My View: Letter from Lviv

I spent the first 10 days of November in western Ukraine, volunteering with Lviv Volunteer Kitchen to prepare vacuum-packed, dehydrated meals (including borscht) for the front. The country is a war zone, and the U.S. State Department advises against traveling there. So why did I go? My practiced answer to Ukrainians who asked was “to help Ukraine stay independent and free.” If a conversation developed, I mentioned that I wanted to show Ukrainians that Americans still care about them, almost two years after the brutal Russian invasion and despite our congressional mishegoss.

A couple of times I mentioned that my Jewish grandmother grew up not far away — living through a Russian attack and occupation herself in 1914 — and some of my ancestors were from Lviv, when it was known as Lemberg, Galicia, and was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I never told anyone that I wanted to be a war tourist, but maybe that’s another reason.

During the day, I peeled and chopped carrots, potatoes, beets and other vegetables. During the evenings, I sampled the restaurants and bars with fellow volunteers from across Europe, making sure to get home well before midnight curfew.

One afternoon I drove around Lviv with a Ukrainian 20-something, delivering supplies to a roasting plant. Like many Ukrainians, Ihor is a chain smoker. As we barreled around the narrow, cobblestoned streets (he was at the wheel) and then hauled 50-pound sacks and crates from the truck to a loading dock, he told me that many of his friends had been killed and he thought the war would go on for another 10 years.

I asked if he was worried about getting drafted, as press gangs (military recruiters) roam the old town in Lviv rounding up young men. Ihor said that he had already served in the territorial defense in Kharkhiv during Russia’s siege from February to May 2022. In any event he planned to go to the U.S. I inquired how he could possibly get out of Ukraine, as men aged 18 to 60 are barred from leaving. Ihor smiled, winked and lit another cigarette.

One night I went to the opera. Front-row seats were $10. Before the curtain, the house manager said that in case of an air alert we should proceed to the shelter downstairs. Then everyone in the packed house rose to their feet and the orchestra launched into the Ukrainian national anthem. After the orchestra finished, a burly man in a camouflage jacket a few seats from me shouted “Slava Ukraini!” (“Glory to Ukraine!”), and the audience answered, “Heroim Slava!” (“Glory to the Heroes!”). For 3 1/2 hours we watched an over-the-top performance of Carmen and forgot about the war.

On my day off, I took a walking tour with a historian named Alex Denisenko. I hadn’t realized I was living in the former Jewish ghetto. Alex casually told me that during a recent tour, a Russian missile had flown overhead. We dropped in to see Meylakh Sheykhet, the Ukraine director of the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union, which provides meals to Ukrainians who have fled the front (whether or not they’re Jewish). He hopes to rebuild the Golden Rose Synagogue, constructed in 1582 and destroyed by the Nazis in 1942.

Later, we stopped at a building in which Raphael Lemkin lived while studying law in the 1920s. A Polish Jew, Lemkin invented the word genocide.

At times the war seemed far away, until I heard air raid sirens or walked past hollow-eyed soldiers in fatigues enjoying a few moments of leave with their families. One day I was in the main square when the Ukrainian version of taps played on a trumpet brought everything to a halt — buses, trams, pedestrians. A funeral procession passed: recently killed soldiers. I made a pilgrimage to the Lychakiv cemetery. During my brief visit to Lviv in June 2022, a small number of freshly dug graves had occupied a corner of an area they call the Field of Mars. Now it’s full.