Through empathy you also become a witness

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All the poems in The Lightning… are about the current war. I see an inner symbolic structure like that: Babyn Yar… as hell, The Lightning… as purgatory, and the new book I am currently writing as heaven. These books are nothing alike, but all of them are about war and death. Babyn Yar… resembles an ancient tragedy and can be seen as a chorus, while The Lightning… appeals to Heraclitus’ concept of “Lightning as Logos” and is a mythologized epic about Russia’s war against Ukraine. The third one has the title Men, women, children, animals, birds, insects and shadows speak fruits from the tree of knowledge (heaven), but I don’t want to talk too much about it yet. The history of the Babyn Yar… collection is as follows. In truth, I started working on it twice. First, when I had to put my pain somewhere after my father’s death in December 2015 but could not express it as at that time I was a recipient of the Gaude Polonia stipend and only returned to Lviv in July 2016. Secondly, between 2015 and 2018 I travelled with Ukrainian volunteers from Kharkiv almost to the front line in eastern Ukraine. Back then the war was called ATO, the anti-terrorist operation. Several times we found ourselves so close to the enemy that we were within the range of their sniper fire. And thus The Voices of Babyn Yar is an experience of my personal pain. Six months after my father’s death, in July 2016, it became a vessel for my pain and grief. I also started writing poems which were based on my memories of those trips to Donbas. But those were not voices yet. It wasn’t until September 2016 that I began writing poems, which later became part of The Voices of Babyn Yar – after my father’s birthday on September 21st, and just a few days before the anniversary of the tragedy on September 29th.

IWONA REICHARDT: Your poems about the current war are intertwined with the poems from The Voices of Babyn Yar.

As I said, the current war in Ukraine started in 2014. But at that time, it was less known, also in other parts of the country. You had to come almost to the front line to see it yourself and have an opinion. Several poems included in The Voices of Babyn Yar were actually written in August 2016, not in September. But the poem that started it all ended up not being included in this book. During one of the trips, one lady whose sister was a witness told me that Russians executed local Ukrainian teachers and activists, about 18 people, in a ravine. I wrote a poem about this atrocity and published it on my Facebook page in August. But because it was on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre, and because there was no indication that the massacre happened near Donetsk, everyone thought that the poem was about Babyn Yar.  I was invited to recite it at the commemorations in Babyn Yar. I was faced with a moral dilemma; I did not want to read a poem about today’s war as a poem about the mass murder of Jews in the Second World War.

So yes, in the collection, there are a couple of poems which are not voices from Babyn Yar. One of them is a poem about a crematorium, and there were no crematoria in Babyn Yar.  Sometime in October, I realized that I had about 20 poems about Babyn Yar. I sent them to my publisher, Leonid Finberg, who agreed to publish them. So, I kept on writing. I got so immersed in this process that it entirely devoured me. I stopped going out and was lying in bed, only getting up to write another poem. Afterwards, I would return to bed again. At some point, my husband could not bear it any longer, so he brought me a bottle of vodka that I drank for three days but I did not feel any alcohol in my body. I said it in many interviews already but let me repeat it here – I never thought that I would be writing about Jewish people. I only started reading about their history and culture when I was in university. At home, we did not talk either about Jewish or Polish people. It is not that I did not want to make friends with my Jewish peers. I had good relationships with them, but we never had conversations about what we can call “Jewish topics”. I don’t want to say that these topics were taboo, just something simply not talked about.

When I became a student, I became interested in the Holocaust, and at the same time began to read a lot about the Holodomor, the Volhynia tragedy, and Stalin’s repressions. I learned about all these atrocities because I felt that it was my moral duty. I have no Jewish roots, so for me the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the forced deportation of Crimean Tatars and the genocide in Rwanda (in 1994), all alongside the Volhynia tragedy merged into one deep experience. As a translator of Polish-language literature, I have translated Jewish poets and writers but not because they were Jewish. Among them were Bolesław Leśmian, Julian Tuwim and many others. When I was writing my poems about Babyn Yar, I came to an understanding that those Jewish people who were to be murdered in the ravine were unaware that there, they would face death. That is why they took some personal things with them when they were summoned. They must have believed that the future would bring them life, whether good or bad, but life nonetheless. They were misinformed. Those who were also brought to Auschwitz could not fathom that they would meet their end.

KG: Thus, these voices from Babyn Yar and other poems that are included in the collection show a certain connection between the two wars…

Actually, now that I think about this book, I see that it combines three wars: the Second World War, the current war in Ukraine which started in 2014, and the war which is now taking place in Israel and Gaza. This thought brings tears to my eyes because it makes me realize that in these poems, I have woven more than I thought I would. Lately, when Ukrainians talk about the war in Israel we draw comparisons to the war in Ukraine. And vice versa, when we talk about what is happening in Ukraine, do we compare it to what is happening in Israel? Here in Ukraine, these parallels are perceived very differently compared to how they are seen in the West. Probably, it is because we have a historical memory which differs from that of people in the West.

IR: Would you then say that in our region we have our own way of interpreting this war? And this interpretation differs from the perspective people have, for example, in France?

Your question is whether our interpretation of the war can be universal, or if it is biased, right? To answer this, let me share my reflections on what I have read about wars in the past ten years. I have read a lot about different wars; however, I am interested not only in war as a phenomenon but also with regards to war-inflicted trauma and the memory of traumatic events. I have been trying to understand how trauma influences the way we process information. Indeed, a traumatized person interprets information and remembers it differently than someone who hasn’t experienced a similar trauma. Trauma is a filter in itself. At some point, I started to think about war from a different angle. I recalled the writings of Hannah Arendt, who in the late 1960s wrote an essay about freedom in which she expressed her critique of the Vietnam War. This is, in fact, a very significant question: How distant a war should be to traumatize a person? And the second one: What makes a person a witness of war? These questions are of great importance to me because I am sometimes asked if I have the right to write about the Second World War and about the Holocaust which I did not experience. And if I have the right to write about the war given that I am not in Ukraine – temporarily, yes, but for almost two years by now. I have contemplated this question for quite some time, and, personally, I consider myself a post-memory witness to the atrocities committed during the Second World War. I am a witness, because when I was writing The Voices of Babyn Yar, my body was reacting to it. My hair turned grey in half a year. I felt as if all those atrocities were happening here and now.

KG: Does the trauma of today make you see the war differently?

I feel like a witness to two wars, and now the war in Israel adds to it. I also responded to the full-scale invasion physically. I had two very complicated spinal surgeries in 2022. A witness does not just see things – a witness also reacts to the atrocities with his/her body. It is a somatic reaction wherein the distance from the place of the crime does not matter. Think about it: a lot of people in Germany, Poland, or Czechia, who are citizens of these countries and have no blood or other ties to Ukrainians, are also witnesses to this war to the same extent as Ukrainians.

IR: How come?

Because they interact directly with this war as well. Even tears of compassion are an interaction.

KG: And because, as you said, they have similar somatic reactions when they see the committed crimes?

Somatic reactions may occur, but they are not always present. I see them as witnesses because of their connections with direct witnesses who were in trenches or bomb shelters, who have lost their family and friends. Through empathy, one can also become a witness, even while being far from the war in a physical sense.

IR: It is very interesting what you are saying that through empathy you become a witness. I don’t know if you remember the discussions that were held during the wars that took place in the former Yugoslavia. At that time, one of our most influential writers, Stanisław Lem, asked the provocative question of whether as human beings we can be empathetic to every person, every tragedy, every death. These wars in the Balkans seemed to be far away from us, and there are defence mechanisms that allow us to also distance ourselves from the tragedies they brought on…

That’s why I always look at how a person reacts. First comes trauma. From that moment, it decides what a person feels, thinks, and how a person communicates. Trauma indeed acts as a significant filter, and many people are unaware of its existence. I remember this discussion in the Polish press that you mentioned. But since we are talking about the Yugoslav Wars, I would like to refer to somebody who pondered over the lessons from the Balkans and today’s war in Ukraine. The person I have in mind is Krzysztof Czyżewski, who made an important comment on the concept of victory in a recent interview with the Ukrainian Radio Liberty. Europe and all the world observed the Yugoslavian events, but no one said that the war in Yugoslavia would end in victory. There needed to be a compromise acceptable for all the parties, a consensus – that is what everyone was talking about. Yet victory is intertwined with the concepts of good and evil, and therefore, as a value, victory must endure. If it is excluded from the worldview of those who make up what we call the European civilization, then what happens to that civilization? Thus, Czyżewski says, Europe must support Ukraine not only for its practical interests but also because Ukraine can bring back this value of victory into European thinking. Think about it, Europe has not seen any victories for over 50 years now. Today, educated people don’t want to say they want to win. Instead, they ask right away about the price of victory. But you need to understand that this is a trick. Czyżewski mentioned that unlike the war in the Balkans, which to a certain extent devastated a whole generation of Poles who have lost this understanding of the value of victory, the war in Ukraine is – paradoxically – saving Poland by bringing that understanding back. I see great value in this thought because it is tied to the promise that Poland will emerge as an important nation, and this transformation will be catalysed by the war in the East. Do you understand what I mean?

IR: Maybe not entirely… Please explain.

I see this war in Ukraine as paradoxically the opportunity to save Europe despite the horrible price Ukraine is paying. But Ukraine pays that price both for itself and for Europe as its inherent part. Now we are coming back to that understanding after 2014 when the Revolution of Dignity started in Kyiv. The return of solidarity in the face of war and the return of an understanding of the value of victory are now like a vaccine for European culture. Just look at Poland and the hate speech it has experienced in recent years. Hate speech starts like a disease in a weak organism. It acts like a poison, a venom. In Poland’s case, the poisoning was very fast and strong. In my view, the war in Ukraine stopped it, even if partially. The empathy towards Ukrainians and the solidarity with Ukraine have changed Poland. I am not saying that there is no hate speech in Poland now, but it has weakened. In my view, this war even influenced civic engagement in the country, including the most recent elections. It was as if in the first months after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Polish society was undergoing a Maidan without a Maidan.

KG: What do you mean by that?

Let me refer to the recent film The Green Border directed by Agnieszka Holland, who showed this change very well. To me, this film is also a reflection on war – our war, even though only the final scene touches upon the war in Ukraine showing refugees from the recently shelled cities. Thus, the question arises – how does this scene fit into the context of the entire film? Firstly, the film is in black and white, a director’s choice that helps us pay attention to detail and remember what was said. If this film was in colour, we would remember the characters’ words much less.

IR: But the scene with the Ukrainian border that you mention is in colour.

Yes, yes, but think about the composition of this film again. The black-and-white part is like a chronicle, but then at the end, the shots of the station and the border crossing are in colour. An entrance to a new reality. I see a change of rhetoric here. This crossing changes the situation of the people who are escaping from the war – they escape to safety. That is why for me, the war in Ukraine has changed Poland in a very good way. And the film showed that too.

Marianna Kiyanovska is a Ukrainian poet, translator and literary scholar. She is a recipient of the Shevchenko National Prize (2020) and the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award (2022) for her poetry in The Voices of Babyn Yar. She is a member of the National Union of Writers of Ukraine and the Ukrainian PEN.

Kinga Anna Gajda is an associate professor at the Institute of European Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

Iwona Reichardt is the deputy editor in chief of New Eastern Europe.

poetry, Ukraine, Ukrainian poetry, War