A very Ukrainian lady: "Why can't they just let us think for ourselves?"
I met 86-year-old Maria in Kharkiv 9 years ago. A Ukrainian. A fighter. A teacher. She did not like Putin. Or most of the other men who have ruined her country. RIP Maria.
BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN
This morning, when this post ticked up on my Facebook page today – ‘Today 9 years ago’ – I decided to try to track down Maria (see the whole post below).
After we first met in 2016, we stayed in touch - which wasn’t easy seeing as Maria was going blind and did not use the internet. But she introduced me to her grandson Zhenya, and from time to time he sent me an update. Maria and I met when ever I was in Kharkiv. I last had coffee with Maria in 2021. By then, she was almost completely blind.
“Maybe it’s better”, she joked, “I can’t even see myself in the mirror anymore, but I tell you - I was quite the looker in my time, and that’s how I am imagining myself now.” She was the only person I have ever met whose laugh actually sounded like we write it “he-he-he.” And she laughed a lot. Despite - well, despite her life.
At that time, the Russian dictator was already amassing troops and military equipment, just on the other side of the Kharkiv border with Russia. Rumors were rife.
“That little ugly KGBist”, as Maria called him (“what is he going to do to me?” she laughed, “what do I care?”), “he is getting ready again, he is always getting ready for something, looking for what next to ruin, undermine, kill, it’s what the KGBisti do, trust me, I have seen it too often…”
When Russia invaded i February 2022, I lost touch with Maria’s grandson, and thus touch with her.
This morning, inspired by Facebook(!), with a friend’s help, I managed to track down Zhenya, Maria’s grandson. Or rather Zhenya’s wife, Natalia. She could tell that Zhenya was at the front, that in fact he volunteered on February 26, 2022. And that he has been at the front ever since, apart from a three-week break one year ago, and that he has not even been allowed leave to go home and see his now three-month-old daughter.
Maria had died in 2022, Natalia told me. She had just lived to see Putin invade her country. Again. And then she died of old age in June 2022. 92 years old.
A large, important chunk of Ukraine’s history in one woman: the Holodomor, the war, the oppression, life in the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s independence, the Orange and in particular the Maidan revolution, Russia’s invasion of Donbas and Crimea, Russians trying to take over Kharkiv in March 2014, Ukrainians defending their country, corruption – always corruption. And the men in power always fearful of free thinking, of democracy. But, through it all, this woman kept her own mind free – “Why can't they just let us think for ourselves?", as Maria said to me that foggy March morning in Kharkiv 9 years ago.
Natalia told me that more than 30 of Maria’s former pupils had shown up at her funeral – because they remembered her and her influence on them even though they had left school 40 or 50 years ago. That’s quite a legacy.
What a life. What a brutal, brutal life. What a strong soul. Like Ukraine.
Yes, Maria was just like Ukraine.