From Ukraine To Ireland: The Journey Of A 12-Year-Old Survivor

So many of the stories of my ancestors are about fleeing Ireland in order to survive the Great Famine. So I have been interested in the harrowing accounts of refugees who are seeking safety in the Emerald Isle, in order to escape a larger oppressor in the Russo-Ukrainian War. I am intrigued by an Ireland whose past makes her strong enough to welcome new children who desperately need her, instead having no choice but to grieve for the starving ones forced to depart from her two centuries ago.

I found a book that follows this perilous journey from eastern Europe to the Republic of Ireland, written from a brave and forthright perspective. The first entry of You Don't Know What War Is: The Diary of a Young Girl from Ukraine by 12-year-old Yeva Skalietska, is on February 24, 2022, the last night before the sound of explosions. Her story is about her love for her grandmother, Iryna, who is her primary guardian (Her parents are abroad.). It is also about her beloved and now war-ravaged homeland of Ukraine and the countries she and her grandmother take refuge in - first Hungary, then Ireland, with its peaceful blue sky. (Note to reader: There are spoilers in this essay.)

In the section titled “Before,” she writes a detailed description of her hometown of Kharkiv. It is the second largest city in Ukraine, which can be located on a map in the front of the book. She reveals what makes the city so special to her. You can almost hear the thrum of the city streets. She writes:

Every Sunday, I go down to the city center for my piano lessons. I pass old houses with large windows, and the Wedding Palace, which was built in 1920. The thing I like most about it here is all the shops. Kharkiv has loads of beautiful places. The city center, the Shevchenko City Garden, the zoo, and Gorky Park. The Shevchenko Garden is especially beautiful and has an amazing musical fountain with toy monkeys playing different instruments. There’s also a really cool dolphinarium nearby where you can go visit dolphins and beluga whales. There is a beautifully paved street that leads up to Derzhprom, a group of tall buildings in Freedom Square. And whenever Granny and I need to soothe our souls, we visit Svyato-Pokrovs’kyy Monastery.

She also describes her home with great fondness. This includes the views from different rooms and treasured objects. This is where the happiness of her daily life unfolds.

I love my room in Granny Iryna’s apartment. It’s very cozy, with really comfy armchairs. I do my homework on a cute little desk. I’ve got my easel and my oil paints right in the middle of the room. Whenever I feel inspired, I sit down and paint. On my bed, I always have my favorite stuffed animal - a pink cat. It is long (like a sausage) and white-bellied, and I call it Chupapelya, I don’t know why I named her that, or what it even means, but it just stuck. The windows in my room look out toward the city, and the windows in Granny’s bedroom face the Russian border and some houses and huge empty fields. Granny’s apartment has a big kitchen filled with Italian furniture. There’s a tall palm tree in a pot in the corner. We have a lot of plants. Also, I really enjoy taking nice warm baths in our huge tub with massage jets. It’s such a lovely apartment and in a great neigborhood in a block of buildings on the northeastern outskirts of Kharkiv.

Then war rips away that sense of comfort and security that can only be found in a home. Yeva shelters with her grandmother in a basement. They briefly visit their apartment a few times to grab a few things like Yeva’s laptop and diary. They also wash and grab a bite to eat. She writes, “I used to take sunny days for granted. A peaceful sky was nothing out of the ordinary. But it’s all changed now.” Eventually, the danger is too great. They are worried they might be used as human shields. They have to leave their apartment and the surrounding area altogether. “The taxi finally arrives. We get in and set off. I ask Granny, ‘What about our things?’ She replies, ‘We have to leave them. Our lives are more important!”

They travel to the house of a friend of her grandmother, Inna, on the western side of Kharkiv, farther away from the fighting. From there, she hears news about the destruction of her hometown. “My neighborhood. North Saltivka, is practically being erased. It is terrible! All the little streets I used to play in, the little courtyards, my favorite pizza place, and my school! It was all so beautiful! Such an awful shame…and for what? “ So many of the places she has described earlier in the book are struck by bombs - Freedom Square, the zoo, Derzhprom, Gorky Park…They receive news that the destruction has reached their apartment when their kitchen is destroyed by a missile. She writes:

This hurts, because my childhood was spent there! Attacking my home is the same as attacking a piece of me. I’m starting to feel depressed, but I’m fighting it with food. I feel like my heart has been squashed. There were such memories there! Our Italian furniture, our fancy dinner sets, the glass table. All those memories blown to bits. Tears are streaming down my face, and that’s only a fraction of my sorrow. I don’t care as much about the things themselves as much as I do the memories they held. I spent my childhood there, and it has simply been destroyed! There isn’t much left of the apartment. Why doesn’t anyone care? Why? Do you enjoy fighting in cities, destroying everything in your wake, instead of fighting in the battlefields? Kharkiv is being destroyed bit by bit.

She goes on to describe the destruction of the apartment in further detail, keeping a record of each innocent object, each memory that has been wronged. It is a catalogue of outrage. It is a breach of privacy.

If you want a detailed description of what happened to my apartment, then read on - we’ve been given all the details….The balcony, the kitchen, and the part of the hallway leading into it were all destroyed. Bits of plaster, rubble, and broken glass fill the hallway. My bedroom windows were blown off, but the room itself seems intact. The living room, along with its windows, was spared. The front door was so bashed up that even if Granny had managed to get the key over there, it wouldn’t have helped. The emergency workers closed the front door as best they could and fixed it in place with tape. We want to weld the door shut. Will there be anything left in our apartment after the war?

Eventually, Yeva Skalietska and her grandmother leave the city altogether and head to Dnipro, a city in south-central Ukraine. Then they take a train to Uzhhorod, in western Ukraine, where there is a school that is housing refugees.. She writes:

How am I supposed to sleep on a mattress in a school gym instead of in my warm cozy bed? Where am I going to wash? There’s no hot bath here. I want to go back to school - my school - to my friends. I feel numb.

Channel 4, a British TV channel (whose videos of Yeva’s story I have included on this post) take an interest in the pair’s plight and help them on their journey. This includes a stay in Hungary. She finds the central European country enchanting, especially the Hungarian Parliament Building. It is Ireland’s willingness to take refugees that brings her to the island.

Since the very first day I met them, I’ve been asking the reporters to help us get to England. After about three days, it became clear that in order to do so. we’d need to have family there. They said we could go to Ireland or France instead. We’d heard that the people of France aren’t very welcoming toward immigrants, and we don’t speak any French. So we decided to go to Ireland.

She later writes, “I felt so happy, because I was going to a safe country and because there were people waiting to meet us at the airport.” An Irish couple, Catherine and Gary, opened up their home to them. “The Irish are very kind and friendly,” she notes in her diary.

We arrived very late, at midnight. There’s a dog at the house called Buddy. I gave him some cuddles. We were shown around the house.and to our room. I was showered with gifts - a new set of pajamas, some makeup, some gym clothes, and some toys. I was so excited I couldn’t get to sleep until 3 a.m.!

Yeva and her grandmother are welcomed by neighbors with flowers and gifts. She is invited to play the piano at a neighbor’s house, A girl her age invites her to bake scones and play Kimble (the Finnish version of Trouble), She attends the local Ukrainian Catholic church. She describes a walk along the coast of the Irish Sea and a visit to the parks.

When we arrived, I could feel the wind on my face and blowing through my hair. We climbed down to the beach and it was low tide, which made the beach look huge. I took some pictures. The sea was breathtakingly beautiful. I was all wrapped up in a snug, warm coat, but kite-surfers were there, rushing bravely into the water, not minding the cold one bit! They were fascinating to watch, gliding over the waves. The sea was like a mirror reflecting the sky. I ran around on the sandy beach, enjoying every wonderful moment. I felt overwhelmed with emotion. Buddy was zooming around too, and I kept trying to catch him. It was so thrilling..Then we went to take a look around the city. Trees are planted along the bank. Gorgeous green parks that you can actually run around on!

She is a constantly inquisitive observer of this new world. She further describes her impressions of Dublin, while visiting with a school group. Her first real glimpse of the city is from the window of a train. She writes:

The curious thing about Dublin is that there aren’t any buildings taller than five stories here. European-style streets. Stunning redbrick buildings. It surprised me that the city doesn't have a metro! We walked over a bridge that straddles the River Liffey -it’s amazing. I’m looking around and seeing many different bridges. Some are tall, large, and built to allow cars to drive over them. But others are small, for pedestrians only. We walked along Dublin’s best known street - Grafton Street - and then we walked along the river and made a turn toward EPIC, the Irish Emigration Museum. We kept together, like a row of geese.

At the museum, she learns about many aspects of Irish culture, from the Great Famine to national holidays and Irish dancing and food. She then travels to Trinity College Dublin to see the Book of Kells, which I was excited about because when my sister Stephanie and I visited Ireland, that was our first stop. She writes:

And then we stepped inside the library and saw the ancient Book of Kells. It’s very long, 1,200 years old, and written in Latin. We weren’t allowed to take photos. Then we walked up some stairs and entered a very long library. Two stories filled with books. I had no doubt you could find Pushkin’s poems there (that’s whose name popped into my head when I tried to think of a writer, I don’t know why). Someone played the theme music from Harry Potter on their phone, and right away I imagined I was at Hogwarts.

She contrasts her “wonderful day” in Dublin, to a “horrible day” in Kharkiv and the Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine. The shopping center next to her school was destroyed. A “beautiful monastery” that she visited last summer in a city called Svyatohirs’k is no more. She is worried about a rumor that chemical weapons will be used on citizens.

In the meantime, she attends her first St. Patrick’s Day Parade. This is a further introduction to her new country. (“There were also people dressed as characters from Irish history and folklore, but we didn’t know who any of them were - yet.”) It connects her to her homeland, when she sees Ukrainian refugees who are wrapped in the country’s yellow and light blue flag, at the parade. They arrived in Dublin a few days ago. The three discuss the shared experience of war planes flying overhead. A short conversation is enough to trigger painful memories.

With friends and neighbors fleeing war zones for places such as Germany, Poland and other parts of Ukraine (We read about their experiences throughout the book as well and in a section toward the back called “My Friends’ Stories.”), Yeva visits a large park and zoo in Dublin. She writes, “I wanted to get out of the car and run around on the grass. The park was so vast that it would take an entire day to explore it all. The president of Ireland has a house somewhere in this park, but we never went to it.” Instead, she relishes the company of the lemurs, a tiger, both types of lions - the ones with manes and sea lions, giraffes, gorillas, elephants, and rhinoceros. She is delighted by an artificial waterfall and a lake, that is connected to the monkeys’ jungle.

Later, she visits 830-year-old Malahide Castle and Portmarnock Beach . “There, sky-blue waters and sandbars stretched out into the distance,” she writes. “There were people there taking a stroll, and it seemed to me like they were walking over the sky.” Still, every night before she goes to bed she watches the news about the shelling - the rockets and missiles aimed at her home city and country and thinks of family hiding in a shelter.

Yeva visits Howth,Summit and a lighthouse that reminds her of Sochi, a Russian resort city on the Black Sea. Sochi hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics. She reflects on the current fractured relationship between Russia and Ukraine.

For a few seconds today, I was transported to Sochi. It’s where my great-grandmother lives - a seaside town in Russia. I saw some palm trees, and they seemed so odd here that I felt like there was a bit of Sochi here. I used to spend entire summers there, splashing around in the sea, but the war has divided Russia and Ukraine. It’s so sad.

The lighthouse evokes mixed feelings for Yeva. There is the wonder of a vast sea, but there is also the awareness of distance. Sometimes grief is also a gigantic void.

And the lighthouse stood there, quietly watching over the ships. The ships went by, one after another. The weather was amazing, not a cloud in the sky. If you took a boat straight from here, you could reach Wales. We got to the edge and it seemed like there was no end to the sea. A boundless horizon. I sat down on a warm little boulder and looked out. ..But at the same time, I felt such sorrow…

Yeva begins school in Ireland. Everything is in English and she relies on a translator app. She is switching from a Ukrainian curriculum to an Irish one, with the added challenge of having to learn in another language. There are grand pianos for her to play, a school library and she makes new friends, but she misses old friends and teachers. There is a photo of Yeva in her new school uniform, (as well as additional photos throughout the book).

She feels a further sense of isolation at being called a refugee. Having a home provides such a sense of identity. To be torn from that, one would imagine, would shake a person’s sense of belonging in the world.

I can’t stand the word ‘refugee.’ I never could. When Granny began referring to us as refugees, I immediately asked her to stop doing that. Inside, it made me feel ashamed. I’ve only just understood why. I’m embarrassed to admit that i don’t have a home…It’s felt unbearable ever since we fled our apartment to go to the basement. My dream is that, someday soon, we’ll have our own place again.

It turns out that some treasured possessions of Yeva’s are rescued from the Kharkiv apartment, but she doesn’t return home. After all, the war is still ongoing. She and her grandmother rent a small house in South County Dublin. She describes it as “a cozy little house with a garden,” that is a five-minute walk from her school. “There are flowers everywhere,” she writes. Still she dreams of home, describing that in more vivid detail.

I have a dacha in Vovchanks, outside Kharkiv - it’s a big, beautiful house. There are a lot of orchard trees there, and loads of flowers too. There’s a river nearby - Siverskyi Donets. I loved taking my shoes off and going down for a swim among the blooming white water lilies. In the evening, Granny and I would sit by the big fireplace and drink tea. In the autumn, I’d go for a walk in the tall pine and oak forest and forage for mushrooms. There were loads of different kinds! Butter mushrooms, penny buns, bay boletes, and chanterelles.

Throughout the book, Yeva expresses gratitude to the Irish people for helping her and her grandmother. Her whole attitude seems to be one of appreciation over despair. In the acknowledgments she writes:

In Dublin, we were welcomed by Catherine Flanagan and her family. After a long and difficult journey, my life had turned into a fairy tale. A beautiful house and a warm, cozy atmosphere. Gary, Catherine’s husband, has shown us around all the beautiful parts of Dublin. Catherine helped me enroll at the school she works in. They helped us during a very difficult time in our lives, and I am thankful to them.

She is also grateful for the friendship of her new classmates (while missing her Ukrainian friends) and the family who owns the home they are renting. Throughout the book she is so full of wonder at the beautiful places and new bonds she experiences in Hungary and Ireland. Still, one wishes that these adventures didn’t have to come with such a heavy heart, that she could just be a carefree 12-year-old girl. There are the ever-present memories of war and the yearning for a place so dear that will never be the same again, but which one still dreams of returning to nonetheless. Ireland provides the green earth and the blue sky to be free and sustain those fragile hopes.

The glossary and endnotes explain what the illuminated manuscript of the Book of Kells is but they also define, for example, borscht, a traditional Ukrainian sour soup and Kyiv cake, a dessert of layered cake, meringue and other scrumptious ingredients. Also explained is a Ukrainian ritual. When you’re about to leave on a journey, you stop what you’re doing and sit down, quietly, for a few seconds, before you’re on your way.