They are not numbers

In war no symbols or numbers die. People die. Like us. No more, no less. Try to deny it in front of Viktoria and Bogdan. In one of the last photographs they are smiling: the serenity so easy to experience when you are young and in love.

Two thirty-year-olds, married since 2019, a life in their womb that is about to arrive. Kiev is their city, loved, chosen, especially in recent years on the wave of that economic and social ferment that embraces the whole Village. Bogdan worked in a high-tech company: great flexibility, the possibility of working from home, an excellent salary. Vika, on the other hand, was a sommelier at the Wine Bureau, the most famous wine import company in Ukraine. Over one million two hundred thousand bottles sold, almost 40% from Italy. Chosen wine, selected on the spot through dozens of trips, meetings, negotiations. For Vika it was not a burden. Although she was six months pregnant, she felt charged and full of energy. She would stop in December to live their new threesome with Bogdan. A broken dream. That Monday in October it was early morning, just after dawn. They didn't even notice the Iranian drone fired by the Russians that reached their apartment a stone's throw from the train station. There was nothing to be done. Rescuers found them charred still in bed, united in an eternal embrace. The night before, Vika had entrusted her friend Roman with a sentence: "We need to complain less." Words of hope in the heart of a terrible war.

Babushka Vera also tried to smile despite her fear. After months of bombing, she had almost gotten used to the routine of her city, Mykolaiv, in the south of the country, near Odessa. Days always the same, like the nights in shelters. Right there, she had met the volunteers of Operation Colomba who remember her today: «Vera loved us! She smiled at us, always happy to see us, she hugged us and in the evening she chatted and joked with us. Once her son came to visit, we saw her sitting apart in the garden with her granddaughter. She knows what she was talking about. Her little girl was absorbed in listening to her and she didn't take her eyes off her grandmother for a moment. Sometimes we helped her carry the water tank to the tram stop». A cluster bomb, a cluster bomb, the kind that explode into a thousand pieces to hurt as many people as possible, you killed her on September 29, probably while she was waiting for the usual tram. "It hurts us so much because it's as if our grandmother had been killed", say the volunteers today.

And what about Liza, one of the little victims of the Vinnytsia bombing this summer? She was four years old, with Down syndrome and a mother who adored her. Days made of walks, new discoveries, free love. She was on her way to the speech therapist that day, pushing her pink stroller along the sidewalk. The sudden arrival of the missiles changed everything, like a macabre lottery: Lisa reached and died instantly, her mother was left without a leg. Lives interrupted. Viktoria and Bogdan, Vera and Liza are not far off. It's us, when we're in the wrong place and time.


Matteo Spicuglia
NP November 2022