As the Russian invasion moves in on Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, bombs are hitting close to the places I once called home. When I first heard that a missile struck a TV tower close to Babyn Yar in Kyiv, I thought: “That used to be my park.” Because of this attack, more people know that Babyn Yar was where the Nazis built a concentration camp, then murdered 33,000 Jews in just two days. For me, the site is a symbol of both the Holocaust and my childhood in Ukraine.
I spent the first 10 years of my life in Kyiv. When my mother and I moved to the Syrets neighborhood, the grassy parkland that included Babyn Yar became my playground. There, I made friends and forced my mom to read aloud to me for hours. My parents had their wedding pictures taken in the park, shortly after a monument was erected, with the commemoration: “To Soviet citizens and POWs shot by the Nazi occupiers.” It didn’t specifically highlight Jewish death. For my parents, the photos were a way to honor murdered Jews against erasure and to infuse our culture into their wedding when public shows of Jewishness could still come with costs.
When we left Ukraine in 1993, we had months to pack but we didn’t take a lot of photos. Today’s refugees have so little time to think of what to carry as they flee. Because my family brought barely any mementos, retained few connections and hasn’t returned, Ukraine has largely lived inside of our minds. The longer that we stayed away, the more nostalgia shaped our memories, taking out the sting of what pushed us out, though not erasing it. The Kyiv that existed just before this war was not the Kyiv that we left. But there’s a difference between knowing cities change with time and seeing them reduced to rubble. The current war, with its destruction of my childhood haunts, has felt more personally violent, more traumatic than I had anticipated.
