Lyudmyla came to Austria from the war – without joy in it, though she had loved this country for a long time. The first thing she encountered in her new country was not the language and not the people. “WHEN I ARRIVED, I DIDN’T YET KNOW THE LANGUAGE OR ANYONE HERE — BUT NATURE WAS…
Daria fled Mariupol under occupation. She left not knowing what was ahead – only what was being left behind. War, she says, makes you forget who you are. You become a victim, a fighter, a refugee. Anything but a person. “NATURE DOESN’T ASK WHERE YOU ARE FROM. IT WRAPS AROUND YOU AND SAYS: YOU ARE…
Tanya runs through the Botanical Garden every week. She has done this through every season, including winter. What she notices now is different from before — not the running itself, but what the garden shows her: how a season shifts, how a flower appears and disappears, how life moves in circles whether or not we…
When Natalia’s home in Dmytrivka fell under occupation, the hardest part was not the shock itself, but the collapse of any sense of a safe place. “NOT IN MY COUNTRY, NOT IN MY OWN HOME. I COULDN’T UNDERSTAND WHERE THAT SAFE PLACE WAS. IT WAS SO DIFFICULT TO FIND IT WITHIN MYSELF.” This search for…
Two months before the war, I had a dream: the Mother of God was covering Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv with a red cloth. I understood then that something was coming. I began training; I was preparing for a combat battalion, but they took me as a cook for the kitchen. For the boys, it…
When Lena arrived in Ireland as a forced migrant with two small children, everything still felt temporary. The room they were given did not feel like home, and the future remained impossible to imagine. So when they reached Killarney, she bought the cheapest tent she could find and took her family to sleep in the…