How unsafe it has become in Kiev (and the rest of Ukraine) is apparent from the arrival of Hans Jaap Melissen. Where many other journalists save their lives by leaving for respectable reasons, Melissen feels like a fish in the choppy waters.
For a moment I wondered where he was, but luckily he suddenly dived into TV current affairs sections and Fidelity on. Kiev, here I am† His fortress is that he always makes a relaxed, tidy impression, as if he has just arrived at his subtropical holiday destination. While we are tormented by the latest job reports at home, Melissen nods kindly at us. He understands that we are very concerned and tries to calm us down so we don’t get too upset.
He tells what he saw that day, such as that grandson who helped his lonely grandmother leave by bus; after that, the boy would return to his parents who did not want an evacuation because of their pets. A gripping drama in the nutshell of a two-minute film – that’s how we know Melissen again.
He was already named ‘Journalist of the Year’ in 2012 for his reports on the Arab Spring. Whether it’s the Syrian Civil War, the war in Libya or the Taliban-conquered Afghanistan – Melissen was there, watching and talking about it, without a trace of fear. “If you’re standing somewhere, you just hope it’s safe,” he said laconically from Kiev.
When I see Melissen, I always think of Martha Gellhorn, one of his most famous predecessors in war journalism. Gellhorn, too, revived if she could travel to another catastrophe. She found everyday life unbearably dull, even when she shared it with Ernest Hemingway. “I will certainly, until I drop, keep trying to see more of the world and what is happening in it,” she wrote.
Although she had already covered extensively about the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Hitler, because she was a woman she was not given press accreditation for the Allied landings in Normandy on D-Day in 1944. She subsequently witnessed the landings as a stowaway on a hospital ship and could act as a stretcher bearer after arrival; thus she became the only woman to experience the invasion.
There is another reason why I often thought of Martha Gellhorn these days. Commissioned by the magazine necklace’s she went to Finland in November 1939 to write about the impending… Russian invasion. On November 30, the Russians invaded Finland without any declaration of war.
Gellhorn wrote extensively about the courageous resistance of the citizens – boys and women too. The Russians had not expected so much resistance, were poorly organized and suffered unexpectedly large losses. Finland got the moral support of almost the whole world and for the time being it held its own. “When the Finns cried,” Gellhorn wrote to Hemingway, “they cried not for fear, but for the waste and cruelty of it all.” Well, sometimes history does repeat itself.
A new, better prepared Russian attack, in February 1940, proved fatal to Finland. Gellhorn did not experience that again, she had already traveled on. Let’s hope that Hans Jaap Melissen doesn’t have to experience that in Kiev either.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of March 11, 2022