t find her that time, but a few weeks later she was caught working in the fields. They put her in a cattle wagon and took her to Germany. She escaped and walked a couple of hundred kilometres back to her village. Grandma said that life was hard for everybody during the war, but she was lucky.
In the past month, two of my friends here in Kyiv happened to tell me that their hands have started shaking during Russian airstrikes. Everybody who knows that my hands shake during airstrikes tells me their stories. One day, during an airstrike in the Donetsk region, I had a meltdown and have never recovered. Today you could say I am an ambassador for people whose hands shake during airstrikes.
Those two friends said the same exact thing: their hands never used to shake before and now they do. Each one wrote: “I don’t understand what’s just happened to me.”
For nearly five years, the Russians have been targeting these women and their children with drones, rockets, jet-powered drones and missiles. They have threatened us with nuclear weapons. They have used an Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile in combat; carried out a siege; again threatened a nuclear strike; tried to freeze us by destroying Ukraine’s heat and power systems in the middle of winter; blown up a dam, flooding two city districts; used more drones and fired yet other types of long-range missiles at Ukrainian cities; organised terror attacks; and, once again, threatened to wipe us out with nuclear weapons.
In the early hours of 19 July, the general staff of the armed forces of Ukraine reported a massive combined Russian attack: 41 missiles and 125 drones, with Kyiv as the main target. Next morning, I got a message from my friend Valya. “Everything was fine, and then all of a sudden something happened,” she wrote. “Everyone but me is at home asleep. I’m the only one who’s so anxious.”
After every airstrike, the women I know “pull themselves together”, take their children to preschool, and go to work. Because children need to be fed – and if the state-run preschool doesn’t have a bomb shelter, the private one that does costs money. The women I know sleep beside their children in the corridors of their apartment buildings, in underground parking garages, in the metro or in pedestrian tunnels. “Everything’s fine,” say these women. After Russia fires dozens of missiles at Kyiv overnight, they say: “It was loud, but everything’s fine.” And they wonder why their hands shake and they even blame themselves for being weak.
My grandma’s name was Dina and she was as hard as nails. She would get very angry when I snuggled up to our relatives. Once, my grandma’s sister was over and I climbed on to her lap and wrapped my arms around her. Grandma Dina yelled at me: “Get down, what a disgrace, you’re a big girl now!” I was seven. My grandma was afraid I would be spoiled. Whenever I cried, she would say to my mother: “Look how you’ve spoiled her, how will she cope with life?”
Grandma Dina liked to feed stray cats. Grandpa protested, but she did it anyway. When she went out to feed them, for a few minutes she became a completely different person. First, she scolded them for being a nuisance, wearing her usual face. Then, as they ate, she would start to smile a bit and stroke their thin, fluffy backs. With one hand on her thigh, she would lean over and pet each cat once or twice, smiling. Then she would pick up the bowl, straighten up, and her expression would return to normal.
One morning, I found a large grey cat dead under a bush; a cat that my grandma had been feeding for 10 years, as long as I had been alive. He had probably died of old age or sickness. I burst into tears and ran to my grandma. She rolled up a towel and gave me a whack on the ribs. “Now stop that crying, you’re a big girl now!” When my mother came home from work in the evening, I said: “I think Grandma’s a robot.” To which mum replied: “Nonsense, now go finish your soup.”
There was nothing soft about Grandma Dina. If she were still alive today, she would be well prepared. She didn’t know much about getting along with people, but she did know how to pull herself together.
Now I understand that she could not cut herself any slack or allow herself any feelings of self-kindness and that’s why she also felt no compassion for others. Compassion was too risky for her.
And it’s true, we cannot let ourselves be as emotional or compassionate as we were before the war. We cannot live, let alone work, as we did before. On top of that, war reveals the sharp contrast between our reality and the cult of the self displayed on social media. Viral posts about “success, energy and choosing yourself” are irrelevant to anyone caring for a sick child when it is 5C inside your apartment.
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Enduring daily death and the violence of Russia’s attacks has changed us irreversibly. The skin of Ukrainian women has thickened into armour. These women take part in combat, live under constant airstrikes, and keep working and caring for their families through it all.
But if it were up to me, I would keep my belly soft. I still want to hug people, hold them close, and feel the warmth of their hands. So what if Grandma Dina would say I’m not ready for life? I think that love is worth the risk.
We stay calm because our children are watching us, because they need to be taken to preschool in the morning, because there is still work to do. But when resilience becomes an obligation, every trembling hand starts to feel like a personal failure. I do not want survival to take away my tenderness towards other people, or towards myself.
Translated from Ukrainian by Larissa Babij
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Alina Sarnatska is a Ukrainian writer, playwright and war veteran. She is the author of two books and nine plays, and her work has been staged and presented internationally
