My dear friend Audra is from Lithuania.
She was born in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, and she lived there until 1996, when she moved to the United States. Now she lives in Chicago, which has been a sister city to Vilnius for three decades. More Lithuanians live in Chicago than anywhere else in the world, outside of Lithuania.
Our sons have been best friends since preschool, so we’ve laughed together at kids’ birthday parties and cried together at kindergarten graduation and talked and texted about everything from mundane carpool plans to our deepest parenting fears. She has introduced me to her Lithuanian beet salad and Voruta black currant wine.
Lithuania shares a deep bond with Ukraine, as well as a border with Russia. Lithuania, with Latvia and Estonia, was seized by the Soviet Union after World War II. In March 1990, Lithuania declared independence from the Soviet Union, the first of the republics to do so. In January 1991, Russia sent troops to take back control.
When Russia began attacking Ukraine, I sent Audra a text: “I can’t even begin to imagine what you’re going through. I’m so, so sorry.”
Whatever combination of fear and dread and helplessness I was feeling about Ukraine, I knew she was feeling it times 1,000.
“It’s challenging to vocalize what’s going on back at home,” she texted back. “However, it’s not about me. Ukraine is not fighting just for their land. They are fighting for us and the rest of the democratic world.”
Here, she wrote, so many people think and talk like spectators — sad, but safely removed from the violence and trauma raining down on other people. And that’s the spirit in which I texted her. No question.
“Maybe it’s corona,” she told me later, in my kitchen. “We think everything will be fine if we just stay in our shell. If I have no connection with the outside world, I am protected.”
She sees headlines in the U.S. about how to keep your kids from being traumatized by the images in Ukraine, even as she wonders how to help her own kids understand the gravity of what’s happening.
“I’m traumatized how my kids are not traumatized,” she told me.
They feel safe, and she’s grateful for that. It’s what every parent wants for their children. But they feel disconnected, and that breaks her heart a little.
On the day in 1991 that Russia sent troops to take back control of Lithuania, Audra was a few blocks away from the frontline, Vilnius’ TV tower. She was pregnant with her oldest daughter, Augusta, at the time.
“I remember watching my unarmed fellow Lithuanians throw themselves in front of Russian tanks to try to stop them,” she told me. “I didn’t cry. My duty was to stay calm and to protect my unborn child, so I had to be calm for my family. I swallowed some mix of emotions that created a cocktail of rage and sadness and fear. As I watch Russia’s invasion of Ukraine today, I realize it still sits in me.”
She felt it flare up when she watched a nuclear plant in Ukraine being bombarded by Russia. She feels it flare up as she sees images of children sleeping in subway stations and teachers taking up arms for the first time in their lives to defend their land. As she watches Ukrainians trying to flee, only to have their so-called “protected” routes shot upon. As Russians bomb a maternity hospital.
“There is no line, boundary or border that Putin will not cross,” she said. “Let that sit with you.”
Has the pandemic taught us anything, she wonders, about our connectedness?
“Galileo discovered that Earth is round, and during the past years we all discovered how small it is,” she said. “Far away doesn’t exist anymore. We are all on this Earth together — in sickness or in health — and we can infect each other or heal each other.”
Her Chicago friends and neighbors, she said, mostly think that "far away" exists.
“Kindly and with love, they text me that they are thinking about me and my family,” she said. “But this isn’t happening to me and my family. It’s happening to all of us. Democracy is under attack. Humanity is under attack. Nuclear power plants are under attack. There is no far away.”
She asks her friends in Lithuania what they want from the United States.
“Men say specifics: no-fly zone. Cut off Russian oil,” she said. “Women ask, ‘Stay united.’ The United States represents freedom. Stay united.”
Stay united is not a policy to write your legislators about. It’s not a place to send blankets or money. It’s not a rally. All of those things are tremendously important, and maybe a better, deeper sense of our connectedness nudges us closer toward them.
Stay united is a plea. An invitation, to understand and care and shift our mindsets away from those of spectators and into those of participants in the fight for democracy and humanity.
It’s a reminder that humans haven’t given up on each other yet. I’m grateful and amazed.
