September 28, 2022
She closes her eyes to make a wish, then blows – all the candles go out. There are too few, only seven, we couldn’t quickly find more in the apartment. All guests get a piece of birthday cake. Ania laughs: “Last year I wished to move into a new apartment,” she says, “but that’s not how I imagined it, to be honest!”
“Yes, I too dreamed that we would finally spend more time together again and that your dad wasn’t always on business trips,” adds the mother. Her husband, my cousin Andrij, actually traveled far too often for a while. I remember on one of my recent visits to Kharkiv he drove six hours to make it to his parents’ house for lunch. When we were seated at the table, a call came and he had to return immediately. He and his family are now in Berlin, and Ania is celebrating her 18th birthday today.
My son is sitting to her left, her best friend Lika, who came all the way from Poznan to her right, is eating cake, joking and discussing which bar they want to go to to celebrate. Ania seems relaxed and carefree, but I still have to remember that she experienced some things in her 18th year that you wouldn’t wish on any young person, not even an adult.
And as it happens in every conversation with Ukrainians nowadays, sooner or later, we come to the topic “Where were you on February 24 and how did you experience the beginning of the escalation of the war”, while eating cake.
“The night before, when I was sitting in the kitchen with my parents, I wanted to talk to them about what we should do if things really got going,” Ania begins, “but they didn’t cooperate. I woke up just after four to this horrible noise, like someone hitting an iron plate with a hammer, very scary! I walked out into the hallway, amazed that nobody woke up but me.
I woke dad, I didn’t want mom to hear us, she was nine months pregnant and couldn’t always sleep well. I said to him, ‘Hey, the war has started.’ We sat down in the kitchen, he took his cell phone, lit a cigarette, read the news for a moment, but there was nothing there, it was too early, and he said, I’m probably just imagining it all.”
Ania’s grandmother, a teacher, went to work on February 24, like every day
“Well, I was only in bed at three, didn’t even sleep two hours, suddenly my daughter is standing in front of me with a message like that, it was pretty hard!” Andrij describes how he experienced it.
“My mother woke me up,” says Lika, “and she sounded extremely excited, but didn’t want to reveal it under any circumstances. So her voice seemed overly calm. ‘Get up, please get up normally, little daughter, everything’s fine!’, something like that. Everything was immediately clear to me. It was loud outside, I looked at the clock and asked her if war had broken out.”
Ania’s grandma woke up at 4:30 am when her alarm clock rang, she always got up early as she worked as a teacher. From the window she saw something burning in the distance, she thought it might be a power plant. She drank her tea, got dressed and drove to work like she did every day.
She smiles because it sounds a bit absurd today, and when I look at the others in the room, I realize – almost everyone is smiling. If someone had photographed us, the viewer would never be able to guess what the people in the picture were talking about.
We switch to other topics, because what happened immediately after February 24th is not something you want to talk about on a birthday. The Russian tanks on the streets of Kharkiv, the weeks in the basement with 200 neighbors, the days of flight. Ania raises a toast to Ukraine and the impending victory.
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Source: Tagesspiegel
I am a technology author with 8 years of experience in journalism. My writing covers the latest technology advancements and trends, drawing on my expertise in news journalism and social media platforms. I have contributed to major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters.
