“Until you’ve been there, you don’t know what war is.” This short, intense memoir of Yeva Skalietska is the record, told in diary form, of the transformation of the life of a 12-year-old Ukrainian girl from Kharkiv. Yeva writes in direct, unadorned prose – she enjoyed learning English at school and the poise and precision of her language are extraordinary, given her age and the fact that she has constructed this record in words she has only ever encountered in the classroom or on television.
Yeva lives with her grandmother, Iryna, in an apartment on the outskirts of Kharkiv. From her window, she can see “huge empty fields that lead on to the Russian border”. We get a brief snapshot of her prewar life: parties, painting, tenpin bowling. It’s a vision of normality that is shattered by the events of 24 February 2022.
