For Volodymyr Bevkh, Liberation Day is now much more than a holiday. He has lived in Eindhoven for twenty years, but his roots are in Ukraine. On Thursday he will give a speech at the Liberation Festival in Den Bosch: “I wish the Netherlands that we will never experience it as in Ukraine at the moment.”
Speaking at the Liberation Festival gives him mixed feelings: “We’ve been celebrating Liberation Day for 77 years, both here in the Netherlands and in Ukraine. Only now do I know what being liberated really means. Because in the Netherlands we celebrate that we are free, but in my homeland family, friends and acquaintances fight at the front to be able to celebrate freedom too.”
Volodymyr (38) is from Lviv. He came to the Netherlands twenty years ago because his parents worked at Philips. Two months ago, he took part in a protest against the war in his home country. Omroep Brabant made a report of it, in which Volodymyr told his story calmly and soberly.
This was noticed during the organization of the Liberation Festival in Den Bosch. They were looking for someone to give a speech at five minutes to five on Thursday and thought of Volodymyr. He took a day to think about that request.
“Then people say it’s just a day off.”
Volodymyr works as a day spending coach at Archipel Zorggroep. He asked his colleagues there what Liberation Day means to them. He got the answer that there is no more Nazism. “But I continued to ask: what emotions do you have about that? Then people say that it is just a day off, that they want to make it a pleasant day together.”
But for Volodymyr it is now so much more. In his speech, he hopes to make the Dutch aware that freedom is not self-evident. “In Ukraine, we couldn’t even imagine that this would happen. I want to make young people aware of their choices. Think of the municipal elections in March. The turnout was very low. Young people are not active at all, they hardly vote. But because we think we are safe, we may lose our freedom in the future.”
“Only now do I know what it means to be liberated.”
Every day, Volodymyr has contact with his loved ones in a war zone. His home city is a relatively safe harbor, Lviv is located in western Ukraine. “Sunday morning I received a call from friends who were returning to Lviv from the war zone in Donbas to refuel. They tell horrible stories. Their military vehicles had been killed along the way. Thanks to God we survived, they said.”
“Sometimes I have to inform myself to a limited extent in order not to lose too much energy.”
Volodymyr can put things into perspective. He has to: “Life goes on here too. Sometimes I have to inform myself to a limited extent in order not to lose too much energy.” To help his homeland. he set up a foundation: ‘Ukrainians in Eindhoven’. He sends relief supplies to Ukraine every week.
Sometimes he loses heart: “You don’t see an end point on the horizon, that’s the downside.”
On Liberation Day, at 16:55, Volodymyr Bevkh will be on the main stage of the Liberation Festival in Den Bosch.
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