Does anything have more pathos than the empty bed of a child who may never return?
The question is invited by a 100ft mural highlighting the abduction of 19,546 Ukrainian children by Russia that was unveiled this past weekend in the Little Ukraine neighbourhood of Lower Manhattan, New York.
Empty Beds features life-size photos of the beds of some of the 994 children who have been safely returned from Russia or Russian-occupied areas since the outbreak of war in 2022. The rest of the kidnapped children remain unaccounted for.
The pictures were taken by Phil Buehler, a Brooklyn-based artist specialising in giant public installations with political themes, on a trip to Ukraine last month. It is a follow-up to Please Don’t Forget Us, a 60ft-long photo mural of a car cemetery in Irpin, Ukraine, that he presented last year.
It was during that trip that Buehler heard the stories of the thousands of stolen Ukrainian children. He tried to put himself in the shoes of the parents and recalled visiting a close friend in Ohio whose daughter had been killed by a drunk driver five years earlier and who had left her bedroom untouched.
“It like a little time capsule,” the 68-year-old says via Zoom. “When I would walk into the room, you could feel a presence and imagine her parents walking in there and seeing this empty bed and her things. It’s like a life interrupted. The laundry was still in the hamper, the poster’s still on the wall. That always stayed in my head on how powerful it was to me.”
He then imagined Ukrainian parents leaving their children’s bedrooms alone and waiting for them to come back. When Buehler visited the country, it was impractical to photograph the empty beds of those still missing because an active war crimes investigation is under way.
But he was able to meet eight children who escaped from Russian-occupied areas – some taking journeys that lasted a week – to be reunited with parents or guardians. Children were brought back thanks to the efforts of the Bring Kids Back UA, an initiative of the president of Ukraine, which now works on all of the children’s returns and their further reintegration into Ukrainian society. They now live with their families outside Kyiv in the Hope and Healing Center of Save Ukraine, awaiting more permanent housing, or in Hansen Village, a new charitable housing development where they may stay rent-free for five years.
Buehler observed: “Some of the children are still traumatised and want to run to the shelter when they hear the air raid sirens.”
Among them was Rostislav, 17, who was held captive and tortured by Russian forces but refused to renounce his Ukrainian citizenship and ultimately escaped. He later testified before the US Congress and is now studying photography. Another was three-year-old Vlada who in March fled the Russian-occupied Kherson region with her parents and eight-year-old brother Stas, a journey that took them through occupied Crimea and Russia before safely returning to Ukraine.
Buehler took pictures of these children’s current beds, lowering or raising his camera to the child’s height to recreate their point of view. He kept them empty as a symbol of shared humanity. He says: “It’s such an intimate place with your children and the bond between parents and children and, when that’s separated like that, it’s a tragedy, it’s horrible.
“The brutality of that is worse than a bullet wound. Not knowing what happens to your kid. I tried not to over-aesthetise the images. I was trying to get the right height of a kid and I didn’t prop them. I just would shoot them.”
The giant scale of the images allows viewers to see intimate details. “The stuffed animals seemed to be a recurring thing. On one of the beds, it looks like a stuffed animal but it’s actually a kitten in there with the stuffed animals.
“The older kid still had a Yankees hat on his bed with his camera bag. But it is that universal thing from all generations, all countries – I even think if Russians weren’t so brainwashed and propagandised that they would be able to relate to these other children and the horror of that. They’ll never hear that story.”
Children seized by Russia are forbidden to speak Ukrainian. Their names and dates of birth are routinely changed by Russian authorities as part of “Russification” intended to erase their Ukrainian identity and prepare them to fight for Moscow.
Zhanna Galeyeva, co-founder of Bird of Light Ukraine, a charity that supports Ukrainian children freed from Russian captivity and that is working closely with Buehler, says via Zoom: “Unfortunately, they’re preparing to continue the wars and they’re re-educating our Ukrainian children.
“They are stripping them of their identity, of their own value system. They are retraining them into an active military force and we know of cases that prove that. I spoke to some children who were abducted and who came back, who testified in front of the Congress in United States, and they said nobody asked them what they want to do once they were transferred to those re-education camps.
“There was a certain protocol, a routine in which everybody must participate and boys of a certain age – I believe 14, 15, 16 plus – were immediately put in a special class that is military-educated class and girls were encouraged to take nursing classes or cooking classes. It’s a classic approach to preparing these children to be useful during the times when Russia is planning to invade further.”
Buehler only got back to the US at the start of the month but turned the piece around in time for a presidential election on which the future of Ukraine could hang. It also coincides with a ministerial conference in Montreal on 30-31 October that will discuss actions to return Ukrainian prisoners of war, unlawfully detained civilians and deported children.
But the artist cautions: “It’s not overtly a political piece in the way that other pieces I’ve done are very anti-Trump. I don’t want to turn it into that because even part of Trump’s Maga base would empathise with these kids if they could see this situation. It’s to bring this into the public light and then the ramifications of it.”
The Ukraine war has struggled for attention during the election campaign. “I don’t think people are thinking about it. On the long list it’s the economy and gas prices and the border and the rule of law and all those things.
“If they can get in there and maybe it touches that indecipherable undecided voter and they then connect that way because most politics they’re kind of staying out of but maybe they and sparks a reaction in them about what could happen. They know that Trump is Putin’s friend.”
The mural will be on display until 30 November. At Saturday’s opening, from 12 noon to 6pm, there was an added immersive experience. In front of each of the eight rooms there was a chair with a stuffed animal exactly as in the image, while Ukrainian lullabies played from loudspeakers.
Galeyeva explains: “Ukrainian lullaby songs are perhaps the most sensitive, touching part here because they convey such an intimate experience when a mother or father sings to their child. The lullaby song is something that lures the baby into this dreamlike world of safety, cosiness, warmth and, in the folk tradition, it’s not recommended to look at the child while the child is sleeping, because it’s almost like you’re bringing your energy into that sacred space.
“There is a very intimate connection between the song and the child sleeping and this, we hope, also will add an additional layer of immersion. It’s not like that right now in Ukraine for many kids and that’s the tragedy.”
Empty Beds is on show in Little Ukraine in New York City until 30 November
