Tribune. This trip to Ukraine necessarily brought me back to those made during the Bosnian War between 1992 and 1995. I was quarantine, I now have 71 years, but the disorientation of home home is always the same. After the days spent with those who have lost everything and who camp in dormitories of fortune, after the distribution of our loading and once our trucks emptied, the return to the starting base leaves as stunned as then. And it does not come from fatigue, it comes from a void, the disarray of the one who can come back safe and sound.
Refugees, there remains a suitcase and the surety of being alive, to be able to wait. It is their conjugation of time, the present indicative of the verb “wait”, without looks turned towards the past or the future.
After 1,350 kilometers of travel on good roads, across Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, convoy arrives at Sighetu Marmatii, a city on the border of Ukraine. Party of Modena, it is organized by the volunteers of [the Foundation] Time4Life, who intervene in several parts of the world, from Syria to Nicaragua. I did not know them. It is a volunteer of Bosnia years that pointed out to me.
on the “toy bridge”
SIGHETU MARMATIEI is the hometown of Elie Wiesel, who was a child in Auschwitz, then rewarded by the Nobel Peace Prize. I find no trace in the city. SIGHETU MARMATIEI is separated from Ukraine by a river, a bridge connects them.
On arrival, we deliver our loading in a pediatric hospital that hosts Ukrainian children. A woman has just given birth, after retaining his contractions to the hospital. She left kyiv by a railway line still in service leading to the south, about 3 kilometers from the Romanian border, and from there walked to the bridge of the borders, where she was immediately welcomed by the Red Cross Romanian.
She puts her baby in the arms of volunteers who, after unloading, pass through the services to greet. The war in Bosnia taught me the immense need of human warmth, proximity, affection, necessary not to feel alone in the chaos of losses and leaks.It is good to be several to manifest itself, Request news with the help of interpreters. We are thirty volunteers on this trip.
Any war has a fratricidal form, but this one even more, because of the narrow link of culture and history between Ukrainians and Russians. Gogol, Boulgakov, Nekrassov, Babel – My favorite, who pushed me to study his language – are Ukrainian writers in Russian language. The Cyrillic alphabet allows me to read the names of the place, signs, panels. We cross the bridge between the two borders. Along the sidewalks, someone left for Ukrainian dolls, toys that will be there to welcome them. This bridge is already called the “bridge of toys”.
You have 45.25% of this article to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.