May Our Grandchildren Not Know Any of This

It’s been a year since Russia invaded Ukraine. Millions of people fled their homes in search for a safe shelter. Bombs landed less than a hundred miles from my parents’ home. I never thought war would come this close to where I live. In my mind things like this just didn’t happen in the modern rich world.

In the beginning all of Poland became one huge refugee camp. Some of my friends hosted Ukrainian families in their own apartments, squeezing all of their kids in one bedroom so that the guests could have some space. Some others volunteered at the border to offer food and warm blankets to all the people waiting for hours in freezing cold. My Facebook feed was full of announcements like “baby strollers are needed at Warsaw West station”, or “the Torwar stadium just ran out of hygienic pads”. One way or another, everyone helped however they could.

Now the war is far from over, but life still goes on. News from the front rarely make it to home pages of online portals anymore. Out of the few million people who arrived in Poland, about a million decided to stay here at least for some time. You can hear Ukrainian everywhere, there are Ukrainian kids in almost every school and class, most of them speaking Polish without an accent already. My friend Lilia and her new Polish boyfriend are renovating the upper floor at his parents’ place so that they can move in together. She’ll stay in Warsaw until the end of June though, so that her kids won’t have to change schools for the third time in a year.

I can’t imagine what my friends in Ukraine are going through for this whole time. But my grandparents went through pretty much the same thing. With every year the memory fades, some people die, stories get lost, but all of this happened still within living memory. We still have grandparents here who remember.

This is probably why Polish people opened their homes and hearts so eagerly when the war broke out. It could have been us so easily after all. What we did for Ukraine last year and are still doing is what we wish someone did for our grandparents back in 1939.

My grandpa was kidnapped by Nazi soldiers as a teenager and deported to Germany to do forced labor there. He was lucky, instead of in a labor camp he ended up on a private farm where they treated him relatively well. Millions of other kids like him didn’t have this much luck.

My husband’s grandma lost three pairs of parents over the course of the war. She was born in a very poor family that gave her up for adoption. In 1940 her adoptive parents got executed by the Russian army in Katyń massacre. Another family agreed to take care of her, but they too got killed after a few years during the Warsaw Uprising.

The guy she married later, and my husband’s grandpa, grew up in Lviv in present-day Ukraine. The city got first conquered by the Soviet army, then by Nazis when they suddenly attacked Russia, and finally by the Soviets again. Every single time destruction, chaos, and murder ensued. After almost starving to death he joined a local gang so that he could provide for his family. By the end of the war he became the gang leader, controlling the drugs and weapons trade in his district and collecting protection money from the local brothel. He was barely 12 years old at that time.

Husband’s grandpa is still alive today, this summer he’ll be 91 years old. He’s polite towards all the Ukrainian people who live here but still distrustful of them after all these years. I don’t know too many details, some of his closest family got killed in a very brutal way, along with many more Polish people who lived in that time and place.

My great-grandfather was a soldier in the Russian army. He fought in World War 1 still before the Soviet revolution. Poland didn’t exist as a country back then, it was split between Austria, Germany, and Russia, but when these armies fought against each other it was mostly Polish villages and cities that got destroyed, with Polish kids like him killing each other while fighting on both sides.

Everyone in my grandparents and great-grandparents generations got affected by the wars in some way, just like everyone in Ukraine is affected by the war now. Even if your own house doesn’t get destroyed, many of your friends and family will lose theirs. Even if you make it alive on the other side, this may not be the case for many people you hold dear.

This madness won’t be over until the Russian army retreats. There simply is no other way. If the past two world wars have anything to teach us, it’s that appeasing a bully doesn’t work in the long term. If there were peaceful ways to stop this, it would have already stopped a few years back.

But what makes me hopeful is that despite all the horrors the two world wars brought upon my ancestors, my generation is mostly free from these horrors now. Germany’s attack on Poland was absolutely unacceptable, just like Russia’s attack on Ukraine is unacceptable today, but I have good friends in Germany now, and so does the most of my generation. We can do it without denying what happened or justifying it in any way.

People alive today might never forget these horrors, just like our grandpa is still haunted by his own. But hopefully their grandchildren will grow up happily free from this baggage, remembering all the war stories but not the pain and hurt.

But for all of this to happen, the pain and hurt must stop. I pray with all my heart that it stops fast. May the future kids on both sides grow up free from all of this baggage and happy to make friends with each other again.