One of our Global Peace Warriors is Veronika Voloshyna from the Ukrainian city of Dnipro (click here to learn more about Veronika). She is producing a series of blogs about her experiences and thoughts as someone deeply involved in the work of conflict transformation. We invite you to join in this journey with her, and feel free to share her blog in your networks. Click here to read Veronika’s first blog titled “A time for war.” This photo is of Veronika and Sharon Buttry in Veronika’s kitchen in her apartment in Dnipro.
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A time to choose
According to Ecclesiastes, there is a time for everything. It`s hard to believe, but there is a time for war in my country, Ukraine. And a time for hard decisions.
You always have choice, right?
There is a powerful 2008 British TV movie “God on Trial.” Warning: it is emotionally hard. The case takes place in Auschwitz during World War II. The Jewish prisoners put God on trial for abandoning His people and allowing German nazis to genocide them. The issue of free will inevitably arises in the process since war pushes people to choices they would have never thought of in peaceful times.
One of the prisoners tells a heartbreaking story of Germans having taken his sons, his three beautiful sons. The desperate father was running after the truck asking to give his sons back. The officer heard him, ordered to stop the truck, and asked which were his. Lieble, the father, showed him his three sons. And the officer said, “Choose one. Pick one. And you can keep him.”
At the trial, the father`s cry was, “Which one should I have chosen? The youngest? The oldest? The weakest? The strongest? Which should I have chosen?”
I have recalled this story quite often since February 24th, when I`ve heard people`s stories and when I made hard choices myself. To stay home or to evacuate. To stay in Ukraine or to leave.
The other day I met a woman at a refugee meeting in Haarlem. She shared the torture she was going through while making a choice to leave, “I have two children and two parents.”
I don`t know about you, but I just hear that officer`s sadistic proposal, “Choose one. Pick one. Pick one.” And that Jewish father`s question, “Which should I have chosen?”
Never is it an easy decision.
That lady chose to save her children, but her heart aches for her parents staying in a war zone.
I personally chose to leave the family in Ukraine for the sake of the family in the Netherlands.
One of my friends` decision was to stay with her kids in the city, and now with each bombing and longer hours in the bomb shelter she questions that choice.
Whatever you choose, it`s going to tear your heart apart. Choose one. I saw families saying goodbye to each other at the border. Pick one. Pick one.
At the end of his speech the father from the movie says, “Where was my free will? What choice did I have?”
When you are made to choose in the situation of violence and great injustice, any choice would lead to inner torture. To not be destroyed by it, to survive we need to find meaning.
I am in a search for meaning.
we were just in Anne Frank house and I was moved by students’ response to videos and photos. One guide for windmills said she has family in both Russia and Ukraine. Another in Arnem said Putin should have to choose war or his daughter’s life. Thanks for the reminder that we should put ourselves in others’ shoes.