By Anoushka Kuswaha ’24
News Editor
Content warning: This article discusses mass death and torture.
The Russia-Ukraine War, which began in February 2022, continues to bring chaos and anguish to the lives of Ukrainian citizens. The war has led to determinative events that will serve to isolate its perpetrator, Russia, from Western democracies, and is responsible for waves of global economic instability, according to The New York Times.
The latest development is the effort being made by the U.S. government to address the immense damage done to the Ukrainian electrical grid, per The New York Times. According to CNN, many of the country’s power-generating facilities have been damaged due to a series of Russian strikes in the last month. From the same CNN article, Ukraine currently faces the prospect of plummeting winter temperatures with “devastated energy supplies,” leaving citizens without sufficient access to electricity in increasingly colder weather.
As geopolitical moves are being made to quell the energy crisis and its many devastating effects, work is also being done across the country to honor the lives of those lost and to mourn the memories of once thriving and happy cities, towns and villages.
One such site was recently reported on in The New York Times. Mount Holyoke College’s Mary Lyon Professor of the Humanities and the Chair of German Studies Karen Remmler was featured in a piece about a small village called Yahidne in the Chernihiv region of Ukraine. Remmler’s research, according to her profile on Mount Holyoke’s website, is focused on the “politics and cultures of transnational memory in the aftermath of atrocity and war in European contexts.”
The New York Times article focuses on a building that was formerly an elementary school in Yahidne. Now, the building serves as a painful reminder of the trauma experienced by Yahidne’s villagers, who were forced into its basement by Russian soldiers at gunpoint.
According to the Economist, Russian soldiers occupied Yahidne on March 3, beginning what would be a 28-day occupation of the village.
As per an article by The New York Times, until March 31, when Ukrainian troops liberated their village, the townspeople of Yahidne and surrounding areas were imprisoned in the basement of the village’s elementary school. In a statement to The New York Times, the former custodian of the school, whose grandchildren once attended there, explained that the school was once a site of community and happy memories.
Statistics gathered by The New York Times place the number of captives at more than 300 people, including a baby and a 93-year-old. The people of Yahidne were held in the basement of the elementary school and “imprisoned [within] several rooms,” according to the article. Ten of the captives died. Cramped and crowded conditions caused a lack of oxygen, which led many to hallucinate or to lose consciousness. In the basement, there existed a singular source of air, carved out from a wall by the captives themselves, The New York Times reported.
Among the series of horrors and pain experienced by the captives, memorials to the time in captivity have emerged. Indeed, the school itself is now permanently marked by the loss of the lives that took place in what was once a place for learning and growing. As described by The New York Times, tallies made in blue crayon marking the vital status of the individuals held in one of the basement’s rooms, have remained from the days of captivity. Along with the tallies, murals made in captivity by the children also adorn the walls, according to The New York Times. One child’s message reads, “No War!”
It is in the aftermath of these immediate events, local parts of the larger crisis in Ukraine, that acts of memorialization are taking place. In just the singular village of Yahidne, several different acts of mourning, grief and remembrance have been carried out.
Remmler’s interest lies within the various processes of grief. In an interview with Mount Holyoke News, Remmler elaborated that her work regarding the crisis in Ukraine is partially focused on “Not necessarily documenting just the crime, but also how to overcome the cycle of violence. I teach courses on restorative justice, or reconciliation, and memory as a tool to create reconciliation, understanding that it’s never perfect [nor] final — conflict is going to arise again. [Consequently,] how do you attend to the emotions [that] people feel?”
Indeed, the situation in Yahidne has provided Remmler and those interested in acts of restorative justice and reconciliation with much food for thought. Remmler explained that memorialization can and has taken on many different forms, but that narratives of mass memorialization, such as those taking place in Ukraine, are closely shaped by the political context in which they take place — and particularly the outcome of the events that surround the memorialization.
The end of the Ukrainian crisis does not appear to be in sight. The people of Yahidne are still recovering both mentally and physically from the trauma imposed upon them by Russian troops. In the depths of the occupation of their village, the people of Yahidne were faced with the paradoxical nature of occupation and human empathy. As quoted in the Economist, one woman from the village described her interactions with Russian soldiers, “The most upsetting thing was seeing them bring you water, and thinking they were doing you a good deed,” she said, “while you realize they are wearing your kid’s brand new trainers.”
Sometimes, Remmler explained, in order for healing and memorialization to take place, accountability must be taken on the part of the aggressor, otherwise “wound[s] … remain unhealed.”