Dialogues on War. Iryna Starovoyt and Heather Morris

H. M.: It is an absolute honour for me to be here today speaking to Iryna. I hope we can make our audience interested in our conversation as we tell our stories, and share our hopes and our dreams regarding the situation currently unfolding in Ukraine.

I will start by asking Iryna a question, and I doubt there is a simple answer to it. I just want to know, Iryna, how are you?

I. S.: Well, I think here, every single day we are doing the small rehearsals with our friends and relatives, with people dear to us, with the students. How are you? Where are you? Are you relatively safe? This word relatively says it all because you know it’s a real and intense war of the kind Europe has not seen for almost 80 years.

On the morning of February 24, my daughter woke me and said, ‘It has started.’ We all knew what had started. I don’t think it was such a surprise for Ukrainian society as it was a surprise for other nations across the globe. Here, for this people, this land, and this society, there is a sort of a historical trauma trace. One could call it the ‘intuition of a victim.’ A victim knows when the worst is to come.

I asked myself, ‘What do I know about wars?’ I have not been prepared to live through the war. I have not raised my children to live through the war. War is contradictory to my worldview and my values. Then I also asked myself, ‘Who are the people now going to war? Who are the people from the Ukrainian side who stand up to defend their values, their emancipation, let’s say?’ I answered, ‘These are pacifists who go to this war.’

Perhaps, this was not so obvious to the West in the first days or even weeks that we did not expect and did not want fighting in any way. During the 30 years of independence, before the annexation of Crimea and the start of the smaller war in the east of Ukraine, none of us wanted to spend money on rebuilding the big pride in the military. Year by year, decade by decade we were shrinking our military forces. Ukraine was the country that deliberately got rid of the nuclear power that was a part of the Soviet system. We wanted to build a noble society with a blank record. We had this huge nuclear catastrophe in 1986 at the Chornobyl Nuclear Plant and we do not want to threaten anyone with nukes. Moreover, we do not want to threaten anyone with any other type of military equipment. However, it seems that at least for the last eight years, when we were under the threat of Russia, our northern neighbour, with which we share nearly 2000 km of the land border, and around 300 km of the sea border, we will not be safe until Ukraine ends and wins this war.

It is a new situation for us. It is a new situation for Western security, probably, even for the globe. Now we must ensure that democracy is equipped, cherished and defended very well. Actually, it should be defended better if we don’t want it to surrender to autocratic or totalitarian regimes.

H. M.: You’ve hit the nail by saying, that probably, many countries have become complacent. As WWII ended, and the Cold war rolled on and later they were like ‘Oh, OK, we are getting on now. We are one big family.’ We really never were. Yet, as long as it was happening in someone else’s backyard, it was easy to turn a blind eye to the issues happening.

You all know in Ukraine and now everywhere that it is not the case. Of course, I did not live through WWII, and still, I have never known the kind of global support we see now. Not just from the governments of countries but from every man, woman and child around the globe. Like even my tiny grandchildren, one is just seven, want to know what’s going on. We tell them. The support is there.
I want to touch on something else you said. You talked about historical trauma. I know a little about it. Not because I am a professional but because for many years I was talking to survivors. I also worked in a hospital where every day for 20 years I dealt with people with so-called acute trauma. You have both of them right now. You are faced with the questions of ‘How have I survived today?’ and ‘How will I survive tomorrow?’ Plus the historical trauma you’ve mentioned comes through you DNA.

How do you feel that historical trauma can help with the resilience of your fellow countrymen to deal with acute trauma?

I. S.: Heather, I was trained as a literature scholar and I moved to cultural studies shortly after my graduation. I have a question to and complaint about my school education, which was still in the Soviet Union, and to university studies, which were already in the independent Ukraine but just after the collapse of the Soviet Union so it was still a soviet style university. Why was I taught so many things, which are irrelevant and so little things that are relevant for example to my family history or to the experience of the people who started to visit Ukraine since 1991? Since Ukraine started to be free, independent and open to the world.

I understood that my country and my people were heavily hit by both world wars. It is not just WWII which is of course broadly remembered and is now an important part not only of our historical worldview but also of our ethical grid with the slogan ‘never again.’ I was absolutely sure that in my lifetime I would never find myself in a global or major event which can be compared to the real land, air, informational, propaganda, and another type of wars that I was taught about from history. On the other hand, I understood that even though families, like for example mine, where a part comes from the western side of Ukraine and another part comes from the north-eastern side, closer to the Byelorussian border, never had enough representations in school textbooks or school programs, at the same time, on the territory of Ukraine, there were other communities, be it Jewish communities, Polish communities, Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian and of course the Russian-speaking communities who were not enough understood, not enough researched and not enough represented not only at the curriculum level but even in the public imagination, even in our conversations about the experience of suffering and why this is so important.

Therefore, when a Jewish visitor to my city, the city of Lviv, approached me, a 25-year girl with questions like ‘Where is the Jewish cemetery? What do you know of the Holocaust? How did it happen here?’ believe me, I was quite surprised because for me, as for many Ukrainians, the Holocaust was something that happened across the border. Somewhere in Poland, somewhere in Auschwitz, but why are you asking about Lviv? Or, why are you asking about Kyiv, Zhytomyr and other places?

Then I started to connect the dots. In Ukrainian literature, there were mentions about Babyn Yar, a huge ravine in Kyiv that was turned into a mass grave in September 1941 in the first days of the arrival of Nazis in this territory when they were creating this new world order they were striving for. I have heard of some 30 thousand ordinary Kyiv dwellers who were brought together and illusioned that they would be taken to some other place. However, they were just slaughtered there for two days and two nights. For my young imagination, it was just way too much. Then I also understood that not many people knew or even understood this place. Not many Kyivans were ready to think and talk of it as their own memory, their intimate memory, let’s say. Because it was the memory of somebody else, of some other community.

We have started a big discussion here, I would say a societal discussion somewhere around the year 2000, with the beginning of the new millennium, that this is a piece of land where the tragedy was unfolding and the blood was spilt over and over through several generations.

In WWI, the front line crossed Ukraine twice — forward and backwards. Civilians were targeted. We know that WWI was already rather uncivilized because the civilians were targeted en masse, and chemical weapons and air bombardments were introduced. After that, there was also a longer war, which we call here ‘civil war’ which lasted for five years more. That’s when Ukrainians fought for their independence.

On the ruins of the Austrian-Hungarian, German, Russian and Ottoman empires, new political entities were emerging. Some of them were more successful or more familiar to the European imagination. Others were less successful. As we know later, somewhere around 1938 the British Prime Minister Chamberlain infamously said that Czechoslovakia is a far and unknown country, which is why we would not support it in this conflict with the Nazis. No one knows who they are. Maybe they just want to be a part of the Nazi system.

For me, this was a historical marker that it is important to be known, it is important to be heard, and to be friends with neighbours and with many other countries and cultures. We know contact, contrast and conflict as scenarios of the interaction of civilizations and countries that somehow neighbour each other or approach each other. However, there is also the fourth possible scenario and we praised it since 1989 since the so-called velvet revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, there is also the cooperation scenario.

When you contrast with someone, you get in contact with somebody it does not necessarily bring you a conflictual relationship, it could be a cooperation relationship. The benefit of a win-win situation is when we can find solutions for our problems and can somehow support each other. Diving into the history of the XX century, I understood that these win-win scenarios were very rare or they were broken violently and some other genies started to appear from the bottle. These genies were spirits of hatred, spirits of violence, spirits of the thinking ‘for my children to survive your children have to die.’

On the one hand, Ukrainians are those who survived, because our ancestors were resilient enough to survive. On the other hand, they went through such situations, such heavy choices that they were on the brink of humanity. Some of the tragic experience was just sealed. As a collective traumatic experience, it was never discussed. It was even repressed from the above. For example, the topic of the Holocaust was not a part of the public discourse or historical research or literature or movie scene in the Soviet period. That is why as a young educated girl I knew about Schindler’s list but I did not know about the possibility of having a hundred more Schindler’s lists staged at the place of local history across Ukraine. I think this is one of the great changes I have introduced in my teaching through literature and cultural studies — all my students know where those places were and what was happening. They understand at least partly how humanity is fragile, how the skin of humanity can be broken very easily, and how hard it is to restore humanity.

I remember how a famous Jewish historian who studied the Holocaust for many decades came up with an important and transparent formula of the lesson of ‘never again,’ the lesson of the Holocaust and the civilian suffering inflicted by the big powers of the XX century. His notion is the following: you will never be a victim again, you will never be a perpetrator again, and please never be an indifferent bystander again.

This is something Ukrainians found themselves face to face now. If the rest of humanity remains indifferent bystanders, we would be the Jews of the XXI century. Because there were some major miscalculations on the side of the Russian nomenclature and Putin himself, we are now supported by a huge wave of solidarity across the globe. I believe this is not because everybody loves Ukrainians; it is because now we represent a democratic and humanity part, which is exposed to radical evil. If the evil is not stopped the wave will go further. And this will break the promise of the previous generations that we would never go into the darkness as sleepwalkers, that we would have some red lines, some ringing bells, and if we hear them, we would never move in that direction.

Unfortunately, this is already a huge tragedy, but I believe we all together are reverting even bigger tragedy.

H. M.: This is so heart-moving to hear what you are saying. You mentioned those two keywords — cooperation and education. I thought that maybe it is easier in our day and age for these two things to be bridged. Now the media — be it social or traditional — plays such a huge role and lets everybody know. We see it ourselves.

You know, here in Australia there is no news broadcast, television or radio, which does not start and end with the current update on the situation in Ukraine. Many people here are opening not just their wallets but also their hearts and their homes and I know that this is not going to stop. I don’t understand how we here or in other countries get to a situation where we get numbed by it, that it’s going on for too long and we haven’t made a difference so we just switch off. I can’t see that happening. This is the conversation I’ve been having with everyone I know. What we can do as individuals is very limited, I know. We can provide support by helping with fundraising for the needs of people who are displaced. We can lobby our governments. The Australian government has done a little bit. They can do more. Absolutely.

How do you feel about the amount of help you’ve received from a military perspective from other governments, bearing in mind that they can’t or don’t want — which I can’t understand — to have what they call ‘boots on the ground?’

I. S.: Well, it’s a very important development, which has been taking place even before the dire days have come. The Ministry of Defence in Ukraine has been taken under the control of civil society. I am not sure whether you know that our Minister of Defence is not a ranked officer. He is a lawyer. He comes from this part of the society, which was thinking about defence and not about military power or superpower. Oleksii Reznikov did very good work in the last months before the full-scale invasion to gather support and understanding in the West that Ukraine is under great and real threat and we will fight but we need some equipment and technical support because this war will be quite exhaustive and long.

The other side of this story that some of our partners here in Europe did not believe is that Ukrainians will be resilient enough. There were talks that in three days or five days or maybe in a week Ukraine would surrender. There would be nothing surprising in that. However, there was a different surprise. Human capital proved to be very important in dire situations like this. In a certain way, the horizontal support, the cooperation between the front and the rear, and this human solidarity which was first shown among Ukrainians patterned the reaction in our nearby countries, in Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and then of course in Germany, Britain, Canada, America, Australia, and so on. We are grateful for that. However, this cannot be said without little irony, Ukrainians believe that all the help coming is very good, it is very valuable but it is a bit untimely. It comes a little too late. We asked you to help with something two months ago. Now we have it. Thank you, but now we need something extra.

You also see that this war is of particular cruelty. It’s a war of destruction. It’s not just physical destruction which is certainly very damaging and heart-breaking but this is also a war of destructing human behaviours, human solidarity and human empathy for each other. Empathy has to be based on something, you need to have resources for empathy. This is why I cherish your book so much and the story of Lali and Gita Sokolov because they have found some resources for empathy even in the darkest of places and times. 

I will now switch to you and your experience. Sorry for putting it so bluntly but I know that your books were translated both into Ukrainian and Russian. And prominent TV series were also shown both in Ukraine and Russia. Heather, how would you explain that we read the same books, watch the same stories and we come up with such different understandings and have such different illusions?

H. M.: I don’t know enough about the people in Russia and about their reading and grasping of my books to know that they think any differently to you, I mean an average man and woman who are just trying to live their lives. It is just the leaders of this country who are inflicting this damage. I am not hearing enough about the support they are getting. You will know more about that than I do. However, you are right. The books were published in both countries, they are read in both countries, I get lovely emails from people from both countries. My second book — ‘Cilka’s Journey’ — is about a young girl. It is not about the Holocaust but it is set in Gulag. When I was researching her story and her time in the Gulag, the Russian researcher I had was telling me how she was hearing from people in Moscow where she lives the support from people for my stories, for the stories being understood.

So it’s a tough question and I don’t have a clear answer to how different are readers in those two countries and how they interpret and accept what they read.

Can I come back to you? I know I’m doing it again and again but I think what we should be hearing here is your story about what’s you going through right now and what you country needs.

You mentioned your Minister of Defence is a lawyer. Maybe you’ve heard of an American man called Benjamin Ferencz. Two years ago at the age of 100, he wrote a book. He was not only a Jewish man in the American army but also the first prosecutor of the Nazis at the Nuremberg trial. At that time a young 27-year-old man. He took those first 22 Nazis to trial and got them convicted. He has spent the rest of his life forming the world’s criminal courts and trying to bring countries together to sign that if and wherever there are crimes against humanity, the persecutors must be caught and there must be charges. He says the only way humanity is going to survive and continue to strive is not by conflict but by the rule of law. I am a huge fan of this man. Just about three nights ago, I was watching his interview on CNN in America. He is now 103. The wisdom this man has gotten from his life experience is grand. You want to follow his story. His book is very small. It is under 200 pages and it is called ‘Parting Words. Nine Lessons for a Remarkable Life.’ I can only hope that the leaders in the US can get this man talking to the rest of the world about what he did for bringing to justice those crimes against humanity.

He was the first man to stand up in the court and say ‘These are crimes against humanity. This was genocide.’ I hope that now we can get through to that point. Your country is strong. You have world support! Maybe there are one-two countries out there who do not support you…

I. S.: Thank you for touching upon this. I believe, that in this series — The Dialogues on War — one of the first episodes was with Philippe Sands, a famous British lawyer and also a researcher and writer, a PEN member who researched the story of the two terms you have just mentioned — ‘crime against humanity’ and ‘genocide.’ Both these terms were invented by lawyers who observed the atrocities and sufferings inflicted on civilians of Jewish origin first of all through WWII. One of them — Hersch Lauterpacht — was then in Britain and came up with the term ‘crime against humanity.’ Another one — Raphal Lemkin — was a refugee in the US and came up with the term ‘genocide.’ Both of them were educated at the university I graduated from here in Lviv, at that time the city was called Lemberg in German and Lwow in Polish.

In his autobiographic book which also brings him to his ancestors from the town of Zhovkva near Lviv, Phillipe explains these young men were trained by lawyers and they were not just theoretics but also lived in a very complex community, a somewhat community of communities or society of societies of a triple formula: there were different religions, there were different languages and cultures. Some of these communities were more progressive, others were more conservative, some were easier to accommodate and adapt to the new reality, and others were resisting. However, they all represented city dwellers of the modernity of the beginning of the XX century. So there was some common ground and certain enlightenment which was good for them all. Besides, they shared not only some portion of humanity but a common language through which they could reach out to each other and get to know a bit more about each other. First, it was through German and later through Polish. This allowed them to have a closer look at their neighbours.

It is very important to see that the formula of the European Union was union through diversity. For Ukraine, which I represent, it was exactly the same feeling. We are united but at the same time, we are very diverse. We are constantly quarrelling about something. In this respect, since 1991, since Ukraine’s independence, we resemble a big Italian family. We are discussing and quarrelling, sometimes very loudly, between east and west, between Russian speaking and Ukrainian speaking… We also have the Crimean Tatar population and a very important story behind that, and a significant trauma of displacement and Stalinist repression behind that. However, what we shared was that Stalin and Stalinist crimes were equal evil to Nazi and Nazi genocide. Stalin camps were actually the same concentration labour camps. They lasted longer and the perpetrators were never properly brought to justice. And this feeling of a historical open wound was something that also united us in dynamics and in empathy to every big wound and to every grief and to every family story, and to every language that for any reason was not vocal enough and not represented enough.

Ukrainians were listening. They were ears. Russians, on the other hand, and at least for the last 20 years, were more talkative, they were more like a mouth, they were celebrating this narrative of a great victory in WWII which they call the Great Patriotic War, which is true for them. Nevertheless, they somehow forgot the very essence of it: on May 9 or May 8, we are in grief because of the mistakes and atrocities of humanity, which should never be repeated. At a certain moment, I think it is as early as 2004-2005 a narrative of ‘we can repeat’ was planted in Russian society. This notion of ‘we can repeat’ poses questions: what exactly can you repeat? The war? The victory? The atrocity? What exactly do you plan to repeat?

Now we, unfortunately, see that this capacity of unleashed evil is almost limitless and there should be big resistance to bring it back to its origin, punish it, and call it to justice. Otherwise, it will be repeated again and again.

H. M.: You are absolutely right. Everybody relates these two phrases to the Holocaust but it goes beyond the Holocaust. The ‘never forget, never again.’ It’s very easy to say the words but continue to live in a society, in a community where they don’t have a meaning. In Australia, we never had that kind of threat. We actually did not have a conflict here on soil, except for a little bit during WWII.

I somehow understand what you are saying purely because of the number of people I spend time with. Most recently, two weeks ago, I was in Israel with 96 and 98 years old survivors of the Holocaust. They are part of my latest book, ‘Three Sisters.’ Being with all the survivors I’ve met, not only of the Holocaust but other atrocities I hear that they still have hope. They think, ‘We were wounded but humanity would do the right thing. Otherwise, why did we survive? Why did we endure those three years?’ It is a miracle to spend time with these elderly ladies, see how they revived and have a beautiful family and a legacy of four generations, but still see the pain in them which never goes away.

As you said about your own people. They repress it, they keep it down but on the other hand, they also look out for their families knowing, ‘I can’t tell you the horrors I went through because you will never go through them. Because I survived so that you don’t.’

I think about the people of Ukraine, both those who are going through this right now and those who left to — I hope — return very soon. I know that the world community will come together to rebuild your country. You will not be left alone to do that. I just know it in my bones that the support will not end when those tanks roll out of your country. And all these people, yourself included who might think that they are just ordinary people trying to survive, trying to get through, you are living through extraordinary times! At some point, individually and collectively, you will get through this incredibly evil period and become stronger. History is repeating yourself in your beautiful country.

You are right, Ukraine had it. The Holocaust and that ravine with 30 thousand people. It was different to other European countries, other than Poland. People in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Romania were not mass murdered on their own soil. You’ve got the place where this actually happened. It is on your soil. And you take that. You remember that…

I. S.: And before that, 8 or 10 years earlier, on the Soviet part of Ukraine, there was another big atrocity, which is now recognized by the world — the Great Famine or we call it ‘Holodomor.’ It was also the same: neighbours were seeing other neighbours dying and sometimes even enabling them to die. It happened because of an ideology that wanted to crash Ukrainian villagers and their way of living since they were not easy to surrender to collective farming and an idea, alien to them, that was brought from Moscow and executed through Kharkiv, at that time the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet republic. Now, we know that around four million Ukrainians were victims of the Great Famine. People not only lost their dignity in life they lost their dignity in the way they were dying, they were not buried properly. Proper rituals were never observed at their graves, their mass graves. This tragic memory was actually forbidden and erased in the country. Therefore, here, there is trauma over trauma over trauma.

The last thing I want to remark on is that I see my life project in the humanities, in cultural studies, that I was involved in a big collective effort to recreate Ukrainian society from the scratch as a cruelty-free society. It was happening on all possible levels — on the level of how we raise children, how we talk to children, what we tell them, and what kind of example we show. On the level of how we behave with our neighbours and neighbourhood; are we kind enough to our nature; are we kind enough to the environment and all the other aspects, moving from the grassroots up and up to serve us better and better. The idea of good governance was introduced. Corruption — of which we were accused — was a corruption of a transit country. As we were a transit country for Russian gas, we were also a transit country for Russian corruption. It was like Russia was trying to destroy or defect or deconstruct Ukrainian governing. All these years we were a democratic country, with many faults of course, with many stupid things, but there was a corrective mechanism in place and with every new round of elections we were trying to correct ourselves and quite often we were making the right choices and we were supporting them with further energy and societal support. And this process is also now destructed. My big question is how will we appear from this war? I have certainty that Ukrainians will win and will somehow restore their country. However, I believe our hearts will be hardened. Many of the things we taught our children and we said to ourselves are irrelevant in times of war. And post-war, you know it yourself, does not come on the day of a peace treaty.

H. M.: No, far from it. Look, you have summed up it beautifully. Could I just add one aspect of what you are enduring and what will play out in the years to come as people return and are helped to settle either in their country — hopefully in their country — or whenever they are. There is one aspect of war and conflict, which to my total understanding and belief is not looked at enough and not considered. It’s a tough one to speak about but it is very important to me. This is sexual abuse of women and girls that happens during these times. This is something I am very passionate about, talking about, which is why I wrote Cilka’s story.

I just want to believe that your country, you will not allow the women who were victims of this abuse to be in any way shamed, but they will be supported. That everyone would unite behind them as they try to deal with their added trauma. It is a different level of trauma again. I’ve seen it in the eyes, faces, and words of too many women. This is my request: can you please stand up and look after this horrible aspect of this horrible evil period?

I. S.: I must say that in this respect we also have tremendous help from abroad. Psychologists are in place, lawyers are in place, and many international refugee helpers are in place, so these people who have already suffered more than you can actually stand, would not be shamed in their own society. Again, I want to look back to this talk about a cruelty-free and empathic way of upbringing. You know, this cruelty-free string in Ukrainians was observed even in Stalinist labour camps. Ukrainians were resilient, they were in solidarity with others, they were sharing their last tits and bits with others, and they were very empathic not only within their community but also with labourers, with other people who were in the same dare position. Sometimes they were even empathic to their perpetrators.

We have a famous Ukrainian poet — Vasyl Stus — who spent more than 10 years in the Brezhnev camps. His perpetrators did everything possible for him not to know that the Soviet Union was about to crack and persuaded him that his words were worthless, his language was dying, no one would know about him, that he would die at a camp ad his son and relatives would be ashamed of him as an anti-Soviet element. Nevertheless, Stus was empathic enough to think of his perpetrators as equal slaves but on the other side of the ideology.

I want to believe in this depth of humanity, in big hearts. I also want to believe that after these very trying events — the XXI century was not supposed to be like that — Ukrainians will be leaders of humanitarian aid, leaders of support, leaders of sharing the experience of survival, and the guards of humanity for the next generations.

H. M.: Beautifully said. Can I just end by saying, Iryna, it’s been one of the highlights of my life to be speaking with you here this evening. To the folks from PEN Ukraine, thank you from the bottom of my heart, for the privilege of being here with you this evening.