Kate Gladka: Blood, sweat & tears in Kyiv

Grumpy Old Men contributor Kate Gladka tells stories about how daily life goes on in war. This week she is on the train from Poland to Ukraine - the train home without a home.

I'm 33, and I'm from Kyiv. For most of my life, I've been involved in writing and journalism. After February 24, 2022, the history of my country, city, and myself took a sharp turn. Like yours probably did. And I understand that words don't stop the war, but they can carry a charge, unite, and evoke empathy in people, and that helps us live. Every day, I ask myself: is the war inside me? It sounds abstract, but I mean quite specific things: where do I fight, where do I not take responsibility for certain aspects of my life, where do I feel anger? And these moments are becoming fewer. For me, war has, first of all, become a state of consciousness, a state of mind. It's easy to blame Russians for everything, and I don’t minimize their crimes or what they are doing here. But I'm interested not in them, but in us.

The train home without a home

The train from Przemyśl in Poland to Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, is like a miniature model of our country right now because it carries thousands of people across the Polish border. The train consists of countless stories of torn families, and Ukrainians scattered all over the world.

On the seat behind me on the intercity train from Przemyśl to Kyiv sat a woman; she was around 60 years old. She was talking loudly on the phone, seemingly with someone from her family. And everything she mentioned had a vividly negative context. Either “they didn't meet me properly,” “ I had to wait for a long time,” or “there were huge delays at the border.” Eventually, she spoke so loudly that it irritated her neighbors, including me. Suddenly, a young girl from the next row addressed her across the aisle.

"The rules of the Ukrainian Railway company say that you should respect other passengers. You're talking so loudly on the phone, and everything is so negative that it's unbearable."

For a moment, everyone fell silent.

The woman stopped her conversation and replied to the young girl:

"If you knew what I've been through, you wouldn't speak to me like that!"

"I understand. Everyone here is living their own story,” the girl said.

Suddenly, the woman began to cry. She was sobbing, tears streaming down her face as she spoke through her tears, recounting parts of her story. It turned out she was from Bakhmut. Bakhmut is in Donetsk region, an ancient Cossack region, a unique place, now practically destroyed by the Russians. A rocket hit her house, and she lost everything. But from a legal point of view, she still had to prove that it was indeed a rocket that had ruined her house. "The whole world knows that our Bakhmut was destroyed, but I still have to prove it to the bureaucrats," she said to me when I gave her valerian (a herb for calmness). She was trembling.

The young girl, on the other hand, suggested that the woman seek help from a psychologist and advised places where this assistance could be provided for free.

"Everything was fine for me in Bakhmut; I had a business, I had a house, and we lived wonderfully. And now, do you think anyone needs us? I'm traveling from Germany to Ukraine because I have health problems. But nobody needs us. It's easy to say, ‘We can all talk,’" the woman continued.

As I found myself in the middle of these two generations, these two Ukraines, these two different ways of thinking, I caught myself thinking that advice about mental health, attention to our psyche (although I don't always support solely psychologists' methods), is more than just ‘talking it out’ for younger generations.

At the same time, I feel the pain of this older woman because I visited Bakhmut when it was still called Artemivsk (of course, named so by the KGB descendants). I remember talking to the locals well and how everyone who understood the situation in Donbas from the beginning consistently called the city by its original Ukrainian name - Bakhmut. It was a signal of where you're from and what your genetic memory is. And now this city is practically gone, and people have lost everything.

But I hope that they haven't lost themselves. Because in the nation we will rebuild, there will be a place for everyone except those who never considered it their own.