My View: Letter from Lviv

In December, I wrote in The Current about volunteering for 10 days in western Ukraine, where I prepared vacuum-packed, dehydrated meals (including borscht) for the front in the war against invading Russian troops.

I returned last month to work again with Lviv Volunteer Kitchen and to lead drama therapy workshops, a remnant of a former career and a little break from the war for Ukrainians. A session with psychology students at a university in Kyiv was interrupted by air raid sirens; the students conjured imaginary air defense missiles but the dean broke the fourth wall and announced the alert was possibly a wave of hypersonic Kinzhal missiles. 

The students were sent to the bomb shelter, and I sat in the dean’s office drinking a cappuccino. “I grew up in New York City in the 1980s, so I’m used to living in danger,” I said. She smiled as if I were a lunatic.

Just about everyone I met wanted the war to end but also believed the only way to remain independent was to keep fighting. It’s possible to overstate the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder, but the entire country is at risk.

I frequently saw men without limbs navigating the baroque streets of Lviv and gasped at how many had been buried in the Field of Mars cemetery since my last visit. Battle losses in the east and a third winter of relentless Russian attacks on the power grid have worn the Ukrainian people down. Yet they somehow maintain their decency. 

At the volunteer kitchen, my aggressive productivity at dressing chickens despite my vegetarianism surprised me. I also spent a day making camouflage nets to help Ukrainian soldiers avoid drone attacks. But my main mission was drama therapy, and Zoya Romanets, an energetic psychodramatist, scheduled eight workshops for 200 psychologists, university students and artists in Lviv, Kyiv and Irpin, a suburb that was occupied and heavily damaged by Russian forces in March 2022.

Images of war and weapons came up in every session. In one group in Lviv, students traveled on a magic carpet to Crimea — occupied by Russia since 2014 and a raging war zone — and had a beach party, singing “The Caucasus” by Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko. To conclude, we passed around a magic seashell that granted their wishes: peace, victory and to be reunited with friends and family.

During another session in Lviv, some members asked to remove an imaginary pile of weapons, while others refused, even for make-believe. I was thinking it might be best to avoid diving too deeply into war themes, but then Claudia volunteered to do an individual session. We imagined flying over Mariupol, her hometown. She described the month she spent underground in 2022, fleeing just before the city was reduced to rubble. I understood all this even before my translator rendered her words into English. She wanted to go home, but could not. 

On my final night in Lviv, I attended a Passover seder for the first time in four decades at the invitation of Volodymyr Puzyrko, a diplomat and lawyer whom I’d met the night before at a jazz club in a scene out of a John le Carré novel. I endured a two-hour Passover Haggadah in Ukrainian, which probably made my Galitzianer ancestors happy, although I could hear them yelling, “Eat more!”

A few hours after I arrived in Kyiv by overnight train, I walked through Bucha, the leafy suburb that Russian forces briefly occupied in their attempt to encircle the capital and overthrow the government in February and March 2022. They destroyed much of the town and killed hundreds of civilians. Standing in a rebuilt neighborhood, it was difficult to imagine the line of charred Russian tanks and bodies that had littered the streets two years earlier.

Later that day in Irpin, I led a workshop in a university building next door to a burned-out husk. Because we were closer to danger than in Lviv, I assumed the session would focus on war themes, but group members — especially the men — were more interested in traveling the world, arranging a festive wedding and dancing all night long.

The coda to my visit was supplied by Joe Lindsley, the editor-in-chief of The Putnam County News and Recorder during the Ailes era. Joe has been in Ukraine for five years and reports daily via WGN in Chicago and Ukrainian Freedom News. We met at a swank cocktail bar filled with Americans and Ukrainians networking.

I didn’t know Joe when he lived in Cold Spring, but he’s probably much happier now, covering politics, culture, business and the war. As we parted, I handed him two baseball gloves and a baseball, asking him to pass them on to a Ukrainian. He sent them to Kharkhiv, which a few days later had to fight off a new Russian assault.