‘They drop lovely memories into a world filled with destruction and death’: Ukrainian women on the war, leaving home and moving to Ireland

In 2007, Roddy Doyle and Seán Love cofounded Fighting Words, a charity devoted to helping people of all ages explore their love of writing. Last summer, Fighting Words ran camps for Irish and Ukrainian children and teenagers. A number of Ukrainian women helped out with translations. For some, seeing the children so creatively engaged evolved into a desire to write their own stories so Fighting Words organised six months of workshops and one-on-one mentoring.

Love explains: “We were acutely aware at Fighting Words of President Zelenskiy speaking many times of the importance of story and of bearing witness, of artists writing and talking about what is happening in Ukraine – to ensure no one can ever say they didn’t know.”

At the same time, Fighting Words was partnering with Ukrainian Action in Ireland and the Irish Red Cross to create the Inner Light project. This Monday, April 24th, in Vicar Street, 30 artists from Ireland and Ukraine are coming together for a night of music, words and cultural solidarity. The Concert For Ukraine also sees the launch of Inner Light – Внутрішнє світло – a collection of memoirs and stories by 17 of the women who took part in the workshops, some of whom will be reading their work at the event.

They wrote about losing homes and families and finding new hope and strength. About choosing what they most wanted to keep safe and realising what must be left behind. About taking only their children and their memories. What they didn’t write about is their own quiet bravery, yet, it shines through this moving and unsentimental anthology, a book of boundless warmth, humour and courage.

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“They each present in beautiful but different ways all the usual family, friends, events, occasions and things we all take for granted and they use personal items of great emotional significance for each of them to reflect this,” Love says. “Then, they drop these lovely memories into a world filled with bombs, displacement, destruction and death.”

“The war showed us things don’t matter, only people,” writes contributor Olha Khoroshevska in her story, From Home to Home. In March 2022, home was an apartment in Vyshgorod, a suburb of Kyiv. In cool, clear prose, she describes her father phoning her early, too early. The bombing of Kyiv has started, he tells her; she must leave immediately. Olha is reluctant to wake her daughter. “I wanted to prolong her peaceful childhood. Because I knew the minute she woke, it would be destroyed.”

She packs food for a journey that should take five hours but will take three days. “It’s the 8th of March – International Women’s Day, a holiday. At some checkpoints, men have drawn a daisy and written down, ‘Ladies, our congratulations’.” She gives chocolate to “severe-looking men with machine guns”, her small gesture of thanks to those “holding our sky on their shoulders”.

[ Ukrainians and their Irish hosts one year on: There are stark reminders. This is not a cultural exchange ]

What is it to suddenly try to put your life in a suitcase? If you got a call telling you to flee, today – now – what would you take? Every belonging travels at the cost of another. Olha packs her beloved Dyson hairdryer. It symbolises who she is. “I’m not a refugee or a vagabond. I’m not a tramp. That my life is not crushed into small pieces. That I’m just on a very long pause in my life. That I’m still the girl who gets up in the morning, washes her hair, blow dries it with a Dyson and lives her life with her head held high.”

Olha leaves her husband at the border with Slovakia and crosses on foot, with only her daughter, a suitcase and backpack. She becomes someone new: a refugee. “In a moment transformed from being a person with a career, property, family and plans to being a lost, desperate immigrant with a foggy future.”

In Kyiv, she was working as a public relations manager at a kids’ camp. Today, she runs a Ukraine Community Centre for the Irish Red Cross and is a founding member of Ukrainian Action in Ireland. “We have very much in common with Irish people in history, mentality, attitude to our land and life in general,” she tells me. “We are a land of farmers and hardworking people who are fighting not just for freedom but for existence.”

Inner Light is divided into four sections; Flight, Transit, Stasis and Hope. One of the contributors to Stasis is ethnographer and social anthropologist, Julia Buyskykh. “Since I was a child, I have always felt like I was part of water,” she writes in the River’s Flow. Julia grew up in Kyiv, near the great river Dnieper. The world of the river was her kingdom, she writes, a place where she “felt incredibly free”. Her family has a diverse ethnic and cultural background, with Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, Russian and Tatar roots. She was raised with love, brought up by “my beloved granny, Olena, my mother’s mother, and my dear great-grandmother Alla, my mother’s grandmother”.

When she was a child, her father gave her a book of Irish, Welsh and Scottish legends and fairy tales in Russian translation. She began to dream of visiting Ireland then, she says, despite that being a time “when the very idea of going abroad from Ukraine seemed to be insane and impossible”.

She describes a happy life before the war. Kyiv was a bustling, important city, yet she always found it cosy, a place of solace. When the war broke out, she felt she was stuck inside a huge wave of water, carrying her into the unknown. At her mother’s urging, she took an evacuation train to friends in Khmelnytskyi, in western Ukraine. She moved between Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania until she came to Ireland last September on a six-month Sanctuary Fellowship at UCC. “I am on the road of wandering again,” she explains, having recently returned to Kyiv to be with her mother, “the only family member I have now”.

In common with Olha and Julia, Olena Didyk’s essay, the Dublin Spire, touches on the grief and helplessness that accompanied the realisation that her Kharkiv home had become a place of danger. Suddenly, safety was an illusion. Arriving in Dublin on St Patrick’s Day was “a kind of miracle for my son and me”. A self-described homebody, she writes about wandering through unfamiliar streets, realising, “I do not have any connections or memories with this city, even a single brick in a Victorian building has more memories and means more to this city than I do. It’s a heavy feeling.”

At first, the Spire on O’Connell Street functions as Olena’s navigational aid but, over time, it becomes a kindly beacon, a wish made manifest. “One autumn morning when the nights grew longer, and even the early mornings, I suddenly saw my old friend as I’d never seen it before. There was a tiny light at the top. My mood was sour, tears welled in my eyes, ready to spill any moment. I took my child to school and it meant I could no longer pretend everything was okay. Then, I saw the light. It was like a distant lighthouse peeping out above the roofs, giving me hope and a feeling of safety.”

Before the invasion, Olena worked as an English teacher at Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics and as a translator at the international relations department of Karazin Kharkiv National University. She had recently begun piano lessons and was training with a friend for the four-mile Bosphorus International Swimming Race in Istanbul.

[ CSO says number of Ukrainian refugees in Ireland nearing 75,000 ]

“When Ireland opened its borders for Ukrainians, it became my choice as the distant enough country from Russia,” she explains. “I came with my 13-year-old son, my friend and her two kids.” They live in a hotel and she got a job at Dominican College Sion Hill in Blackrock. She had always enjoyed writing and reading. “Ukraine has a very strong voice in literature and I want the world to hear it.” Writing was cathartic, she says. “When you tell your story, you share it with others. You reflect the events, the burden and pain, the guilt. The emotions become less intense.”

The authors could choose whether they wrote in English or Ukrainian and all picked English. Each piece is unique, yet the writing is imaginative and fluid throughout. Many contributors naturally drop into present tense, even when describing events from years earlier. Trauma, like memory, lives in the mind; forever current, forever churning.

Regardless of what – and when – she’s describing, Olena tends to write in the present in the Dublin Spire, such as this gorgeous passage: “One day you realise that despite all your vulnerability, you’re strong because the earth holds you, because in your hair there are still cornflowers and feather grass from the wreaths you braided in your childhood, that a steppe wind lives in your breath and the sun’s rays are in your eyes. You learn that you become strong when others are weak and the world is falling to pieces around you.”

The Inner Light project has three strands: the book; an exhibition of photography by artist Alan Compton who worked with the writers on creative representations of scenes inspired by their stories; and the Concert For Ukraine on April 24th, with performers including Roddy Doyle, Glen Hansard, Cathy Davey, Paul Muldoon, Colm Mac Con Iomaire, Hazel Hogan, Lia Mills, Patrick Freyne, and Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, in addition to Ukrainian talent such as singer Olesya Zdorovetska, indie rock group Vivienne Mort, folk band Shpylyasti Kobzari, pianist Mariia Yaremak and renowned author and activist Victoria Amelina.

[ ‘I strongly feel that we won’t come back home’: Ukrainians planning a future in Ireland ]

The invasion of Ukraine has created the largest refugee crisis since the second World War. Seán vows that Fighting Words will keep working with Ukrainian refugees for as long as it takes. “And when they can safely return to their homes, Fighting Words will continue working together with Irish Red Cross on future humanitarian crises that bring large numbers of desperate people to our shores.”

In his memoir, Survival in Auschwitz, Italian chemist, writer and Jewish Holocaust survivor Primo Levi wrote, “one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness”. The Inner Light project is an important opportunity for us to bear witness. To show solidarity and remind ourselves of the challenges unfolding daily as a result of the invasion of Ukraine. As Olha says, “Everyone has a story. Sometimes we just need to listen carefully.”

In 2007, the original holding page for the Fighting Words website said, “Everybody is welcome”.

A promise Fighting Words has kept.

Concert for Ukraine: Inner Light takes place at Vicar Street on Monday April 24th. Tickets €25 from Ticketmaster. All proceeds to Irish Red Cross Ukraine Fund. The Inner Light anthology will be on sale at the concert, and subsequently from fightingwords.ie.