ON THE COVER
Iana Syrotnikova uses the phone in her basement shelter in Kharkiv.
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JUNE 2 • 2022
COURTESY OF IANA SYROTNIKOVA
Dispatch from Dnipro
One woman’s story of escaping — and surviving — the bombing of Kharkiv, Ukraine. IANA SYROTNIKOVA SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS TRANSLATED BY ASHLEY ZLATOPOLSKY CONTRIBUTING WRITER
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f you’re born in Ukraine, but you have Jewish roots, most likely your family will have an interweaving of Ukrainian and Jewish traditions. My father is Jewish, and this means that my childhood was full of foods such as forshmak (Jewish herring) and matzah. Every year, we celebrate Passover and Rosh Hashanah. We cherish and honor the memory of our origin and know all of our relatives up to five generations back. For us, family comes first. Six years ago, I took part in the “Book of Generations” project in Israel. As part of the project, my family’s historical narrative was reconstructed. In the process of collecting information about my ancestors, I was given a questionnaire to fill out. It contained a section called “evacuation.” Who from my family was evacuated during World War II? Where were they evacuated? How did they manage to survive in such a difficult financial situation? What were their strongest memories of the war? With my father’s help, we were able to fill out the questionnaire. He told me the story of how the women and children in our family were evacuated from Kharkiv to Uzbekistan and the Ural Mountains in 1941. There, my grandmother worked as a hospital nurse for four years. The most difficult thing for them was to be in a non-native place, to be separated from loved ones, from their husbands, to eat unusual food and live in a different climate. Their strongest memories were of the kindness of people of solidarity. My family’s reason to survive was simple: to guarantee the future of their children. Speaking about these topics filled me with an unexplainable bitterness. How could my family go through this? Yet the words “war,” “evacuation,” “separation from loved ones” and “survival” didn’t sound real to me. The only way to understand the horror of war, to understand how a person feels in an evacuation, is to go through it yourself.
