How to move on after a loss is told by a resettlement activist

Six hundred eight thousand hryvnias were awarded to 23 cultural professionals working with IDPs. The Culture Helps project gave them individual grants to support their mental health. Journalist Tatyana Bakotska became one of the participants in the project.

Where did the full-scale invasion catch you? How did you decide to evacuate?

On February 24, I woke up to explosions at five in the morning. Rockets had shelled the Kulbakino airfield near Mykolaiv. It was one and a half kilometres from our house. The house's walls were shaking; the roof covering was falling off. The window glass was broken. Together with my 6-month-old daughter and 11-year-old son, I ran to the basement in our pyjamas. It was not safe to stay near the military airfield. We decided to go to my mother's village, 100 kilometres north of Mykolaiv, near Voznesensk. We drove for nine hours. There was a lot of traffic on the road. Women and children from Kherson oblast ran away. A few days later the fighting for Voznesensk began. Columns of enemy equipment reached there. I started looking for somewhere to take the children to a safer place, closer to the border with Poland. It turned out that there was no such an opportunity. Because the bridge in the direction of Nikolaev had been blown up. We drove by car along the bombarded road to Odessa. The family of Natalya Grinko helped there. They invited us, strangers, into their house. They fed us. They bought us food for the journey.

The evacuation train went from Odesa to Lviv. No one wanted to go in a compartment with a six-month-old baby. We had to leave our belongings at the station. We took only a backpack with food and medicine. Already at the train station Miroslava had a fever. We had to go to the children's hospital. Volunteers gave us warm clothes to keep warm overnight in the queue at the border, nappies, food for the children, and even a new backpack. All the volunteers accompanied our evacuation bus to Warsaw. I still feel enormous gratitude. They were with us until the last minute of our stay on our native Ukrainian soil. We were all in tears.

We left Warsaw for Paterek village in Kujawsko-Pomorskie Province. We were invited to her house by Anna Urbanska. Her relatives and friends provided us with the necessary things and food. She helped 11 other people from Mykolaiv. Tomasz Milewski, viceroy of Nakel County, came to get to know us. He asked what we needed. Then he had the idea to organize the first meeting of Ukrainian refugees with local authorities and volunteers. In those days more than 500 people from Ukraine came to the county. The youngest child was my six-month-old daughter Miroslava. In April we moved to Olsztyn, the capital of the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship.

Did your husband stay in Ukraine?

On the evening of 23 February 2022, Ruslan had his last taekwondo training session. He trained children in the village of Shevchenkovo for free. And the next day, he went to the military enlistment office. I hoped that my children and I would be in a safe place. I did not go to war because I hated the Russians. His mother, his two sisters, and his nephews live in the suburbs of Moscow now. He made this choice because he loved those in Ukraine. He believed that Russia could not take what we did not want to give from us by force. For him, it was an uncompromising struggle to be able to choose his future.

During a full-scale war, Mykolaiv became more and more of a ruin. Rockets destroyed the student dormitory where Ruslan and I met 18 years ago. And also the university where we studied and the enterprise where my husband worked.

On August 4, 2022, Ruslan was killed in action near the village of Lozovoye in the Kherson region during enemy artillery fire. He was a squad leader of a reconnaissance platoon of the 36th Separate Marine Brigade named after Rear Admiral Mikhail Bilinsky. Scouts always go first. On August 25, he would have turned 37. He left two children. Ruslan did not live 25 days to see his daughter's first birthday. The bodies of Ruslan and his fellow soldiers who also died that day could not be carried away. The Russian military constantly shelled the area. Therefore there was no funeral. We still wait every day to hear from the brigade commanders.

Comforting my son and me, the psychologist said that people who volunteer in times of danger to defend their homeland deserve the most tremendous respect from society. These people are willing to sacrifice the dearest thing - their own lives - to protect the secure future of Europe and the world. Like all Ukrainian warriors, Ruslan is a hero of our time.

What were you doing in Ukraine before the full-scale invasion?

We have been building our own house since 2008 and planted a garden. I always wanted to live only at home, to do something useful for my native community and Ukraine. At first, I thought that the war had taken everything away from me. And that it was unfair. But it is impossible to endure the pain of loss all the time. The loss of many people, homes, property and jobs. Since 2005 I worked as a journalist in the Mykolayiv branch of the National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine. In the end losses of meanings and visions of the future. I realized that even when you live in a state of temporality when you live one day, you must do something. So that all this traumatic experience of war doesn't pull me back again and again. If I can turn the pain of loss into strength, everyone will be better off.

How did you manage to resume your professional activities abroad?

I took a Polish language course with my son, and they recommended a vacancy. In September I started working in Olsztyn, Poland, as a translator in a project aimed at helping refugees. There you can get counselling from lawyers, psychologists, translators and others. They also offer Polish language courses and training to help you find employment. There are group activities with animators and cultural and entertainment events for children.

Then I started helping to organize cultural events for Ukrainian refugees: festivals "Rok for Ukraine", "Open Piano", "Christmas Festival", "Fairy Carnival", and "Music Festival".

I am currently running "Literary Meetings" for displaced people in an educational project of another organisation. This is an opportunity to create our archive, where we record stories about the war: memories of experiences, current emotions, thoughts and experiences. We also discuss different language strategies through which this information, including war crimes, can be documented. Some can speak while living in a state of painful burning, while others are silent. And someone no longer wants to remember. We also look at works written about the war by Ukrainian writers. For example, the novelist Bogdan Lepky chose the form of a fairy tale. So one can see oneself from the outside, through someone else's eyes.

When did you realize you needed support and decided to apply for the project?

After two months, after 6 hours of talking to resettlers, I felt very sick and exhausted. There were voices in my head all the time. One had a five-month-old child who died, and another had been abandoned by her pregnant Polish beloved. One of the Ukrainians has cancer and is thinking about suicide. Another one asks for a place to live because she must leave her children on the street for a fortnight. Someone needs to find a dentist. And someone is pitied because a man is cheating on her and a kind neighbour has told her about it.

There are amazing cases. A woman refused to see a psychologist, demanding to pay for a manicure. Another one wished my whole family and me dead because I got the job instead of her daughter, who knows Polish better. These people were with me everywhere - in the lift, at the bus stop, on the bus, in the shop, in the hospital, on the playground. They needed something repeatedly: translating yesterday's documents and refilling their travel cards from their pockets.

I can understand them. I don't judge anyone, and I pity everyone. These are people traumatised by war, with physical and mental health problems, and people painfully experiencing the loss of loved ones or property. Most of them have no money, no job, no home. They are in constant search of resources. I have tried to do what I can to alleviate these people's pain somehow. I needed it to feel my need for this struggle for our freedom. But I didn't know it would be so exhausting for me.

On 30 June, my work on this project comes to an end. It has been an invaluable experience, helping me to carry on in a better way with similar projects supporting foreigners and writing new material about the lives of displaced people. But these months have brought up a lot of different negative situations that I haven't faced before, events to which I don't react as steadily as I used to. I understand that information is filtered through new experiences and I now have many unanswered questions. That's why it's important for me to talk about this with a specialist, with a therapist, so that I don't make the same mistakes. I plan to pay for visits to a psychotherapist with the money I get from the support.

The project "Culture Helps" is supported by the European Union and zusa. It aims to help people forced by the war to move to safer regions of Ukraine or abroad. Provides grant support to cultural managers, managers, and organisations that help people integrate into new communities through culture. Includes financial support for mental health activities, online workshops and offline meetings for networking with cultural workers and workers from Ukraine and Europe. It will last for two years.