On 30 April, I attended a presentation given by Maria Romenenko and Jez Myers at the University of Leeds, entitled How NOT To Flee A War. It began with an interesting thought experiment: your country is imminently going to be invaded by a hostile neighbouring state. What are you going to do?
For the population of England, this is an abstract, theoretical question. The last time a successful invasion of our nation occurred was in 1066, at the Battle of Hastings. However, my ‘Boomer’ age group, raised by the generation who lived through World War II, can still draw upon a few borrowed, fragmented memories of the last time an invasion of England was attempted.
Wartime ‘memories’ live on in the UK
My mother told me that the time she was most terrified as a teenager in the London Blitz was when she left it nearly too late to get to the air raid shelter, and had to run from Nazi planes overhead. My mother-in-law was a young nurse in Sussex, literally underneath the Battle of Britain, working on teams that recovered dead and injured airmen, both British and German, from downed planes.
Teachers at school would also sometimes tell their stories; two I vividly remember were a lady who, in 1938, was a fledgling journalist who took the opportunity to flee from Czechoslovakia, but ultimately lost her entire family in Auschwitz; the other a man who had been one of the prisoners of war in the Far East who had been used as slave labour to construct the Burma railway.
All Britons over 35 have lived in a time where we will have heard ‘living memory’ stories such as these, told by parents and grandparents, whether personally, or in a media context.
Fleeing a modern war
Maria and Jez then gave a vivid account of the 40 hours they spent travelling between Ukraine and Poland, on the day after the invasion by Russia began, and the consequent lengthy process they had to undertake to obtain permission for Maria to enter the UK.
They now run a Manchester-based organisation called All for Ukraine that helps Ukrainian people to settle into the UK and, in Jez’s words, tries to: “plug the gaps where government help stops”.
They also work to educate people in the UK about the harrowing events Ukrainian people have experienced since 2022. Maria says: “These are people like you and me who are defending Ukraine, and not just Ukraine, but the whole of Europe”. And surely, this is something that Britons should be able to relate to: we are, at most, only three generations away from those who contributed to a similar mobilisation in 1940.
Practical sources of support
Jez and Maria work with two other charities, both based in Ukraine: the Unbroken Foundation in Ukraine, and Lifeline Ukraine, the first and only suicide-prevention hotline in Ukraine.
Unbroken offers a range of services for those who have been injured in the war, providing services like healthcare, prosthetics, physical and psychological rehabilitation, housing, and reintegration.
Lifeline Ukraine offers free online seminars and in person training to build mental resilience during wartime. In particular, they have worked with Ukrainian journalists to help them to cope with the pressures of reporting traumatic events unfolding in their own nation. They provide a free hotline for those who are thinking about suicide, both civilians and soldiers, and have now provided over 124,000 instances of support They also offer suicide awareness and prevention training seminars, and for those who are unable to attend in person, a free online programme in Ukrainian.
Can you ever really flee a war?
In an interview with journalist Michael Judge, Maria said:
“There’s a lot of mental trauma that impacts everyone – people still in Ukraine and people outside of Ukraine. Every morning you wake up, you check the news, and you see what’s happened: who’s been bombed, if your family has survived, if your friends have survived. You can never really stave off the bad things happening no matter where you are.”
In this sense, while people can physically flee a war, it is still present within their mind, resulting in the fact that the post-traumatic and survivor guilt stresses become immense.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) became a formal medical diagnosis in 1980; but there are records on its prevalence in war going back to the mid-18th century, when it was labelled ‘nostalgia.’ It began its slow journey towards its modern incarnation through research on ‘Shell Shock’ following World War I.
Leaving a war zone creates trauma
Survivor’s guilt was first named and described as such in 1940s psychoanalytic writing about the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Karlyle Bistas and Ramneet Grewal (2023) comment:
“Survivor’s guilt is described as the manifestation of tension, distress, or solitude that is triggered by a celebration of life, references to the deceased, and expressions of sympathy… it is often overlooked, as it gets grouped into the broader recognised disorder of PTSD it is associated with – heightened psychopathological symptoms and thoughts of suicide.”
In 2023, Menachem Ben-Ezra et al found that Ukrainians displaced by the war both inside and outside Ukraine showed higher levels of PTSD than those not displaced, but that there were no significant differences between those displaced within and outside their home country. Survivor’s guilt may therefore be playing a major part within these findings, because it seems that the act of leaving is more pivotal than the place of relocation.
It is important that survivor’s guilt is recognised as such and idiographically addressed in tandem with (rather than immersed within) the generic treatment of PTSD, as outlined by the UK National Health Service.
The importance of listening to those who were there
One issue that can arise for those suffering from PTSD and survivor’s guilt is the lack of opportunity to discuss issues that are still centrally present in the individual’s mind, particularly when they are surrounded by other people who have not had such experiences.
In my own later years, after studying the phenomenon of ‘generational trauma’ I have realised that my own generation were unwittingly a part of this problem, often listening politely, but with little engagement to the stories our elders would sometimes spontaneously share. This was, sadly, a time in which the lasting impact of war was poorly understood.
In an era in which the post-World War II consensus is breaking down, and the world returns to war on several fronts, we must recognise that another European nation is now, like we were in 1940, standing alone on the front line. Our knowledge of psychology has, over the 85 intervening years, developed to the point where we are able not only to understand the physical dangers, but also the deep emotional toll that this will have.
The ongoing need for practical and emotional help
It is therefore surely a duty for us to support fellow Europeans who whose current fate has placed them on the border of a totalitarian state, as they pick up the contemporary burden of protecting Europe from tyranny. Much of this will relate to practical help, but an important element must additionally involve listening to their stories and ensuring that they know they have been heard.
This article is dedicated to further disseminating the message that Jez and Maria communicate to their audiences: remembering people who have been lost to them over the three years of war that have passed since their traumatic journey to the UK.
In Memoriam
Maksym (Maks) Levin was a 43-year-old Ukrainian photographer with four young sons. In March 2022, during a mission to document the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Kyiv Oblast, he was arrested, interrogated, possibly tortured, and executed by Russian soldiers. Maria says: “It’s very important for me to talk about Maks – to keep his memory alive, to keep his legacy alive… Ukrainian soldiers shouldn’t be getting killed. But it’s a different story when journalists trying to report the truth like Maks was – trying to take pictures, images of what was happening in occupied areas – are murdered”.
Victoria (Vika) Roshchyna was a 27-year-old journalist. She disappeared in August 2023, and, in October 2024, was confirmed to have died in a Russian prison. When her body was returned to Ukraine, it bore signs of torture and had some organs removed. The Ukrainian government announced it is investigating her death as a potential murder and war crime. Maria says: “Vika was tortured with electricity and with a knife, and at one point she weighed no more than 30 kilograms… it’s those gruesome details that make it even more unthinkable”.
Mykola Oransky was a 24-year-old soldier, formerly TV engineer who died on 22 March 2024, during a combat mission near Robotyne, Zaporizhzhia Oblast. He and Maria worked together for a few months at Hromadske, where he was known for his dedication and professionalism. After the full-scale invasion, he volunteered to join the Ukrainian Armed Forces and served as a UAV operator.
Victoria Amelina was a 37-year-old Ukrainian novelist, author and war crimes researcher. She won the Joseph Conrad Literary Award and a European Union Prize for Literature. On 27 June 2023, she was injured during the Russian attack on Kramatorsk and died from her injuries four days later. Maria says: “I didn’t know Victoria Amelina personally, but we had many mutual friends. And I remember, even though I didn’t know her personally, I cried when I read the news of her death”.
Thinking about the Fallen
These people were a similar age to my own children, and to the generation that I taught as a schoolteacher, and later, a university lecturer. Even to trying to imagine myself recognising their names on a list of young lives so brutally destroyed, while I had managed to relocate to a place of safety, is heartbreaking – indeed, I would be tempted to say, ‘unthinkable.’
And this gets to the core of the issue: however painful we find it, it is the duty of fellow Europeans to think very hard about the effects these tragedies create, as part of the support we must offer to those bereaved.
We must rekindle the original impact of Laurence Binyon’s 1914 poem For the Fallen: one verse of which the vast majority of Britons know by heart, but too many have forgotten how to feel within their hearts.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
For those who wish to offer support to All for Ukraine and their sister charities, Jez and Maria can be contacted at info@talksforukraine.com.
