Editor’s note and content warning: all interviewees’ names have been changed and relationships to the author omitted to protect their anonymity. The story contains references to child abuse and the Holocaust.
I have known Inna all my life, but as I sit with her in her warm-hued living room, the golden light from her floor-to-ceiling windows lacing through her silver hair, she tells me the stories of her childhood for the first time. I know that listening to refugee storytelling has been proven to forge community connections, provide an outlet for trauma, and increase empathy, yet I will leave Inna’s home shaken, my heart freshly buried in the blood-soaked soils of a nation across the world.
When Russia’s war broke out in February 2022, I felt an eerie disconnect from a Ukrainian homeland I had never seen and that my own family rarely talked about. Watching death and destruction flood the media had me grappling for a human connection to a nation not much older than myself and a storied people who seem never to find peace.
For me, Inna becomes the tether, her words weaving with my long-dormant roots and pulling the understory up into the light.
Leaving Ukraine: 1943
Inna knows she was born in 1943 in a small Ukrainian farming village, but her birthdate and hometown remain mysteries.
“My mother doesn’t remember,” Inna shares, sad eyes softening her age-lined face. “There was just too much chaos, too much going on. I was born at home. There were no hospitals. There were no doctors.”
At the time, Inna’s region fell under the Polish flag, but the communist powers of the USSR were ever-present, teetering on the disputed Polish border and constantly spilling over. The Soviets made a habit of sweeping through nearby villages, claiming food and able-bodied men. They left behind hunger and workerless fields.
When World War II started and these Red Army raids became more frequent, the soldiers in Inna’s area instituted a rule: each Ukrainian household had a death quota. Every time the Soviets visited a home, they expected at least one family member to be dead from starvation or disease. Families who failed to provide a corpse were soon given one. So, when Inna’s father, Oleksi, heard the Red Army was nearing his home, planning on recruiting new soldiers, he disappeared into the surrounding woodlands. He could not protect his family from Soviet violence, but he could escape becoming the perpetrator of such violence. When the soldiers arrived at his wife Katryna’s family home and discovered Oleksi’s absence, they pledged to kill the remaining residents unless he returned.
So, shortly after Inna’s christening, Katryna took the baby, packed whatever supplies she could carry, and fled. Reflecting on her mother’s flight from Ukraine, Inna ponders, “I don’t know if she had a plan on going to a specific place, and I don’t know how long we were on the road. It can’t be easy holding a child. A child cries and you want to get things settled and put it down… She was the only one that got away and was holding me, and whether it was days or weeks or months I don’t know… I know that there were bombs falling and bullets flying, and it was just chaos.”
The violent symphony damaged both mother and child’s hearing, and long, whistling tones from the skies had Katryna constantly throwing herself to the ground, sometimes on top of her infant, at a moment’s notice.
Katryna quickly became too thin to produce any milk. She went into any bakeries or restaurants she could find, begging for scraps, asking that they at least give her a crust for her baby. But the owners, terrified of Soviet retaliation, turned her away every time.
The young mother had no diapers or change of clothes for Inna, no food, and no hope of help. It crossed her mind that a quick, merciful death might be a better end for her baby. But in the end, Katryna couldn’t bring herself to kill her child. She and Inna had been the only two to escape from the household marked for execution, and, for all Katryna knew, the infant was the sole family she had left. So, weeks or months later, when the refugee mother fell into Nazi custody, she did so with a baby girl in her arms.
A History Bathed in Red
On February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to begin the invasion of their southern neighbors. In a speech justifying his nation’s attack, Putin claimed that Russia was taking a preemptive strike against the expansion of the Western world’s sphere of influence into Eastern Europe and that Russia’s hand was forced by the repeated provocations of NATO and the United States.
In response, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated, “We will not lay down our weapons. We will defend our state because our weapon is our truth. And the truth is that this is our land, our country, our children. And we will defend all of that.”
For two and a half years, war has ripped through Ukraine. By July 2024, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had recorded 35,160 civilian casualties, including 11,520 killed.
What Inna’s story demonstrates is that this war is not a new one. In fact, the legacy of Russian violence against Ukrainians stretches back to the late 1800s, when a majority of the Ukraine territory came under Russian rule and, after the Russian Revolution of 1917, was merged into the USSR. In 1928, Stalin’s collectivization of farmlands resulted in the mass murder and disenfranchisement of landowning Soviet peasants; Ukrainian farmers who resisted were labeled kulaks (literally “fists,” this term referred to the so-called “wealthy” peasantry) and regarded as enemies of the state.
Systemic starvation of the Ukrainian population began in 1932 with the Holodomor, a state-enforced famine that punished Ukrainian regions that failed to meet farming quotas by seizing their remaining food. This resulted in the deaths of an estimated 3.9 million, roughly thirteen percent of the Ukrainian population. Compounded by Stalin’s targeted arrests of Ukrainian intelligentsia and landowners, banning of Ukrainian books, and outlawing of the Ukrainian language, the Holodomor constituted a crackdown on Ukrainian nationalists’ resistance to USSR rule.
When Germany triggered World War II in 1939, they did so reassured by a freshly minted non-aggression pact with the Soviets. But in 1941, German forces opened the Eastern front by invading the USSR, and Ukraine found itself caught between the hammer of the largest invading force in human history and the anvil of the USSR’s Red Army. Regions that fell to German rule were quickly cleared of their Slavic populations through the German “Hunger Plan” as well as mass executions of Slavic Jews.
When the USSR regained control of the Ukrainian territory in the aftermath of WWII, many survivors of the German occupation—especially those who resided in the resource-rich east—were subjected to the USSR’s Siberian concentration camps. A small number of Ukrainians had joined with German forces, viewing the Nazis as liberators from Soviet rule; as a result, the USSR treated all Ukrainians as potential German allies.
During the fall of the USSR, Ukrainians advocated for independence, eventually gaining statehood in August 1991. Still, Russian-backed political corruption left the young nation vulnerable.
Ivan, a Ukrainian refugee currently living in Bulgaria, recalls that he first noticed tremors of oncoming war a decade ago: “For the first time, tension began to be felt in the fall of 2013. Our family was shocked by the fact that in 2014, [the Ukrainian territory of] Crimea came under Russian control. In the period 2013–2014, there were many conflicts throughout Ukraine.”
The current war, despite Putin’s claims of Western provocation, is considered by many to be a grab for Ukraine’s rich natural resources: lithium, titanium, farmland, precious metals, natural gas, and oil.
Inna’s story brings this history into focus, making names and dates real, tangible, and human. After I shared my recording of Inna’s story with her son, Symon, he reflected, “So often we simply hear of [refugees] as statistics... Hearing the story gives voice to the terror other humans face simply because they were unlucky enough to be born into a war zone.” He told me that reading his mother’s story in its totality changed his understanding of her. “Empathy is built out of understanding the plight of real people.”
Surviving War: 1945
After two transfers between camps, Katryna and young Inna were assigned to the Dachau Labor Camp in South Germany. At Dachau, the pair were split up and sent to nearby families—Katryna as an enslaved household servant and Inna as a sort of foster child. At the time, Ukrainian children were often separated from their families and given to Nazi sympathizers to “Germanize” the youth, and Inna, as a toddler, would have fallen in the target demographic for such a program.
After this separation, Katryna’s and Inna’s lives diverged dramatically.
“[The Nazis] wanted [my mother] to work on a farm, for a farmer, to help his wife with the cooking, the cleaning, and everything,” Inna tells me, gently folding her hands across her lap. “But I was in the way. Somebody had to take care of me, so they gave me to an old eighty-something-year-old couple. And they kept me in their barn.”
While Katryna became part of her household’s daily functions, earning her food and very limited freedom, Inna was living off whatever scraps of bread and coffee her elderly caretakers could spare.
When the American forces freed Dachau in 1945, Katryna immediately set off to find her daughter.
*****
On the morning of our first interview, I offer Inna a cappuccino. She declines, explaining that all coffee reminds her of those bitter days alone in a barn and triggers intense bouts of anxiety. Her body has become an echo chamber for the years spent in camps she can’t remember. Rotting teeth, heart disease, high blood pressure, weak bones—the war did not leave her unscathed.
She reminds me often throughout our conversation that she can’t recall much of her childhood, just small snippets patchworked together by the threads she could gather from her tight-lipped parents.
“[My parents] never talked about it so I never questioned. We accepted it. It was life. That’s the way it was. I never questioned anything, didn’t know it was any different than anybody else’s life.”
*****
After the camps, Katryna and two-year-old Inna moved to a makeshift town for displaced persons in Miltenberg, Germany. Soviet soldiers swept through refugee towns, extraditing Eastern Ukrainians (especially those who might have rightful claims to resource-rich land), and feeding them into the deadly Gulag prison system, claiming survivors of the labor camps were German sympathizers or spies.
Katryna and Inna, Western Ukrainians, lived in a one-room apartment with another family, the space divided by a sheet hung from the ceiling. Because the apartment was cramped and noisy, Inna often wandered outside alone, exploring the surrounding woods. The wilderness became the young girl’s playground.
“I just remember being in the woods all the time.” Here, Inna laughs for the first time in our hour-long conversation. “Walking on the cliffs and sitting on the cliffs—that was my home.” This is how she chooses to remember Germany: a haven of green woods, open spaces. Tiny heels clicking as she sits, solitary on a cliff’s edge. A small room with her mother after a long time apart.
The War-Torn Mind
“When stories are told directly by those affected by the issues being reported on, they are most powerful and more likely to move the public to act,” explained Zoë Abrams, executive director of communications and advocacy for British Red Cross, during a One World Media interview on the importance of refugee storytelling. This emphasis on the importance of refugee narratives is supported by studies like Laura Taylor and Catherine Glen’s from 2019, which concludes that children introduced to refugee stories are more empathetic and accepting of refugees, making immersion into host communities a socially easier process for displaced youths.
Because of their prolonged exposure to traumatic events, refugees often face mental health challenges such as anxiety (37 percent experience symptoms), PTSD (26 percent), and depression (48 percent).
When I message with Ivan about his experience after being displaced, he shares, “The first two months in Bulgaria were like in a fog… It was calm, but there was some kind of mess in my head.” He describes returning to routine and finding solace in the company of the three families living with his own as helping “to get away from Bad thoughts.”
Tatiana, a Ukrainian friend of my mother who has chosen to remain in Kyiv, explains that, when it comes to coping with the war, she and her family got used to danger. “We’ve been cursing a lot… To stay positive, we try to live our [lives] and to do usual things. I spend time with my son, meet friends when possible, try to find time for reading, painting, shopping, walking. Donate. We all now, I guess, donate.” Maintaining a sense of normalcy has been essential for her family’s well-being. Still, the violence is impossible to ignore. “We are never one-hundred percent safe.”
Compounding the contemporary stressors of war, transgenerational trauma from mass starvations and violence has left Ukrainian refugees and their descendants grappling with the struggles of both today and the past. Psychology Today describes this form of trauma as “often covert, undefined, and subtle, surfacing through family patterns and forms of hypervigilance, mistrust, anxiety, depression, issues with self-esteem, and other negative coping strategies…trauma can have a significant affect [sic] on the immune system and may contribute to the generational curse of autoimmune diseases and other chronic illnesses.”
With this definition in mind, Inna’s son, Symon, emails me a few weeks after our initial conversation: “Living in the Chicago suburbs, we would have helicopters flying around our house on a consistent basis. I do remember… thinking that one of those helicopters would land in my front yard and take my mother away. Not rational, but that was the level of paranoia.”
Tracing this anxiety an additional generation back, he recalls, “My grandmother experienced extraordinary trauma mental and physical. I don’t think anyone can come out of that the same. It impacted her relationships. I don’t think she felt she could ever trust anyone again. She moved on with her life, but there is no way she could process things.”
Inna, Symon, Symon’s sister, and all four of Symon’s children suffer from anxiety, depression, and/or chronic illness. While these conditions cannot be definitively linked to Inna’s childhood malnutrition and traumas, the pervasiveness suggests some level of correlation.
When considering the obstacles refugees and their families face, the fact that refugee storytelling can ease their recovery and immersion into new communities reveals it to be a valuable resource to both refugees and those who might embrace them.
As I’ve recorded Inna and Ivan’s recollections, I’ve seen how Ukrainian refugee stories hold a special power. They are simultaneously tales of the one and tales of the many. They speak to the multigenerational impacts of Russian abuse, but, more importantly, they speak to the lasting strength and the inextinguishable hope that is uniquely Ukraine’s.
Finding Home: 1950s
After the war, Inna’s father Oleksi made for England, where his wife and daughter eventually joined him. “That was the first time I even knew I had a father,” Inna confides, eyes wide with remembered shock. Oleksi learned English phrases at work but spoke with a thick accent. Already trilingual in Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish, Katryna never picked up English, always finding someone she could speak to in another tongue, so the role of family translator fell to Inna.
“In England, I went to school,” Inna recalls. “It must have been a Catholic school because I remember my first communion. [My mother] couldn’t afford a veil, so we took the curtain from the window. It was all white.”
At school, Inna learned the new language by total immersion. By the time the family left England for the United States a few years later, Inna became a polyglot fluent in Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and German and semi-fluent in English.
Funded by Oleksi’s meager savings and sponsored by his aunt and uncle, Oleksi and Katryna embarked on a four-day transatlantic voyage. They were plagued by seasickness, but young Inna’s stomach remained calm. She was totally enamored by the ship’s opulence. The onboard restaurant was home to more chairs and napkins than she had ever seen in one space.
In the new country, the family lived in the Chicago basement of Oleksi’s relatives until he found work as a crane operator and Katryna as a coach cleaner for the railway. Their combined income was scant but sufficient to move into a small apartment of their own. Over the next several years, the family developed a pattern of moving from place to place, always in search of a building with nicer rooms, quieter nights, and fewer cockroaches.
Inna was a sickly child and missed school on a regular basis. English had come easily to her, but sounding out words was still a challenge. She often felt that each time she returned to class after a few days home sick, the teacher had moved to a different topic entirely. Instead of helping the young girl, teachers typically chose to humiliate her—making her stand in a corner with her arms above her head or scolding her relentlessly in front of her peers.
To make matters worse, her classmates had taken to calling her “Grandma” because of the patches of gray streaking her otherwise dark hair. Years of malnutrition and trauma had stripped the strands behind her ears of their natural color by the time Inna was three. The result was a skunk-like pattern that left the young girl further ostracized.
Katryna noticed how other children refused to play with her own and resolved to do something about it. She could not change Inna’s heritage or episodic illnesses, but she could help the girl dye her hair. Katryna went to the store with a friend and, together, the two women purchased a box-dye kit. That night, they lathered the coloring into Inna’s hair. “She thought that you’d put this hair coloring on, and it would just cover the gray, and it would just turn your natural color,” Inna chuckles at the memory. “She couldn’t read a word of English. Neither could her friend. And they put this stuff on my hair, and we washed it out after a while. And I was a carrot top. I mean, it was orange.”
After a few days, the dye toned down from a vibrant orange to a more natural auburn. Soon, Inna was dying her hair on a regular basis. Her gray-and-black roots would raise eyebrows when they grew out, but, by high school, her scholastic troubles had eased—both socially and academically. The faint traces of an Eastern European accent disappeared, and the pages of her yearbooks began to fill with well-wishes at the end of each year.
To Stay or Go
Inna’s parents didn’t adjust well to life in the United States. “They never went anywhere. They never did anything. They were so afraid of another war breaking out. They just stayed put,” she recalls, a crease carving between her brows. Inna, for her part, hesitates when asked if she would ever return to Ukraine. Her ancestral land is a place she no longer remembers, and the fear of the KGB and extradition that her family lived with remains entrenched all these years later. Even her enthusiasm at sharing her story fades. Several months after our initial recordings, she expresses concerns over anonymity and Russian retaliation, agreeing to proceed only if I don’t share how I know her.
When I pose a similar question to Ivan, he responds immediately: “Yes, of course. I plan to return to Ukraine as soon as such an opportunity arises.” Still, he communicates that what he wants others to take away from his story are his eleven suggestions for safely and quickly leaving dangerous territory.
“It makes no sense to stay [in] the territory where a rocket or bomb can fly at any moment,” he says. After waking up to the sound of bombs falling on Odesa, “I made the decision immediately to leave the dangerous place… [My family] drove to the nearest border… There were no plans for where to go.”
While he vows that “home” will always be Ukraine, he also insists that the safety of his family is his priority. Now, Ivan simply hopes for a peaceful future for his children: “Right now my daughter doesn’t know anything about the war, and I hope she knows about the war only from books.”
Tatiana, defending her choice to remain in Ukraine, explains, “It’s my land. My home is here. My family is here. My memories are here.” Still, she knows that her situation could change at any moment. Like Ivan, Tatiana asserts that, should the front line ever move to her door, she would not hesitate to take her two-year-old son and run.
Whether they have chosen to stay or go, these Ukrainians hold their stories of survival close to their hearts, sharing a piece of themselves with me in hopes of raising awareness, finding connection, and creating a better future for their children.
“For me, it is a new experience,” Ivan says. “Previously I never shared family stories, but as far as I can see, it is a good idea.” He is not alone in this sentiment.
Across the world, Ukrainians are sharing their histories in an effort to forge a new path forward. In UNESCO shelters, Ukrainian children write fairy tales to comfort one another. Ukrainian poets lace their verses with themes of violence, resistance, and grief, and Ukrainian memoires and testimonials trickle out into the literary world.
Whether recited in a light-filled living room or glowing on a computer screen that bridges thousands of miles, these Ukrainian voices carry heavy burdens, but they carry far.
When I ask Tatiana why Ukrainian stories are so precious, she puts it simply: “The value is every Ukrainian’s life.”
Since 2022, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative has supported disaster response, preparedness, and heritage protection measures in Ukraine. Providing cultural context to the conflict, our Center has published articles and hosted “Sounds of Freedom of Hope from Ukraine” at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
Caroline Brown is a former intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She received a BA with honors in English from Washington & Lee University and is now pursuing an MA in children’s literature at the University of British Columbia.
Ivan’s Suggestions for Safely and Quickly Fleeing
“If you are a civilian who does not have military specialties, then it seems to me that in order to leave the dangerous territory on time, you must have the following:
- The car is in good technical condition.
- Fuel supply for at least one full tank.
- Several bags in which you can put the necessary things and documents.
- It is mandatory to take ALL documents with you, including documents for education, passports, driving licenses, and real estate if any.
- When crossing the border, you need to rely only on your own strength, since during this period of time scammers and criminals are activated who can sell you into slavery or somewhere else.
- You need to have a cool head when making decisions.
- You cannot trust anyone. You can only trust those people you know.
- It is mandatory to have money both on the card and in cash.
- It is necessary to have cards of different types, MasterCard and Visa.
- The stock of things and medicines should be for at least three days.
- Various expensive jewelry such as gold earrings, chains, and rings should be hidden so as not to attract attention.”
