As a 7-year-old girl, my Russian-Jewish grandmother Irina fled the communists with her family. During the Second World War she fled from the Nazis. When I asked how she was doing, she always replied ‘normal’. A translation of the Russian ‘normalno’, which means ‘normal’. It’s not good, not bad, but something in between.
On May 9, Russia celebrates Den Pobedy, the day of victory over the Nazis. The importance of that day, isn’t it Liberation Day but victory day, cannot be overestimated. The exploits of the Red Army in the years 1941-1945 are praised. This day is so important that even the rain clouds are dispelled with silver iodide. “We have nothing in the present to be proud of, so we focus on past achievements,” I learned from my friends there.
Will Putin now stop reminding his people of his military’s great achievements in the past, while it is now “denazifying” Ukraine with “a special military operation”? Or will it be the day when the Russian president officially declares war on Ukraine? An official declaration of war is followed by national mobilization to replace the high numbers of killed and wounded Russian soldiers. I’m not sure.
Analogies with the Second World War
The Russian president considers the Jewish Zelensky a Nazi. “The Ukrainian Nazis are committing genocide against the Russians in the country,” it sounds day after day on state television. There are also comparisons with the Second World War on the Ukrainian side. Zelensky compared the Russian invasion of his country and the consequences for the Ukrainians in his speech to the Israeli parliament to the Holocaust. It feels uneasy that the jargon in the battle in Ukraine is now getting mixed up with analogies from the Second World War. That discomfort forces us to think about what exactly is going on.
It is the job of journalists to make it as clear as possible that history never repeats itself, that power struggles, violence and human suffering come in different forms and that we have to be precise about what is going on. One of the ways to do that is by keeping an eye on everyday life. Irina, who always said “normal” when I asked how she was, did not tell me until old age and after a few glasses of Campari about the terrors she had endured. She had crossed the border into Switzerland at night and had to temporarily hand over her daughter, my aunt, to another group of people. For the first time I saw my grandmother emotional, she was ashamed. Behind the ‘normalno’ was always impotence. ‘It’s okay’ is also a way of recognizing that disaster is never far away.
refuse to believe
Not the devastation wrought by the endless bombings and shelling, but the stories of everyday life will stay with me most of the past few months I was in Ukraine. The stories of people who so recently led a fairly carefree life. They all said to me: Show what terrible things are being done to us. Our future has been destroyed. What have we done wrong?
All those stories have nothing to do with my grandmother. Because every war is different and every comparison with the Second World War is wrong. And yet the stories have everything to do with my grandmother, because many lives have ended just like that, because there are people living in permanent panic.
In addition to acclaim, I also received three different reactions. From people who said they couldn’t stand the horrors anymore. I get it, but what’s the point of looking away? There were also people who thought the attention for Ukraine was unjustified because people are also dying in Syria and Yemen. I get that too. I am concerned about the third kind of reaction. There are also people who refuse to believe what is happening. They think the battle has been staged. These people are afraid of being fooled by the media. That is why they are copying Russian state television. Unfortunately, that happens more often than we think.
Tribunals and propaganda
If there is a threat here in the Netherlands that ‘tribunals will come’, if the judiciary, parliamentary democracy and journalism here in the Netherlands in one effort are dismissed as a lying machine, if it is suggested that the EU is a conspiracy, or that George Soros holds world power, Putin’s propaganda machine is never far away.
In addition to continuing to provide factual information, our most important weapon is continuing to nuance. If someone in the Netherlands makes major historical comparisons, for example about the so-called battle between the Judeo-Christian civilization and barbarians from outside, it never hurts to ask what they think about the dark moments in our own history, and what exactly is Jewish there. , Christian and, above all, civilized.
More importantly, ask what it helps to highlight differences between people, differences you can’t eat, that you can’t dance to, that in no way add anything to our existence other than the message: there are strangers among us and we must distrust them. Even if Putin loses the war in Ukraine, he will still win if we just start to find the distrust of politicians in our democratic institutions here, and when people take over this mistrust. Putin wins when we say ‘normalno’ when someone asks how things are going, because we no longer know how to talk back to authoritarian, repressive politicians.
May 4 is Remembrance Day. I think it is also good to consider the Ukrainian Vira Hyrych and the Russian Oksana Baulina. Both journalists were killed in Kiev by Russian missiles. Hyrich, born in 1967, worked for Radio Free Europe. Her parents and son survive her. Oksana Baulina, 42, worked for the Russian research platform the Insider. She was also active in the Navalny anti-corruption foundation. She fled Russia to cover the war in Ukraine. They are just two of at least 23 journalists who have been killed so far. I hope they were the last, but I’m not sure. Let’s make sure their work wasn’t in vain.
Kysia Hekster is a correspondent for the NOS. She was a correspondent in Russia from 2008 to 2012. Since the war in Ukraine broke out on February 24, she reported on the battle from, among other places, Kiev. This piece is an adaptation of the lecture Hekster gives on 4 May during a memorial meeting for the underground press in Nieuwspoort.