My Third Interview,

Welcome, friends, to my third blog post in this format. I am excited to introduce you to another friend I have met along the way. As I told you, I have a knack for stumbling upon interesting, brave, intelligent, and creative souls. I have been blessed to be able to manage (if I am in the mood) to get even the quietest introverts chatting. I love to collect friends and their stories. The beauty of the internet is that I can share them with you. Some of my conversations will be light and funny. This one is not; it is inspiring, upsetting, and informative.

I understand, you feel full up with bad news, but this isn’t; it is a story of survival. Also,

“Silence in the face of evil is evil itself”

Dietrich Boenhoeffer

The world has had its eyes on Ukraine for the past four years since Russia invaded Ukraine and began this horror for that sovereign country. Sadly, here in the West, we seem to have grown weary of the terrible stories and injustices happening there and are no longer very focused on that region. I wanted to bring you just one of the millions of stories of the pawns of war, to remind everyone this war is still very real and still destroying lives every day

My interview subject is Nataliya, and there are many threads to the connections I have with her. The first thread is that her beloved homeland, Ukraine, was my great-grandparents’ and grandparents’ country of origin. I remember many personal stories from my grandparents, reminiscing about the good life they had there, before the Russian Communists took over. Ukraine is part of the breadbasket of Europe, renowned for its rich agricultural output. My grandmother would often talk of the quality of fruit she had to make rich, sweet jam back in the motherland. When they lived there, it was part of the province of Ukraine in Imperial Russia, ruled by a Czar and Czarina of the Romanov Dynasty.

From 1917 to 1920, the Russian Communist Revolution swept through the land, and the Bolsheviks tore through the country, raping, murdering, and pillaging. My family was eventually forced to leave their businesses, homes, farmland, possessions, and roots.

100 years later, Nataliya and six million, and counting, other Ukrainians have been forced out of the same land by the murderous dictator Vladimir Putin. The little possum-faced swine invaded the sovereign country of Ukraine in 2022. His official reason was based on some convoluted bullshit, which was all lies. Still, it is really about taking Ukraine for its vast reserves of critical raw materials, its strategic position in Europe, precious minerals, and, of course, it also feeds his psychopathic desire for power.

The second thread to our connection is where we all found sanctuary from Russia. As fate would have it, both my family and Nataliya would find refuge in the place of my birth, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. A prairie city of 750,000 in the middle of Canada. Winnipeg, with shockingly cold winters, vast spaces of empty land, and sunsets that stretch to the ends of the earth. It was a good place to grow up, a kind place.

This final thread in the braid that weaves Nataliya and my family together is that Nataliya holds a PhD in Mennonite history. That is the history of my people; I should take one of her classes, although my parents are very well educated on the subject.

I met Nataliya through my parents, Fred and Irene Wall. My parents are endlessly curious about the world, and have seen quite a bit of it. They love meeting people from other countries. Given their connections to Ukraine, their visits there, and their deep concern for the country and democracy, they were anxious to hear Nataliya’s story when they met her at a get-together.

My parents then shared their encounter with Nataliya with me. The next time I was in Winnipeg visiting my parents, I arranged to meet her. I had a feeling I would want to tell her story. Nataliya argued that her story was not worth telling; she said, “The heroes are all in Ukraine fighting.” I convinced her that Refugees need a voice, too, and if even one person reading gained a more personal understanding of what was happening in Ukraine, it would be worth it.

You understand, I had to tell this story; it found me.

Meet my family’s friend, Nataliya

When you meet Nataliya, her entire presence contradicts the reality of her situation; she is far from her beloved home, Ukraine, scouring the internet and watching television as the body count of her countrymen climbs and negotiations and promises for peace explode like the nation in her soul.

We are sitting together to talk in my parents’ condominium in Winnipeg. I grew up around Ukrainians, as Winnipeg has always had a large, vibrant Ukrainian community. In 2001, one year before the Russians invaded, there were 100,050 Ukrainians in Winnipeg. Since the war with Russia began, around 30,000 more of them have moved to Winnipeg. Ukrainian culture is rich in traditional songs, dance, food, and stories. So, Nataliya felt very familiar.

Nataliya is beautiful, petite, with blonde hair, porcelain skin, and bright blue eyes, embodying the traditional Ukrainian aesthetic. What really strikes me is the way she carries herself, strong and proud. Her life has been manipulated, first by the communists in power in Russia, and now, the little, vile dictator in Moscow, but she will not be beaten down, although she says plainly,

“I will never be truly happy until Ukraine is free.”

I asked Nataliya to start our conversation by talking about her childhood. When there are quotes from her, imagine a Ukrainian accent, similar to Polish, and these days, all Ukrainian voices carry an undercurrent of grief.

A Soviet Childhood

When Nataliya grew up in Ukraine, it was part of the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. As she says, “Life was the same for everyone: the same house or apartment, the same clothes, we went to school, and we thought the same. In the summer, we go to Children’s Camp. Same, exact. We didn’t even know what we could dream.”

Children’s camp was a three-month communist camp, which was a privilege for children to go to; it was pretty strict, with many activities, where they were taught the communist philosophy. There was a lot of physical activity, and the motto was always be ready. The youth were told that in the West, many people were homeless, there was a lot of crime, and drugs. They were told how lucky they were to be born in the Soviet Union, where education was free, while in the United States, only the rich could get an education, and it was terribly racist.

Everyone would go to school, if you had good marks maybe University, then marriage, then children, same for everyone, same apartment, same clothes, same vacation, same, same. But we were young so we were happy.”

Nataliya says she didn’t know she was in a mental prison,

Then at the beginning of the 1990’s, images from the West through movies started to break through the censorship of the Iron Curtain, and Nataliya says she and her peers were in awe of the clothes, the houses, the lifestyle. She could now watch the TV program Dynasty, and she couldn’t believe the fashion. The free, wealthy world of the West was opening up to the communist world, and they couldn’t get enough of it.

Time passed, and Nataliya’s academic excellence allowed her to attend university, which would be her salvation.

Obviously, a great deal of history occurred here, but this isn’t a history book, and I’m not a historian. I am bouncing over important historical events, trying to tell Nataliya’s story. However, it doesn’t take a genius to see that history is just a circle, repeating itself every generation. Dictators, fascists, oligarchs, religious militants, what have you, around the globe rise and fall over and over again, using brainwashing, military force, control of the press, starvation, genocide, etc., to enrich themselves and attain power. The masses rise, and so it goes. However, my good friends, we can take comfort in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s words,

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it trends towards justice.”

-Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1991, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union dissolved, and Soviet Ukraine voted for Independence. Nataliya says, initially, things were terrible. At that point, Nataliya was married, and she talks about those very dark times. “Nataliya put it this way, “It was a time of transition for the to independence for the country and it’s souls. For two years, we had paper coupons, but the black market was also producing them. We had no food, and I was pregnant.”

Nataliya stopped speaking. Then said something so quietly I had to ask her to repeat it. With tears in her eyes, she said a little louder, “I starved.” The pain in her face took my breath away. Not just because, obviously, it was so traumatizing for her to have been pregnant and starving, then scrambling for food so she could breastfeed, once her daughter Olena was born, but I could see shame on her face. I was confused. I have lived a life of great privilege and have been untouched by such harsh realities.

This is where I remind you, I am a lady with a blog, a voice, and a heart. I am not a real journalist or psychologist, but with all our connections, Nataliya feels like family, and the burden she is carrying is painful to see. I did some research on why food insecurity might come with shame, and this is a summation of what I found: The shame that sometimes comes with starvation can stem from a mix of intense guilt, dehumanization, and a disruption of their identity and social relationships. How cruel.

If I could, I would go back in time and hug Nataliya, that young mother, and make her Varenky, a type of pierogi we both ate growing up, and tell her what a brave mother she was.

During that bleak time, Nataliya was also working on her Phd dissertation in history. When I remark on her inner strength, the shadows of the painful past drift away from her eyes, and her face beams like a bright sunflower as she says,

“I was young, and I had hope, and I had the best person in the world, my baby, my daughter Olena.”

Olena is Nataliya’s greatest blessing, and it is clear that her existence kept her going during that time. Nataliya was also on her own because Olena’s biological father left when she was a few years old, although in the end, he was just baggage. Men who abandon their children aren’t a real loss because they leave the treasure (the children) behind, turning abandonment into a gain.

Ukraine managed to survive the transition to a sovereign nation, and things slowly got better. In 1994, the democratic government signed the Budapest Memorandum, where Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons with assurances from the U.S., U.K., and Russia for its security.

So, when Putin started piling military forces on the border in 2022, no one was that worried; they had an agreement, and Biden warned Putin of decisive and severe repercussions if they invaded Ukraine.

On February 24th, 2022, Nataliya and her second husband were awakened by bombs going off in her city of Dnipro. Natalya says she was so confused by the loud, strange sound that awakened her that she did not know what was happening. Her husband looked at her and said

“We are in Shit.”

On that day, Russia launched a multi-front assault on Ukraine that included airstrikes on military targets and major cities and a ground offensive from the north, east, and south. On the first day, 137 Ukrainian civilians and soldiers were killed, and hundreds were wounded. Three years later, although it is tough to get an official number, somewhere between 60,000 to 100,00 civilians and soldiers have died. Many more Russian troops have been killed, probably 1 million, most of whom have no interest in this war.

Nataliya intended to stay in Ukraine; her life, her career, and her home were there, but her daughter Olena, who had graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont, was working in New York. As the Russians advanced into Ukraine and the death toll grew, Olena was becoming increasingly frightened. Olena is an only child, with no other family. Nataliya says,

“One night, Olena was calling me every hour, crying, ‘Mama, you cannot leave me alone on this planet, you must leave Ukraine.’ What could I do? I had to try and figure out how to get out.”

What mother would do anything different?

I will continue Nataliya’s difficult journey to safety in my next Blog post.

Until next time, stay,

Love Leana.

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