By David K. Shipler
Victims of war are usually caught in the present. In the midst of crisis, it's hard to think about the big picture or what comes next. But six young adults in Ukraine, during an online discussion last week, summoned up the power to reach beyond their personal
immediacy into a larger time and place.
The session,
attended by young people from at least twenty-six countries, was organized by a
broad array of international youth organizations and moderated by Saji Prelis
of Search for Common Ground, which manages
conflict-resolution projects around the globe. (Full disclosure: My son Michael
Shipler is a vice president of Search.)
If you
have an hour, it’s worth spending it watching the discussion here, because you can hear
and see what you cannot read: the chords of sorrow and resolve in their voices,
the grieving beauty in their eyes. And by the end, which will not be an end for
them, of course, you will be torn by inspiration, which they throw up against the
tragedy.
At Saji’s
wise request, not knowing what oppression that elusive future will bring, I am
using only their first names, even though they gave consent for their full
names to appear on the screen during the live stream. Neither they nor we can
calculate the dangers going forward.
Most appear to be in their twenties
and early thirties. They are fluent in English. They have the innocence of
idealism. They are not children, but they are young enough still to imagine and
to strive. They are not yet jaded or calloused or—as far as we can see—wounded.
But they understand the wounds of others and are trying to heal them, in part
by seeing their struggle as being not only for themselves.
Yulia is trapped with her two small children in besieged Sumy, near the Russian frontier, having missed the brief opportunity to escape in the first days of the war. The town is under heavy Russian bombardment. Anna, a medical doctor, crossed into Romania, where she is treating evacuees. Alina recorded a gentle but defiant message as she fled to the Kyiv train station. Yuliana, a psychologist in Lviv, is trying to help with trauma. Roman, also in Lviv, is assisting refugees flooding into the city’s train station.
